ZDNet reports that Hewlett-Packard has unveiled a color handheld, improving its position in the handheld market.

Kelly McNeill writes “”Throughout this final week before Apple’s next-generation OS ships on Saturday the 24th — and before Steve Jobs unveils the OS with a press release on Friday — the Mac Web has been buzzing with much concern about whether or not a handful of OS X copies issued to developers, administrators, dealers and the like are in fact “the real deal.” According to the individuals who received these prerelease copies, the version number indicates that its build number is only 4k78, rather than what many had hoped was the final Golden Master.””

CNET News.com reports: “The U.S. House on Wednesday gambled that freeing small phone companies from regulations will encourage them to invest in broadband for their customers in remote areas. The House passed a bill by Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo., that would lift regulatory burdens from small local phone companies.”

“A Czech company is hoping to make a big spash at the world’s largest trade show this week by publicizing an alleged vulnerability in PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), encryption software used by millions of people around the world to keep their communications private.” Full story at The Standard.

CNET News.com offers a chat with Apple CEO Steve Jobs about Saturday’s debut of Mac OS X. Included are some tentative dates for CD-RW (“next month”) and DVD-writing (“sometime in the spring”) feature additions. Jobs also denies that the G4 Cube design team has been disbanded; this could mean that last week’s report of the Cube’s demise were premature.

CNET News.com reports that a Singapore company plans to ship a Bluetooth add-on for Palm V handheld devices later this spring. The WaveClip from Sunderland Technologies will allow the sleek Palm unit to communicate with any other Bluetooth-enabled device within thirty feet. Retail price is expected to be $320.

“Entropy” is now available for download. This is the GNOME 1.4 Release Candidate, and if no serious bugs are found it will become GNOME 1.4 in a short while.” Details at gnome.org.

The latest attempt at US anti-spam regulation has cleared its first hurdle, passing through a House subcommittee with unanimous approval. Even with such strong support, bill co-sponsor Heather Wilson (R-NM) admits that success is far from certain. The Direct Marketing association is lobbying furiously to derail passage, and several House members are concerned that the bill’s enforcement powers may be too broad. Next step: presentation before the full Commerce Committee. Full story at ZDNet News.

From Network World Fusion: “Sun Wednesday announced that it has begun shipping four models of its new midrange Sun Fire servers. The servers are powered by Sun’s UltraSPARC III processor 64-bit chip and start at $73,195, Sun said in a statement. Sun is marketing the systems that run on Sun’s Solaris 8 OS as “midframe” machines, which offer mainframe features and deliver high system availability, application performance and flexibility.”

From Cluebot.com: “According to a brief article in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled ‘Fewer Patents on
Methods Get Clearance,’ the U.S. PTO ‘has drastically reduced the pace of issuing
controversial business-method patents, by setting up bureaucratic roadblocks that have
angered some information-technology investors.’ Is this claim significant? Has the U.S.
government truly reformed its habit of granting patents to business methods? I think the
answer’s ‘No’ for two reasons.”