It was a report that went right to the roots of United States broadband policy, so it should come as no surprise that it's getting hammered by the telecommunications industry.

Harvard's Berkman Center study of global broadband practices, produced at the FCC's request, is an "embarrassingly slanted econometric analysis that violates professional statistical standards and is insufficiently reliable to provide meaningful guidance," declares AT&T. The study does does nothing but promote the lead author's "own extreme views," warns a response from Verizon Wireless. Most importantly, it "should not be relied upon by the FCC in formulating a National Broadband Plan," concludes the United States Telecom Association.

The things people post on Facebook have gotten them in trouble with spouses, their employers, the law (or not, as the case may be), and now their insurance companies. A 29-year-old Canada woman is now battling her insurance company, Manulife, after her sick leave benefits were revoked thanks to photos she posted on her Facebook page. She wasn't skipping out on work and she didn't even post a public update, but the company somehow managed to find her private photos and has decided to stop paying out.

Nathalie Blanchard took leave from her job at IBM a year and a half ago after being diagnosed with "major depression," according to CBC News. At that time, Manulife began paying out monthly sick leave checks as part of her benefit package—until Blanchard posted photos to her private Facebook profile depicting her having fun at her own birthday party.

2007's Assassin's Creed was a divisive game. While it was full of ambition and great ideas, it ultimately boiled down to a fairly repetitive experience with plenty of potential but even more gameplay "issues." For the the sequel, the team at Ubisoft Montreal attempted to fix those mistakes, building upon the solid foundation of the original—and it worked. AC2 is the game we all wanted Assassin's Creed to be three years ago.

The Queen announced on Wednesday that her government would deliver Internet piracy legislation; today it arrived in the form of the massive Digital Economy bill meant to modernize the UK's approach to everything from copyrights to broadband to video game ratings to domain names. The bill contains no sanctions against suspected P2P file-swappers, but it introduces a "reserve power" that can be deployed whenever the Secretary of State feels that it's time to bust out the switch and administer some beatings.

The bill implements the Digital Britain report, which was completed earlier this year and attempted to chart a course forward for Britain in a high-tech world. It initially imposes two obligations on ISPs: they must forward warning letters from copyright holders to their subscribers, and they must maintain an anonymized list of the number of such warnings received by each subscriber. If a copyright holder asks, they must be shown the list, at which point the rightsholder can go to court and seek to uncover the names of the top offenders, and then sue them.

EMI recently scored an epic victory against the US website that tried to sell Beatles tracks online for a quarter, but the whole incident raised a familiar question: why, exactly, isn't The Beatles music legally available online?

The answer isn't hard to find—as everyone knows, The Beatles' own music company, Apple Corps, hasn't been able to reach a deal on offering the songs online. It's not as though EMI hasn't tried to convince Apple Corps to allow online distribution either; it has, repeatedly, and the surviving Beatles are open to the idea. So why hasn't it happened?

Blamestorming spreads like the plague: It's a typical experience in a large organization: a project has gone bad, and everybody involved looks to find ways to shift responsibility. But that practice is  almost certainly self-defeating, according to a paper entitled, "Blame contagion: The automatic transmission of self-serving attributions." If people are directing their mental energy into pointing fingers, they're not going to spend time figuring out what went wrong and learning from that. The authors show that watching someone assign blame in these situations makes others in a group more likely to view doing so as a goal, one that they pursue themselves. As a result, blame actually does become contagious.

As if the carcinogens and nicotine weren't bad enough: Given the damage that cigarette smoke does to the integrity of the lungs, nobody should very surprised that bacterial infections of the airways is a common problem for smokers. What may be more of a surprise is the fact that the cigarettes themselves may be a disease vector. Researchers took cigarette samples from four major brands, and subjected them to an analysis that can identify the species based on ribosomal RNA gene sequences. The result? "Fifteen different classes of bacteria and a broad range of potentially pathogenic organisms were detected in all cigarette samples," write the researchers.

This week has been filled with games that are worth your time and money. Classically trained gamers will enjoy the newly multiplayer-enhanced New Super Mario Bros. Wii, while Left 4 Dead 2 is a great entry into the co-operative gaming space, and the God of War Collection is a great look back at games that feel current and fresh.

We also talk with the CEO of Square Enix about bridging the gaps between the East and West, and give up some thoughts about why DJ Hero didn't find a large audience in the United States. Welcome to the week in gaming.

Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, was officially released last month. In a comprehensive review, Ars takes you under the surface for an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes.

The wiki crops up in many companies' internal discussions about process improvements and efficient collaboration, but it is often shot down because so few people have exposure to good models of what a really successful business wiki can do. Ars is here to help with a practical introduction based on real-world examples.

What would a week in Apple be if it didn't involve some developer drama, Google, and Psystar? That's all included in this week's top Apple news, as well as a few major software tidbits and rumors about Apple building more first-party iPhone games. Read on:

Respected developers begin fleeing from App Store platform: Continued issues with the App Store approval process are prompting developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers pumping out over 100,000 iPhone apps, will migration away from iPhone development result in less quality software for the platform? Worse yet, will users even care?

News Flash: Apple already working on Mac OS X 10.7: Believe it or not, Apple has already begun work on the successor to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Well, actually, you should believe it—Apple has probably been working on it since 10.6 was announced.

First the 10.6.2 update to Snow Leopard wasn't compatible with Intel Atom processors. Then it was. Then it wasn't again when it was finally released to the masses. Fortunately for the netbook-loving Mac OS X fans out there, the OSx86 scene is only too happy to offer a patched version of mach_kernel to enable booting 10.6.2 on netbooks once more.

The kernel is the deep-down part of Mac OS X that generally handles direct communication between the OS and hardware. Speculation swirled that Apple was actively trying to keep Mac OS X from being installed on inexpensive Atom-based netbooks. However, chances are it was more likely a result of optimizations that didn't take into account Atom processors, since Apple doesn't use them in any shipping products.

Let's look back at the week that was in Microsoft news. Here were the top stories:

Inside "MinWin": the Windows 7 kernel slims down: Back in 2003, Microsoft assembled a team of engineers to rethink the lowest levels of Windows, so that the OS could be more easily slimmed down and secured to run in servers and embedded applications. That project, called "MinWin," has now started to bear fruit. Ars takes a look inside MinWin.

Windows 7 tool violates GPL; Microsoft will open source it: After pulling the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool from its servers over reports that it might violate the GNU General Public License (GPL), Microsoft has decided to go open source with the tool.

MPAA head Dan Glickman sent a letter yesterday to both Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and to US Trade Representative Ron Kirk in which he called for a serious US push to pass the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. That's certainly expected—ACTA contains a host of goodies for Hollywood and the recording industry—but what came as a surprise was Glickman's irritation at various ACTA "protests" which create "apprehension over the Agreement's substance."

He's referring to online outlets that have hoisted the anti-ACTA flag over the last year, accusing the treaty of being a pretext for ramming "three strikes" laws through without Congressional oversight or empowering Customs agents to check the contents of your iPod. Based on our reporting, neither of these items appears to be in the draft text, but the secretive nature of the negotiations and the bland, impenetrable public statements about ACTA have fueled plenty of suspicion.

Electronic medical records and the general digitization of medical data and practices are promoted as a way to slow the rapidly inflating costs in the US healthcare system. The push for expanded medical IT has come from the top, with President Obama extolling its virtues and his administration making funding for EMR deployments part of its stimulus package. But many have pointed out that simply throwing computers at a problem isn't a solution unless the software and practices are also in place to allow the medical community to leverage the technology efficiently. A study of US hospital data suggests they may not be: computerization only had a mild impact on quality of care, and it didn't seem to alter costs in any significant manner.

The study will appear online at The American Journal of Medicine Friday. Its authors combined three datasets that collectively track the computerization and outcomes at thousands of US hospitals. Data on the deployment of medical IT systems were obtained from an annual survey performed by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. The survey contains over 20 measures of computerization, including both administrative and clinical functions.

Dealing with some technology is challenging enough for the hearing-impaired without scammers taking advantage of federal dollars meant to help them. That's exactly what has happened with the Federal Communications Commission's Video Relay Service (VRS), however, and 26 people were arrested Thursday for scheming to steal "tens of millions of dollars" from the program.

VRS was first launched in Texas in the mid-90s as a way for the deaf to communicate via telephone. A hard-of-hearing or speech-impaired person could use a video phone to dial into a VRS service equipped with sign language interpreters, who would then dial through to a hearing recipient. The interpreters would read the caller's signing over video and speak it to the recipient to help facilitate the call.

The litigation between Ancora Technologies, Miki Mullor, and Microsoft reached a settlement both in respect of the patent infringement claim and Microsoft's claims against Mullor, Ancora's founder and former Microsoft employee. All claims between the three parties have been resolved; they have agreed to deny any and all liability, and have released each other from all claims of the litigation, but made sure to keep the terms of the settlement as confidential. "I am pleased with this resolution and wish my friends at Microsoft's Windows division nothing but success with Windows 7 launch," Mullor said in a statement.

College isn't cheap these days, even if you're attending public university. In that case, pretty much any discount offered to students is welcome. Microsoft's Mac Business Unit has just announced that it's offering a special discount on the full Office 2008 Business Edition for US college students, offering them a 70 percent discount off the usual retail price. Even if you're not a college student, though, the Mac BU is offering a range of "holiday" discounts on Office as well.

Office 2008 for Mac comes in two different editions. The Home & Student Edition includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage, and usually sells for $149.95. The Business Edition, includes Entourage Web Services Edition, which is compatible with Exchange, as well as Document Connection for Mac, Automator actions, templates, clip art, and more; it normally sells for $399.95.

Almost two-thirds of adults have broadband connections at home, but that's a long way from the ultimate goal: universal adoption of high speed Internet throughout the United States. Depending on which study you believe, we're everything from number 11 to 24 in international broadband penetration rankings.

So how do we get to somewhere near number one? The Federal Communications Commission's broadband task force has identified seven "gaps" or roadblocks along the path to the Holy Grail. The document doesn't offer any specific solutions to these problems. But the analysis offers clues as to where that National Broadband Plan the Commission has to crank out by February is going.

This week, Google released an update to Google Chrome Frame. Version 4.0.245.1 is available and all users should be updated automatically, according to Google Chrome Releases. The release fixes issues where the plugin would not follow redirects properly, where network requests would fail randomly, and where it would freeze IE8 intermittently. What really caught our eye though, was the security fix that's included in the release, and especially who gets the credit for finding it:

After Internet Explorer 9 was officially announced this week and a few tidbits on the release were shared by Microsoft, we had the opportunity to talk to Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for Internet Explorer, to prod him for a little more information. 

The overriding theme for IE9, he told us, is delivering a great browser for everyone, especially for developers. The big areas Microsoft is targeting with this release are performance, interoperable standards, and text and graphics. While Hachamovitch made sure not to talk more about IE9 beyond what was already revealed at PDC09, he was quite happy to answer a few of our more general questions regarding Internet Explorer's future.

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Unless you were hiding under a rock for most of the day yesterday, you're aware by now that Google held a press event at which the search giant pulled back the curtain on ChromeOS, the OS that's really a browser (and is based on the browser that's really an OS). The search giant announced that it is open-sourcing the OS, and described in detail much of its nature and function.

In this article, we'll recap only a few of the highlights of the announcement, because the news has been covered exhaustively elsewhere. Our main focus here is to provide some analysis and context, and to think about what ChromeOS means.