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It is unusual, but not unheard of, for a murder case to go forward if a body has not been found. It is even rarer for the charge to be first-degree murder -- and less common still for the defendant to be found guilty. Those were the exact circumstances, though, under which Hans Reiser was convicted ...

IBM is putting its heft behind a project that could morph into new way of doing business in Second Life, Linden Lab's virtual 3-D community. The two have partnered to build a protected enclave in Second Life where the company can conduct serious business without fear of marauders. While there are mo...

In Search Of: CEO to turn IT organization that operates like a terrorist group into a Microsoft-like outfit. Vision and big-picture mentality not required. Management, administrative and detail skills sorely needed. Ability to deal with a chairman who occasionally goes off reservation during press i...

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and twelve media groups are asking a federal court to lift an injunction against the global whistleblower Web site Wikileaks.org. Two weeks ago, in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, J...

The Software Freedom Law Center is challenging Verizon's use of BusyBox open source code in the wireless routers provided to its FiOS customers. SFLC has filed suit against Verizon in the U.S. District Court of New York on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, alleging that the...

French company Seanodes has introduced software architecture that it says allows companies to leverage unused processing power in its storage infrastructure to create a virtual storage pool. The introduction of this application, the firm claims, has in effect created a new category in the storage sp...

IBM and Linux distributor Novell are strengthening their partnership in order to encourage cross-adoption of their respective platforms and products, especially in the small to medium-sized business space. The companies hope to erode market share inroads recently gained by Microsoft and Red Hat with...

IBM is contributing a processing engine to the open source and public health communities that will make it easier to track the transmission of diseases around the world. The software, Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler, is available for use through the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework Project,...

Wikia, the open source search engine initiative and potential Google-killer, has snagged Jeremie Miller, who founded Jabber, an open instant messaging platform. Miller was handpicked by the Wikia project's founder, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales. "Jimmy sat down in January after he announced his intention ...

Microsoft has rolled out alpha and beta versions of Silverlight, its recently announced RIA platform, at a keynote address at the MIX07 conference underway in Las Vegas. As part of its strategy to flatten Adobe with is own iteration of flash technology, Microsoft has configured Silverlight, essentia...

Adobe is making an aggressive push into open source with its plans to release the code for its Flex platform. The Flex SDK and documentation will be available under the Mozilla Public License in the second half of 2007. At the same time, though, Adobe will continue to make the Flex SDK and other Fle...

Jennifer Goodwin is on a mission -- and a budget that doesn't go beyond five digits. Goodwin is gearing up to expand her company, InternetGirlFriday.com, which provides virtual business administrative support. "I have been turning away business for a couple of years now, in some part due to the lack...

For some time there has been a drive to smooth the process of building applications over existing call platforms. Also, more and more PBX operators have been moving platforms to open source -- Cisco Call Manager 5.0, for instance, is Linux based. Now the next step in developing robust open source un...

Sun Microsystems, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, announced it would open source its online game server platform, called "Project Darkstar," which is written entirely in Java technology. The source code for Project Darkstar will become available under a general public l...

One of the editors in charge of monitoring Wikipedia's content has been discovered to be a fraud. EssJay, whom the site had assumed was working under a false name for privacy, had presented himself as a tenured professor of religion with expertise in canon law. However, it has been revealed that Ess...

Two main representatives of the Linux community -- Open Source Development Labs and Free Standards Group -- have merged to form the Linux Foundation. The group is supported by several major firms, including Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell and Oracle, which serve as foundin...

Since Jimmy Wales' announcment last week that he plans to launch a new search engine in Q1 2007, speculation has been rife over what it could mean for the search industry -- and specifically for Google. Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is one of the few Web 2.0 players with enough clout to take on t...

Without fanfare -- in fact, there was no official announcement made at all -- China decided to stop blocking its citizens' access to Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia. The move hints that China may be loosening its control of public access to the Internet and other forms of media. Th...

As part of its appeal against a decision by a district court judge, SCO has filed a claim purporting that IBM destroyed certain software code, thus making it impossible for the Utah-based company to detail how IBM had infringed its Unix code. Last year IBM asked the court to limit the scope of SCO'...

For the first time, IBM is making Lotus Notes available for Linux. The initial offering supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Update 3. The company will add a Notes client for Novell Suse Linux Desktop within three months. These are the first Linux-based business applications from IBM. Of course, IBM...