It appears that Mozilla, developer of the web browser Firefox and other things, is currently working on an "open mobile OS" that seems similar in many ways to Google's Chrome OS. The new OS will be based off of HTML 5 and open web standards and be designed to remove many of the barriers that currently make mobile website development difficult.

Mozilla has its sites set on emerging markets such as Brazil in 2013. The basic operations of the phone, calling, gaming and messaging, can be developed as HTML 5 applications. Mozilla is already seeing support from Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, and Telenor.

Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla:

Over the weekend you might have noticed that a few of your popular sites weren't working, such as Instagram, Netflix, and more. This is thanks to a huge storm which took down most of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. Clients that are on this cloud are Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.

What caused the downtime? The "leap second" bug", which International time keepers adjusted, adding one second to the global time standards in order to offset differences between our ultra-precise atomic clocks and the natural rotation of our planet, a rotation which is ever so slightly irregular. Sometimes, such as back in 2008, there's a second that is added to adjust time as needed.

Amazon's servers weren't the only ones that were affected, Gawker (Lifehacker, Gizmodo and others), Reddit, Mozilla and many, many more fell prey to this leap second bug. During the update, some software can't handle the unexpected change in seconds, and the effects are, well, the events of the weekend.

Mozilla have just announced that they are renaming Boot to Gecko to Firefox OS, the company has talked of having support from multiple carriers worldwide, as well as a couple of device manufacturers. Firefox OS is a totally open source OS, and its interface is built from HTML5 and CSS web standards, making it very customizable.

A proof of concept was recently shown off running on Samsung's GALAXY S II, with the company pointing out its responsiveness to touch input, a 3D graphics demo, a full SMS client and on-screen keyboard, as well as a store for various web apps. The first Firefox OS-powered device will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and should launch sometime in early-2013 in Brazil through Telefonica's Vivo brand of entry-level handsets.

Manufacturing partners are looking to be TCL Communication Technology, and ZTE, with operators such as Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia and Telenor all jumping on the Firefox OS bandwagon. Mozilla ia hoping Firefox OS will change how developers have to re-write their apps to run on the various mobile operating systems, with apps that can run in a browser but still look, and feel like a native app with access to underlying phone capabilities like calling, messaging and games.

According to the latest data from analytics company, StatCounter, Windows 7 has gained more than half of the worldwide operating system market, for the first time ever. Windows 7 had officially surpassed Windows XP as the most popular OS choice globally back in October of 2011, but this is the first time that Windows 7 has passed the 50-percent mark.

StatCounter's data shows that Windows Vista still holds third place, just, with 8.32-percent market share, but Apple's Mac OS X has been making a sprint for third position, sitting at 7.05-percent at the end of June. If Apple continues with this slight jump, they should overtake Windows Vista as the third position by the end of the year.

But, as with all analytical data, there are other sides and companies working at it. Net Applications claims that Windows XP still holds 43.61-percent of the OS market, with their data showing that XP edges out Windows 7 ever so slightly, with Windows 7 sitting at 41.59-percent.

Google's Vice President of Americas Sales, Margo Georgiadis, took to the company's blog to say that the Internet is where business is done and jobs are created. How do you back up such as claim? Well, if you're Google, you can provide $80 billion of economic activity directly to advertisers, website publishers and nonprofit organizations across the US in 2011.

The post highlight that 97-percent of Americans use Internet search to find local goods and services, on both smart devices and computers. Some believe that technology is driving people to shop online versus locally, this isn't always the case.

Boston Consulting Group shows that US citizens who have researched products online throughout 2011 actually went in-store to purchase these goods, and spent around $2,000, rather than online. Google says that's nearly $500 billion in revenue that was spent on local retail. Georgiadis cites a bunch of examples of just how Google and the Internet are helping businesses expand. Citing New England baking company King Arthur Flour, who recently jumped online and has since become an internationally-renowned business.

Microsoft have just announced some upgrade plans for their upcoming Windows 8 operating system, where the company will be selling Windows 8 Pro upgrades online for $39.99. If you prefer to make your Windows 8 upgrade purchase in-store, it'll set you back $69.99.

The offer is open to anyone running any version of Windows XP, Vista or 7, and lasts until January 31, 2013. The deal runs for the same amount of time that the $14.99 upgrade deal does, but this one applies to any version of Windows, not just those who have recently purchased a Windows-based PC in the run up to the Windows 8 launch.

Microsoft have also said that the offer will be open to 131 markets, and that it will release more details on the offer as the launch of the OS gets closer. The Verge reports that the upgrade process is quite simple, where it'll offer an upgrade assistant that will help users migrate files, settings, and apps from Windows 7, files and settings from Vista, and files only from XP. After the upgrade, you can add Windows Media Center for free through the "add features" option.

In another attempt to make a pointless statement towards Washington D.C., a group of websites and privacy organizations have come together to form the Declaration of Internet Freedom. The Declaration of Internet Freedom is the start of something bigger, a movement to uphold and ensure some basic principles, much like the Declaration of Independence was.

"We've seen how the Internet has been under attack from various directions, and we recognize that it's time to make that stop," said TechDirt, a site involved with the new movement. "The Internet is an incredible platform that we want to grow and to thrive, and thus, a very large coalition got together to produce the following document as a starting point, hoping to kick off a much larger discussion which we hope you'll join in."

As it stands currently, the Declaration of Internet Freedom is composed of 5 basic values:

avast! anti-virus invited TweakTown, along with a few other journalists, out to Prague, Czech Republic to meet the staff and check out the headquarters of the world's largest free anti-virus software company. The headquarters is really nondescript as the avast! software team is actually quite tiny considering just how many users they have. The headquarters occupies six floors in a business office shared with other companies. From the outside, all that is visible is the avast! logo on the top.

We were led upstairs to the 8th floor. Into a meeting room we went where we were greeted with refreshments, the CEO of avast!, and Milos Korenko, the Marketing Director at avast!. CEO Vincent Steckler welcomed the 9 of us to Prague and avast!'s headquarters and gave us a brief presentation about the company and some interesting, and quite frankly surprising, statistics about the use of avast!

avast! has had 161 million active and protected computers in the last 30 days. While they have over 200 million registrations, they only count computers who receive updates in a 30 day period in order to be more accurate. Considering there are around 700 million consumer PCs worldwide, avast! protects a large portion of them. Furthermore, avast! basically spends nothing on advertising. The reason they don't is because they don't have the need. Two-thirds of new users come from word-of-mouth referrals.

We know that the legal problems between Samsung and Apple are getting more and more serious, with bans imposed on Samsung selling their GALAXY Tab 10.1 in the US, and on Friday the GALAXY Nexus was also denied from sale. The judge in both of these cases is US District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California.

The Korea Times has reported, which Samsung later confirmed, for the first time that they are now getting help from Google in order to better defend themselves over patents. Samsung spokeswoman Lim Yoon-jeong has said that the two companies have been working closely to created a united front. Another undisclosed Samsung insider has been quoted in the article, where they say:

It's too early to comment on our game plan (with Google) in the legal battle; but we will do our best to get more royalties from Apple, which has benefited from our technology. The fight is becoming more dramatic and the possibility of a truce in the form of a cross-licensing deal seems to be becoming likely.

All around the world, GPS is used by consumers, businesses, and everyone in between. Its used from simple a-to-b navigation from your phone, or car, and for industries like aviation, shipping, and many, many more.

The EU commission has estimated that from these various industries, that over £640 billion of the EU economy is reliant on GPS technology. Knowing this has created financial incentives and funding for alternative GPS technologies, which would be utilised in the event of natural causes such as a solar flare, or man-made causes such as a EMP bomb, war, or similar.

This is where UK defence firm, BAE Systems, has a possible solution: Navsop (Navigation Via Signals of Opportunity). Navsop relies on wireless signals from large comms networks, such as TV, mobile and radio antennas, which then determine locations based on direction and signal strength, with some of the frequencies capable of penetrating walls for indoor use.