It's bad enough Sergey Brin and Larry Page are nearly billionaires but now they're also seen as powerful. The dynamic duo of the search engine game have been crowned the kings of Vanity Fair's New Establishment list, which ranks the business world's powerbrokers. This is quite the accomplishment given they bumped H. Lee Scott, Wal-Mart's CEO, to second place, while Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone held onto third place.

Here's an interesting twist to Bell's expanded move into the residential VOIP market. At a press conference earlier this week, Bell's VOIP domo Ron Close made it clear the "lite" service, which will compete against Vonage, et al, would be sold in nine cities outside of Bell's home territory of Quebec and Ontario. This includes several cities in  Alberta and B.C., the home turf of Telus. But it turns out Bell will not be selling the service out of territory but it will sell service with out of territory area codes to consumers in Ontario and Quebec. Confused?  In other words, you can buy "lite" service with a Calgary area code if you live in Toronto, for example, but can't buy the same service if you actually live in Calgary. How does that make any sense?

A beta 1 version of Firefox 1.5 has been released into the wild. According to Download Squad, the new version includes improved popup blocking, drag-and-drop tab shuffling (very cool!), improved Mac OS X support, the ability to delete private data with a keyboard shortcut, faster back/forward action, as well as bugfixes and security updates.
By the way, ZDNet is reporting there is a new, unpatched flaw in all versions of Firefox that "could let attackers surreptitiously run malicious code on users' PCs". Firefox has been downloaded more than 80 million times since it was released last November.

Apparently, Google wants to buy Reuters - according to Silicon Beat. When will the insanity stop? Will someone please make a deal? How long do we have to wait for Skype or Vonage to be taken out of their misery so the speculation game can disappear for awhile? There, I feel much better now.