Later this week, Kyle Wiens will travel to an undisclosed European country, stand in line for hours to buy Apple’s new iPhone, and then find a comfortable, well-lighted place to take the phone apart. Wiens, the co-founder of a site called iFixIt, does this sort of thing for a living.

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European privacy regulators could be about to throw a spanner into the works of attempts by social networking sites such as Facebook to find new ways to increase profits as they try to restrict the way internet groups release personal data.

The European move marks the first attempt by regulators to address the “open” internet platforms that the social networks, led by Facebook, have rushed to create.

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It’s a well-known story by now: Europe, the US, and plenty of other countries have made it generally illegal to circumvent DRM, even when users want to do something legal with the content. Sure, it sounds bad and Ars complains about it all the time, but come on—do anticircumvention laws really prevent real people in the real world from doing real things with their content?

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Are things picking up at Nokia (NOK)?

Maybe… or at least, they seem to be getting worse at a decelerating rate.

RBC Capital’s Mark Sue this morning repeated his Outperform rating on the stock and lifted his price target to $16, from $12, asserting that the company’s operating margins in mobile device many have bottomed. He also contends the company will see some benefits in the first quarter from inventory restocking, lifting his unit forecast for the quarter to 90 million from 87 million. “It’s been the most volatile global handset quarter since we can remember, yet the shock to the system seems to be dissipating,” he writes. Sue still expects global units to be down 15 percent this year, but asserts that the rate of decline appears to be slowing.

Sue adds that “it’s bad out there, but not as bad as feared, implying the multiple [on NOK shares] may expand from trough levels.” He says the company is seeing “encouraging trends” in Asia, in particular in China and India, while Europe “seems to be stabilizing.”

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India’s tech boom has inspired other developing nations to promote themselves as outsourcing destinations. The latest to try to cash in: Egypt.

Egypt seems like an unlikely place for Western companies to send tech work and open call centers, but Tarek El-Sadany, a government official in charge of helping to grow the country’s information-technology industry, says that the country is well positioned to do these tasks–literally. Egypt is only two hours off of Greenwich Mean Time, so daytime there corresponds nicely with the European workday. For U.S. companies committed to outsourcing, Egypt can be a hop between the U.S. and India.

Another benefit, according to El-Sadany, is that the weekend in Egypt is observed on Thursday and Friday. People typically work on Saturday and Sunday so companies won’t have to pay extra for those shifts–or get stuck with second-class workers–as they might in other countries.

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Cisco (CSCO) is apparently following through on its plan to reduce hiring.

Aaron Rakers, an analyst at Wachovia Capital Markets, does a weekly check on job listings for the companies he covers, and this week came across a “startling reduction in listings” by Cisco. In a research note this morning, he points out that the total number of listings has dropped 93 percent in the last week, from 1,830 openings a week ago to only 128 today. He notes that there were 2,678 jobs listed at the beginning of October. Listings for jobs in the U.S. and Canada fell to 52, from 675 a week ago. European listings dropped to 28, from 311. Asia/Pacific jobs fell to nine, from 162. Emerging markets openings fell to 36, from 643.

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OK, so here is the weirdest story of the day. SolarWorld, one of the largest solar companies in Germany, today declared that they want to buy several sites in Germany that now belong to the Opel division of General Motors (GM). In short, they want to expand from solar modules into the auto business.

As noted in an AP story picked up by the Wall Street Journal, SolarWorld said it intends to offer one billion Euros, including 250 million in cash and 750 million in credit lines, for four German production facilities and Opel’s development center and headquarters in Ruesselsheim.

The goal: to create Europe’s first true “green” auto company, with a focus on building electric and hybrid cars.

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Travelzoo (TZOO) yesterday posted weaker-than-expected Q3 results. The online travel information company reported Q3 revenue of $18.8 million and a pro forma loss of 13 cents a share. The Street had been looking for $21.9 million and a loss of nine cents.

“Q3 2008 was impacted by weak North America operating results due to a weak economy and the continuation of our aggressive expansion in Asia Pacific and Europe,” Travelzoo CEO Holger Bartel said in a statement.

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Marvell (MVRL) shares are down sharply again today, pressured this morning by Deutsche Bank analyst Arnab Chanda, who cut his rating on the stock to Hold from Buy. He cut his target price on the stock to $15 from $20.

“Following checks with industry contacts, we believe Marvell is not likely to see significant upside in the next six months, both due to weakness in Europe and Asia, as well as slower-than-expected product ramps” at Research In Motion (RIMM) and Seagate (STX), he wrote in a research note. “While we recognize that the company detailed some of these issues in their recent conference call, we still believe that it is prudent to move to the sidelines, given estimates could get cut” into fiscal Q4.

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This morning, the market is suffering in Dell (DELL) hell.

Last night, the company posted results for its fiscal second quarter ended July, which beat the Street impressively on the top line, but at the cost of lower-than-expected gross margins, resulting in a miss at the EPS level. The Street commentary this morning is mixed: Quite a few analysts contend this is a temporary issue, that the company knows it got overly aggressive on pricing in Europe generally–on notebooks in particular–and can fix the issue quickly. But others contend that Dell’s turnaround has taken a giant step backward. They worry that there is more trouble ahead and note the company’s warning that IT spending is showing signs of slowing not only in the U.S. but also in Europe and some countries in Asia. The results didn’t change a lot of minds on the stock overall; the one downgrade of the stock I spotted came from Standard & Poor’s analyst Tom Smith, who cut his rating to Hold from Buy, asserting that with “unsteady margin patterns” likely to continue, it is time to “take a less aggressive stance.”

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The Internet is still very young. It was only November 1977 when a group of computer scientists successfully connected three networks around the world, including one at University College London. It took until 1989 for the Internet to become commercially available and about another decade after that for it to achieve widespread household use in Europe and the United States. Only then did we emerge from what I think of as the “Internet comma” days, when its mention in the media was always followed by a comma and a short description.

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