Good morning tech

Good morning!

Biden to give nod to auto suppliers on trip to Chrysler. Vice President Joe Biden is slated for an afternoon address Monday at Chrysler's supplier park complex in Toledo. He will see some of the first 2011 Jeep Wranglers to come off the assembly line and will meet chief executive Sergio Marchionne. Biden is expected to talk about how the recession had a big jobs toll on auto suppliers, not just automakers. President Obama made trips to Chrysler, Ford Motor Co., and GM plants last month.

Obama administration may overhaul $30 billion in troubled IT projects. The effort, which will target over-budget and ineffective projects, is seen as a way to cut spending. The programs will not be shut down but, instead, reworked. An example, from the Wall Street Journal: A $2.8 billion Treasury Department project updating the agency's communications technology, "which has resulted in 45 data centers that can't support newer Internet technologies, according to OMB officials." http://bit.ly/bVgta2

Mobile operators eye revenue from app downloads as net-neutrality concerns loom. A survey of executives at mobile companies said they expect app downloads to account for the largest share of their income by 2013, the Financial Times reports. That has them concerned about handling a surge in data usage while content providers pocket most of the of the revenue. “What operators are asking themselves is: am I just a dumb pipe delivering that content, or can I secure a piece of that pie?” an analyst said. Here's what the study found: "Of the companies surveyed, 55 per cent said operators should be able to charge to prioritize network traffic, versus 38 per cent who supported the current model, which in effect disallows the practice," the FT says. http://bit.ly/dohuBM

TOMORROW: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski joins Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) for a broadband summit at the University of Minnesota. 

TODAY: Various telecom policy officials have headed to Aspen have for a forum hosted by the Technology Policy Institute. Today's speakers include California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, Verizon's Tom Tauke, FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker, Time Warner's Fernando Laguarda, former FCC official Blair Levin, FCC Bureau Chief Ruth Milkman, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association's James Assey, Google's Pablo Chavez and Intel's Paul Otellini. 

Can't-Miss News

Executive notes

Swedish prosecutors defend actions in Assange case. Officials in Sweden are standing by their decision to issue an arrest warrant on charges of rape and molestation against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange over the weekend, only to withdraw it less than 24 hours later. The Swedish Prosecution Authority said the warrant was issued by an on-call official and later revoked by a higher ranking prosecutor who found no grounds on which to suspect Assange of the charges, according to reports. Assange has said the allegations could damage the site's reputation, and questioned the motives behind them in a message posted to his Twitter account this weekend. http://bit.ly/9Ktj3V

With D.C. lagging, some broadband stimulus to stay local. A handful of broadband cash doled out by the White House this week will stay local, helping Washington D.C. improve on its below-par broadband statistics. Washington will use its funds to target a group of neighborhoods where city planners say the broadband adoption rate is under 40 percent. That lags considerably behind the national average: About 65 percent for American adults have a home broadband connection. It's the third broadband award for the city, which won $18 million for infrastructure and $1.5 million for computer centers. All the funds have targeted Wards 5, 7, and 8, which include such neighborhoods as Trinidad and Anacostia, where city planners say the unemployment rate is above the national average. http://bit.ly/b6pLqZ

South Korea blocks new North Korean Twitter account. South Korean officials have blocked the country's access to Pyongyang's new Twitter feed, according to a report published Thursday. The feed was created along with North Korea's YouTube account as a means of distributing propaganda against South Korea and the United States. Seoul's state-run Communications Standards Commission and National Police Agency said that the feed contains "illegal information" and "content that praises, promotes and glorifies" North Korea, which are banned under South Korean security laws. http://bit.ly/cd9mkp

Hill notes

Senators ask why Marshals save body-scan images. Eight members of the Senate wrote to the U.S. Marshals service late Friday to determine why it has been storing more than 35,000 images from full-body-scan machines at a federal courthouse in Orlando, Florida. The senators demand to know why the Marshals are preserving the images, which show individual's bodies in detail, and encourage the Marshals to adopt privacy policies similar to those of the Transportation Security Administration, which bans the preservation of such images in all but a few cases. http://bit.ly/cymE2D

Industry notes

Google buys Like.com. Google has agreed to purchase the visual search engine and online shopping company Like.com for roughly $100 million, according to reports on Saturday. The move is the latest in a string of acquisitions for Google, which revamped its Image Search function earlier this summer and may be looking to do so again by acquiring the online retailer known for matching products to customers' tastes. http://bit.ly/bzP8ox

Zuckerberg: unblockable. Apparently there's one Facebook user that you just can't get rid of: CEO Mark Zuckerberg. According to the blog TechCrunch, attempting to block the site's founder results in an error message unique to his account. It could raise concerns among the privacy advocates who have their eyes peeled for any sign of a misstep by the social networking behemoth. http://tcrn.ch/bXwXtI

SAID

" 'The financial support for television is higher than it’s ever been. That’s something that gets missed in some of the excitement of covering the Internet,' he said, making the word sound a little creepy."

—Jeffrey Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, as described by David Carr in The New York Times. http://nyti.ms/8YAPXF. (The NYT also looks at how Internet television has failed to create a major disruption for the cable industry so far: http://nyti.ms/bxso5z.)

WATERCOOLER

BIG SCREEN. After a Hollywood studio acquired the movie rights to a book about Google, All Things D has offered some ideas on who should be cast in the major roles. Among the suggestions: Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Eric Schmidt, Reese Witherspoon as Marissa Mayer and Denzel Washington as David Drummond. http://bit.ly/cto5uO

—Elise Viebeck contributed to this report