Archive

In the world of Rich Internet Applications, the battle for hearts and minds -- not to mention eyeballs and desktops -- heated up this week when Adobe Systems took the wraps off the beta version of its Adobe Integrated Runtime and slotted it for public release. Adobe AIR, according to the buzz on the...

Google Thursday launched a wiki-like Web information-sharing tool that the search company hopes will become a quick-start collaboration platform and a place to tie together work done on its growing family of productivity applications. Google Sites is built on the Jotspot platform, which Google acqui...

Vox populi vox dei -- the voice of the people is the voice of God -- was supposed to represent democracy in action. Until now, however, the true state of democracy was perhaps best expressed by the saying "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." The Internet and associated technologies a...

The Cult of the Dead Cow hacker group -- which claims to be the world's most attractive hacker group -- has released Goolag Scanner, an open source tool that uses Google's search engines to look for vulnerabilities in Web sites. Goolag Scanner is either a Web auditing tool that can be used by securi...

Wikis are finally becoming a useful tool for collaboration and information sharing in the workplace. However, like all business tools exposed on the Internet or corporate intranet, IT managers have to view their deployments with a stern eye regarding who can use them and what corporate information m...

AMD has open sourced more than 3,000 routines in its AMD Performance Library for multi-threaded programming. These routines, which will make it easier to build media and other applications for multi-core processors, have been posted under the Apache license on SourceForge.net. With more than 170,000...

Microsoft is making broad changes to its technological and business practices in an effort to make its most popular products more open and interoperable with those from other vendors. Driven by industry changes, competitive pressures and legal realities, Microsoft laid out a variety of moves designe...

A Swiss bank has succeeded in at least temporarily shutting down the U.S. version of a Web site where a former bank employee posted internal documents he claims showed the bank was being used to hide and launder money. Earlier, a judge approved an order taking down the Web site. The U.S. arm of whis...

Mozilla has been working diligently toward the upcoming final launch of Firefox Version 3.0. With the recent release of the browser's third beta edition, the company's engineers have wrapped up the major challenges and are focused on incremental changes. Now they're working at tweaking the browser i...

Mozilla is up to its elbows in code as it works toward the final release of the third iteration of its Firefox Web browser. With the launch last week of the browser's third beta version, the open source developer has given some 500,000 developers and testers the go-ahead to put the application throu...

The SCO Group, a software technology and mobile services firm that focuses on Unix-based solutions -- but is perhaps best for its high-profile lawsuits against Novell and IBM -- has announced a $100 million cash infusion from Stephen Norris Capital Partners that promises to yank the small Utah-based...

Here I was all ready to post my thoughts on user interfaces and ease of use, when news surfaced that the SCO Group has received an investment of $100 million to take it private. The company once claimed to own the rights to Unix and then proceeded to sue IBM and Novell for infringing its intellectua...

Sparks flew at the GSMA mobile telephony conference in Barcelona, Spain, as members of the LiMo and Android consortiums demonstrated their products and announced new developments. LiMo, a consortium of 32 major firms, including mobile phone companies, unveiled 18 commercial handsets and several prot...

Sun Microsystems is acquiring Germany-based virtualization software provider Innotek and, with it, its increasingly popular open source x86 virtualization product VirtualBox. The deal comes on the heels of Sun's recent purchase of open source database developer MySQL for $1 billion. VirtualBox enabl...

Raising the bar a notch or two higher in its rivalry with Android and the Open Handset Alliance, a newly enlarged LiMo Foundation on Monday rolled out the first LiMo-compatible handsets and announced its software development kit strategy. Orange and Access are among nine new members that have just r...