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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The Q1 earnings period could be a tough one for networking equipment companies; estimates for the likes of Cisco (CSCO) and Juniper (JNPR) in particular have continued to edge lower. William Blair analyst Jason Ader this morning weighed in with updates on those two stocks and a couple of other following a late March survey with 36 VARs in the U.S. and the U.K. Ader joined the chorus of estimate cutters; but he sees improvement on the horizon.

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Shifting U.S. jobs overseas is nothing new for technology giant International Business Machines Corp.–or the tech sector in general–but a brave new employee relocation strategy at Big Blue is raising some eyebrows.

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There is life after Google (GOOG)–though the increasing number of search alternatives popping up around the U.S. are careful not to take the search giant head-on. With three-quarters of all search traffic, Google might seem unassailable. But potential competitors are busy developing new ways of finding information and hunting down the investors they need to support them. Last year, more than 50 new search companies raised $330 million in venture financing, according to MoneyTree.

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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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The competitive edge of the United States economy has eroded sharply over the last decade, according to a new study by a nonpartisan research group.

The report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that the United States ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions, based on 16 indicators of innovation and competitiveness. They included venture capital investment, scientific researchers, spending on research and educational achievement.

But the American economy placed last in terms of progress made over the last decade. “The trend is very troubling,” said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the foundation.

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Before it settled on AT&T (T) as the carrier for the iPhone in the United States, Apple (AAPL) shopped the phone to Verizon Wireless and was shot down. It’s thought that Verizon (VZ) didn’t want to make the concessions (including ceding a lot of control) to Apple, which AT&T ended up doing. Of course, the mobile landscape was very different at the time, and now it’s hard to argue that the iPhone hasn’t changed things significantly. So it wouldn’t be a surprise if Verizon wanted another shot at the iPhone. And if a new rumor coming out of Italy is true, it may get that shot.

The report, by ITExaminer.com, claims to have “deep throats” in Apple saying that iPhones for Verizon Wireless will be announced “soon.” It goes on to say the deal is so secret that Apple isn’t talking about it at all and has been trying to hide job postings for EVDO and CDMA engineers–two cellular technologies that Verizon Wireless uses but AT&T does not.

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The nation’s switch to all-digital broadcasts has been more than a decade in the making. The federal government has spent nearly $2 billion to help people prepare. Broadcasters spent another $1.2 billion to run warning ads and millions more to upgrade equipment. Until last week, the United States seemed ready to follow the half-dozen European countries that have made the switch.

But with two federal agencies in charge, no clear idea of how many people would be affected and constant partisan disagreements over money, the program foundered just before its longstanding Feb. 17 deadline. It has now been pushed back four months.

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More than just conventional wisdom, it has become almost a cliché to say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved “how technology doesn’t have a big place in any doctrine of future war,” as one security analyst told me in 2007. The American military efforts in those countries (or so the thinking goes) have dispelled the understanding of technology-dominated warfare that was prevalent just a few years ago—the notion that modern armed conflict would be fundamentally changed in the age of computers and networks.

It is true that Afghanistan and Iraq have done much to puncture that understanding of war. The vaunted theory, so beloved in the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon, of a “network-centric” revolution in military affairs can now be seen more clearly as a byproduct of the 1990s dotcom boom. The Internet has certainly affected how people shop, communicate, and date. Amid this ecstatic hype, it is not surprising that many security studies experts, both in and out of the defense establishment, latched onto the notion that linking up all our systems via electronic networks would “lift the fog of war,” allow war to be done on the cheap, and even allow the United States to “lock out” competition from the marketplace of war, much as they saw Microsoft (MSFT) doing to Apple (AAPL) at the time.

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With SunPower (SPWRA) set to report earnings on Thursday after the close, solar analysts have taken a fresh look at the company this morning–and at least three of them did not like what they saw. Analysts at Friedman Billings Ramsey, Thomas Weisel Partners and Pacific Crest all had words of warning this morning for investors in the stock, sharply reducing their forecasts for 2009. Here are the details:

Mehdi Hosseini, Friedman Billings: Hoseini repeated his Market Perform rating on the stock, but cut estimates; he slashes his 2009 view to $2.06 a share, from $3.02. For 2010, he goes to $3.05, from $3.40. Hosseini says the cuts reflect his view that 2009 will bring slower-than-expected demand in both Italy and the U.S. He also thinks ASPs will come under pressure, offsetting the impact of cost-cutting and pressuring gross margin. He also sees further trouble ahead in Spain, noting that some systems and modules have actually been shipped out of Spain and into other geographies. He notes that Spain accounted for 40 to 50 percent of SunPower’s 2008 revenues.

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The success of “graduated response” programs in the U.S., U.K., France, New Zealand and elsewhere around the world may depend, in large part, on just how quickly file sharers will buckle. If most will quit after a simple warning, the campaign to enlist ISPs (and back down on the mass legal threats) may be a huge success.

But, if only draconian sanctions like disconnection are enough to “stop the swap,” the entire graduated response program could arouse critical opposition from the public and from lawmakers. The European Parliament, which has already considered the issue, has voted several times against such “three strikes” laws, largely due to the possibility of extreme sanctions such as Internet disconnection.

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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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YouTube is still Google’s toughest sell to advertisers, but the video site is doing better by one measure than most people think: YouTube is selling ads against about 9% of its video views in the U.S., up from just 6% a year ago.

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