The Mono Web site has, in some cases, been downloading a very old version of Mono. It serves as a fine example of what can go wrong with software, even with the best of intentions, and without anyone really making a mistake. What happened was back in May 2005, the Mono team added accessibility features to its Web site, including the little yellow pop-up balloons for screen readers.

Marvell Technology and Intel announced that they have signed an agreement for Intel to sell its communications and application processor business to Marvell for a purchase price of $600 million plus the assumption by Marvell of certain liabilities. The planned sale will give Marvell a strong presence in the growing market segment for processors used in smart handheld devices. The sale also will enable Intel to focus its investments on its core businesses, including high-performance, low-power Intel Architecture-based processors and emerging technologies for mobile computing, including Wi-Fi and WiMAX broadband wireless technologies.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, more than 16,000 votes have already been recorded, as more than 20,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards.

In the UK, the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Center has warned about a spate of attacks in recent months involving e-mail Trojans. 'We have never seen anything like this in terms of the industrial scale of this series of attacks,' said Roger Cumming, director of NISCC, which protects critical infrastructure from electronic threats.

The fake news report telling of a Michael Jackson suicide attempt should be less tempting to users, now that the King of Pop has been acquitted on all counts. Don't rule out future, related scams, though, say the experts.

SenSage today announced that Bruce Scott, one of Oracle's co-founders and the co-architect of the first three versions of the Oracle database, has joined the company to lead the expansion and execution of the company's product strategy.

Yakov Fain reaches Lesson 11 in his popular 'Java basics' series. This time he deals with how and why Java programmers working on large projects that have lots of classes usually organize them in different packages; and explores the new element introduced in Java 5.0 called static imports.

'Compliance and security are the new Software Quality drivers,' said Dr Adam Kolawa, cofounder and CEO of Parasoft Corporation, talking live on SYS-CON.TV to Sean Rhody, editor-in-chief of Web Services Journal and Yakov Fain, Enterprise Editor of JDJ.

Now that Yahoo! Mail has matched the Gmail offer of 1GB storage to its free e-mail customers, Google is doing the obvious thing and pulling ahead again, reopening 'the one-gig gap' between its Gmail service and all-comers.

6 months' freedom and $27,200 - that was the cost to David Jeansonne of having in 2002 sent out e-mails with attachments that, if downloaded, made changes in WebTV customers' set-top box configurations causing them to unintentionally dial the 9-1-1 emergency number.

An invention representing a fundamental component of modern threat detection software, applicable to all operating systems and classes of malicious code, has just been successfully patented by Symantec. The technology - 'data driven detection of viruses' - enables the detection of complex viruses, worms, and spyware.

The FBI has warned the public to avoid falling victim to an ongoing mass e-mail scheme wherein computer users receive unsolicited e-mails purportedly sent by the FBI.

Mikko Hypponen, director of the Finnish security specialists F-Secure, this week discovered a Nokia cell phone in a technology gadgets store in Santa Monica, California, infected with the Cabir mobile phone virus. It had also infected the store owner's own cell phone. Cabir has made it, for the first time, to the USA.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, as more than 4,000 votes have already been recorded in just the first seven days of voting, as more than 50,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards. Highlights after just one week's voting are as follows.

Prudential thinks it could be at least six months before HP finds a replacement for ousted CEO Carly Fiorina and at least nine months before 'a new CEO takes the reins and a concrete strategy is articulated,' notes Maureen O'Gara. 'It warns that business could drift between now and then and that when a new guy finally takes over it could mean more restructuring,' she adds.

IBM has announced the results from its 2004 Global Business Security Index Report and provided an early look at potential security threats in 2005.

The following is an unedited transcript of an internal email exchange yesterday afternoon at SYS-CON Media offices. Disclaimer: We did not have any conversation with any of the hardware vendors regarding the selection of the hardware to install and use for the new 'SYS-CON.TV' and 'blog-n-play' Web sites. SYS-CON paid full price for the Dell hardware through Dell.com. Strukhoff did not know the online editor would publish his comment on the Web site.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has quickly taken centre stage as the primary development style of the next decade and beyond. Businesses of all types are preparing for the SOA revolution that promises consistency of process, reduction in duplicate work, ease of maintenance, service reusability and broad interoperability.

Centrify, reports Maureen O'Gara, is about to come out from under the covers and expects to compete with Netegrity and Oblix as well as Vintela for the identity and access management crown, mindful of the fact that identity management is a top security challenge for the IT establishment these days.

eBay, The World's Online Marketplace, has more than 114 million registered users, 10,000 developers, and over 700 live, third-party applications.

SYS-CON Media, the world's leading i-technology media company, announced that its 2005 Readers' Choice Awards polls opened today, February 1, 2005, and will remain open for six months, until July 31, 2005. More than 50,000 readers are expected to cast their votes to select the best software products and services of the year for Java, Linux, Web Services, XML, Microsoft .NET, ColdFusion and Macromedia MX.

SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com), the world's leading i-technology media company, announced today that SYS-CON.TV (www.sys-con.tv), the first streaming live i-technology television is scheduled to debut on February 15, 2005 to coincide with the first day of the upcoming Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference Expo.

The recent HP management re-org have prompted recent concerns over Carly Fiorina and her performance, particularly in that this re-org slammed the company's underperforming PC business into its perenially successful printer division, a move that could, as the thinking goes, drag down the entire combined division. Fiorina, reports West Coast Bureau Chief Roger Strukhoff, is facing 'a skeptical business press' including an article in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle by Benjamin Pimentel.

Did the geek-fest just finished in Las Vegas, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2005, herald the return of technology and the beginning of the 'post-PC' world?

Last month Microsoft purchased anti-spyware maker Giant Software, which further fueled speculations concerning its anti-spyware and anti-virus products. How and when Microsoft will release these security devices is not known.

For users running Internet Explorer 6 with Windows XP SP2 installed, the Danish-based security firm Secunia yesterday published a demonstration of the vulnerability. The vulnerabilities, Secunia says, can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system, conduct cross-site/zone scripting and bypass a security feature in Microsoft Windows XP SP2. It rates the problem 'extremely critical.'

Claiming it to be only half the price of products from rivals like Avid, SGI, and IBM, Apple has unveiled a storage area network system called Xsan - a 64-bit cluster file system for Mac OS X that allows organisations to use multiple computers with concurrent file-level read/write access.

Instead of the 40 hours or so of video storage offered by a standard 80 GB hard disk in a Tivo-type digital video recorder, Hitachi is going to help manufacturers offer consumers half a terabyte of storage. That's more than 500 billion bits of data.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - whose watchword is 'We believe that the world's toughest problems can be solved - if we work together' - is giving $3M to help those struck by the natural disaster that's wreaked such havoc in South Asia. Amazon.com has helped channel even more, $3.5M - as the wider Internet community joins the fund-raising effort.

SYS-CON Media today announced further details of the upcoming cross-platform technology event, Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edge), to be held in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, February 15-17, 2005. More than 3,000 i-technology professionals are expected to participate this year including the show expo floor, making it the largest Web Services event of the year. The following is the official announcement of the keynotes, sponsors, conference tracks and sessions, tutorials, and the Web Services case studies to be presented during this year's three-day event.

As a Linux desktop user himself, system administrator Chris Spencer did not relish having to clean up his wife's infected Windows PC after it had become compromised. By the time he'd solved the immediate problem, Spencer had become so fed up with spyware, trojans, viruses, and spam, that he decided it was time to write a letter to the world. It's a simple message: it's time to switch from Windows to Linux. 'The letter serves as a guide,' Spencer explains, 'taking you through some of the history of Microsoft right up to this present day.'

In a transaction that is supposed to be the largest software acquisition ever, Symantec, the consumer anti-virus house, is buying Veritas, the enterprise storage and backup manager, for $13.5 billion in stock. The price works out to roughly $30.75 a share, better than a $5 premium over Veritas' closing price on Friday before trades shot up on rumors Monday and the story leaked to the New York Times on Tuesday.

Security giant Symantec, The New York Times is reporting this morning, is 'close to acquiring' Veritas for more than $13 billion, trumping yesterday's $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle, and dwarfing Honeywell's $1.5 billion bid this week for Novar. Only the possible $35 billion merger between Sprint and Nextel would be a bigger deal than Symantec-Veritas.

Early indications are that Sun's response to the the possible security vulnerability in the Java Virtual Machine has been effective. As of yesterday, Monday, November 29, 824,244 users have downloaded the upgraded version of J2SE 1.4.2_06 that corrects the JVM vulnerability. The company adds that there have been 'no reported attacks' exploiting this vulnerability in Java.

In this exclusive 'sneak peek' at one of the articles from the forthcoming Premier Issue of ISSJ, the chief scientist of Veritas explains how most enterprises, whether big or small, now have NAS servers and that many are using them for more than just file serving. 'The cost of SANs has fallen such that they are now a very real prospect for smaller organizations that want to take advantage of improved connectivity and performance to utilize with technologies such as third-party copy and clustered file systems,' writes Guy Bunker.

It is being widely reported that Microsoft is close to announcing the availability of its own browser. The company has been at work on such a tool, which it said would be ready by year's end. Yesterday, chairman Bill Gates, told shareholders this timeline over estimated things.

The Wall Street Journal has been reporting on Steve Ballmer's 2,600-word e-mail due to be sent to Microsoft's customers and business partners today in which Ballmer allegedly steps up the company's attack on Linux, claiming that businesses using Linux face greater risks than those that use Windows.

In order to protect workstations and servers where Linux and Windows run together, F-Secure has introduced the first integrated security system that protects Linux and Windows. This two-pronged approach is designed to prevent contamination, which can occur in IT departments with systems running intimately connected tasks.

According to the latest Web services 'hype cycle' from Gartner, both Web services security standards and the deployment of Web services with security are rushing headlong into the dreaded 'Trough of Disillusionment.' This means that the greatest levels of hype in these areas are supposedly behind us and the reality of just what can and cannot be done is collectively dawning on us.

Data protection is never more vital than in the world of health care, where sensitive and life-impacting data is the cornerstone of medicine. More than 3,600 physicians in 26 states turn to our company for outsourced claims reimbursement management, making backup and recovery as critical as the reliable Linux platform.