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The U.S. Patent Office has rejected two Microsoft patents over the FAT file format, but the software maker said Wednesday that it's not ready to give up its battle to protect its widely used method for storing data. The patent office delivered its ruling late last month but made it public this week. With one of the patents, the decision is what's considered a final rejection, while with another it's considered nonfinal. In both cases, Microsoft has the ability to pursue its claims further. The rejections come after a re-examination of the patents was sought by the Public Patent Foundation,...

Japan aims to switch some government computers to the free Linux operating system and reduce its dependence on Microsoft Windows. Japan is drawing up guidelines for its ministries recommending open source software such as Linux as an "important option" in government procurement, said an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

Microsoft Corp. is not going to release a version of its Office suite software for open-source rival Linux, although the company is actively studying how Linux works and how it can integrate with the platform, a Microsoft representative said Wednesday. “The simplest way I can answer the question is that Microsoft is 100 percent focused on Windows,” said Nick McGrath, director of platform strategy for Microsoft in the U.K. “We have no plans at this present moment in time to deploy or build a version of Microsoft Office on Linux.” McGrath participated in a roundtable debate on whether free software...

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Three Novell OpenSUSE community web site were defaced on Sunday by politically motivated hackers. Defacement archive Zone-H reports that a group called IHS Iran Hackers Sabotage broke into OpenSUSE.org, wiki.novell.com and forge.novell.com to post a message stating that it was Iran's right to develop nuclear power. All three sites were defaced in the same way.

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 Released Thursday September 29th, 2005 Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 is now available for download. Amongst other changes, this minor release includes fixes for a return receipt regression introduced in version 1.0.2 (bug 289091) and the Linux command line URL parsing security flaw.Thunderbird 1.0.7 can be downloaded from the Thunderbird product page or the Thunderbird 1.0.7 directory on ftp.mozilla.org. Refer to the Thunderbird 1.0.7 Release Notes for more information. We expect details of the security fixes in this release to be added to the Mozilla Foundation's list of known security vulnerabilities soon.

No matter what strides the new generation of open-source companies make, they all owe a big debt to Linus Torvalds. In 1991 the Finnish programmer started Linux as a project at the University of Helsinki. Fourteen years later the reverberations are still being felt. Thanks to support from giant companies such as Dell Computer (DELL ) and IBM (IBM ), Linux is now commonplace on big corporate servers -- posting 11 consecutive quarters of growth, according to market researcher IDC.

The NSW Office of State Revenue (OSR) is taking a tough stance against Microsoft's decision to make an enterprise edition of Windows Vista only available to companies that have signed on to its Software Assurance program. The tax collection agency has declared it would rather switch desktop operating systems than lock itself into Microsoft's licensing regime. Delivering a presentation at the South East Asian Regional Computer Confederation (SEARCC 05) in Sydney yesterday, OSR chief information officer Mike Kennedy and the agency's manager of client services Pravash Babhoota confirmed they would start scoping for a move to a Linux desktop within...

The MIT Media Laboratory expects to launch a prototype of its US$100 laptop in November, according to Nicholas Negroponte, the lab's chairman and co-founder. The facility has been working with industry partners to develop a notebook computer for use by children in primary and secondary education around the world, particularly in developing countries. The laptops should start appearing in volume in late 2006.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - A company server that some workers at Novell Inc. apparently used for gaming purposes was hacked into and then used to scan for vulnerable ports on potentially millions of computers worldwide, according to an Internet security consultant. The scans, which have been going on since Sept. 21, are targeted at TCP Port 22 -- the default port for Secure Shell (SSH) services. SSH programs are used to log into other computers over a network or to execute remote commands and move files between machines in a secure fashion. Scans against the port are often an...

David Berlind over at ZDNet wrote a remarkable article called Did Microsoft send the wrong guy to Massachusetts' ODF hearing?. If you missed this article, you'll have missed the equivalent of what Intel's Andy Grove called an inflection point. This one has the potential to have more impact than the release of the first Pentium processor. ... Microsoft has essentially alienated the rest of the IT industry. I can't remember a single company that had so many people working in harmony against it, including IBM at the height of its arrogance. The Java Community Process provides just one example of...

In an extensive memo called "The Web is the Next Platform" that was introduced as evidence in Microsoft's antitrust trial five years ago, Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka described a "nightmare" scenario for the software giant. "The Web...exists today as a collection of technologies that deliver some interesting solutions today, and will grow rapidly in the coming years into a full-fledged platform (underlined for emphasis in the original memo) that will rival--and even surpass--Microsoft's Windows," Slivka wrote.

The activist group, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), released a statement yesterday strongly criticizing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for its recent decision to switch all government computer systems to open-source format. The new policy would require all state agencies to acquire open standard software, like Open Document Format (ODF), by January 2007. "It is bad procurement policy for any state to unilaterally lock itself into one set of technologies," CAGW President Tom Schatz said.

IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) and Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT - news) have announced a joint initiative aimed at accelerating the development and adoption of Linux-based products in emerging markets like China, India, Russia and Korea. The two companies will provide software developers with implementation services, expertise and technical resources to help them certify new applications for IBM and Red Hat software. According to IBM, the program will give developers greater ability to build standards-based products that will not lock customers into proprietary operating environments. Penguin March In unveiling the initiative, IBM noted that a shift is occurring in emerging...

Users running Firefox on Linux may be vulnerable to a security vulnerability that can be exploited to compromise the user's system. Security firm Secunia warned on Tuesday that a flaw rated as "extremely critical" has been found in Firefox 1.0.6. The flaw can only be exploited on Unix or Linux based environments and can be fixed by upgrading to Firefox 1.0.7.

Infected binary or source code files aren't anything new. And sometimes they are found on public servers. Mozilla.org is the latest example. Korean distributives for mozilla and thunderbird for linux turned out to be infected - mozilla-installer-bin from mozilla-1.7.6.ko-KR.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz and mozilla-xremote-client from thunderbird-1.0.2.tar.gz were infected with Virus.Linux.RST.b This virus searches for executable ELF files in the current and /bin directories and infects them. When infecting files, it writes itself to the middle of the file, at the end of a section of code, which pushes the other sections lower down. It also contains a backdoor, which downloads scripts from another...

When Jack Messman, CEO of Novell, stands up and tell the attendees at BrainShare that the enterprise desktop is the way his company is going, isn't that a pretty good clue that Linux on the desktop isn't such an anathema as it used to be? Well, apparently not, as pundit after pundit called out to the masses this week all that was Evil (and Good) about the Linux desktop. By Wednesday night, I was reeling from trying to pick and choose articles that were trying to represent a balance of opinions. And that wasn't easy. While some of these articles...

Despite the obvious driver problems experienced on commodity x86 hardware, there is not much else to criticize about Solaris 10/OpenSolaris. There are some obvious gaps which should be addressed over the long term--better updates and patching processes, for example, and an improved administration framework would go a long way to help new users unfamiliar with the Solaris environment. Is it a viable alternative to Linux? Absolutely. In the last six months I've had no problems with Solaris 10 crashing, locking up or exhibiting odd behaviour. By comparison, my Gentoo-based systems have not been so well behaved. A SPARCserver 20 running...

The cost of migrating from Windows XP to Windows Vista will encourage more companies to seriously consider moving to desktop Linux, the chief executive of open-source and networking company Novell said on Monday. Speaking at Brainshare, the company's annual European user conference in Barcelona, Novell CEO Jack Messman claimed that the cost of moving desktops to the next version of Windows will be significantly higher than migrating to desktop Linux. "The cost of migrating to Windows XP to Vista will be higher than the cost of migrating to Linux and that will push migrations to Linux," Messman said. Novell says...

# Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved. # Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance. # Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs. # Improvements to popup blocking. # Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut. # Answers.com is added to the search engine list. # Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery,...