LettersWe ran an article this week that posed the question "Is open source strategic?". The author argued that if it is, it is probably bad news for open source enthusiasts because it would expose the open source suppliers to the same scrutiny as commercial software vendors. A number of you wrote in saying that this wasn't quite the point:

Azlan has assembled five new bundles of security services which should make it easier for networking resellers to sell such add-ons to customers.

Napster's subscriber base reached 410,000 during its most recently completed fiscal quarter, Q4 FY2005, the company said today in advance of its formal earnings announcement.

Detective chief superintendent Sharon Lemon has been appointed head of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. She joins the National Crime Squad hi-tech crime division after leading Paedophile On-Line Investigation Team (POLIT), the national and international single point of contact for on-line child abuse investigations. Lemon joined the Metropolitan Police in 1976, working her way up the ranks until she joined the National Crime Squad in 1999, where she served as head of its firearms squad.

Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel took home $230m from the result of stock sales last year, one of the largest ever hauls for a company executive, a SEC filing reveals. Semel holds another 300 million in Yahoo equity. While mere mortals are usually restricted by selling chunks of options over a four-year period, most of Semel's equity is readily convertible.

Simon Aldous is joining Computer 2000 as general manager of its CAD and high-end printing business, Datech 2000.

It's tough to quantify and even harder to prove. But, optimists rejoice, the US economy is still booming. Investors can feel this even if they can't explain it.

A group of software companies is banding together to help the European Commission in its ongoing anti-trust case against Microsoft.

CommentBack in colonial days, natives were generally considered second rate. That has all changed, at least in the IT world, where all things native are generally considered to be a "good thing". However, any term that might be used to describe something worthwhile is open to abuse by marketing.

Blackberry maker Research in Motion saw its subscriber base rise past the 2.5 million mark during its most recently completed fiscal quarter, Q4 FY2005, as service and software revenues began to slow the company's dependence on hardware sales.

A survey of Register readers, carried out by analysts Quocirca, reveals you love Linux on the desktop, but you love Windows XP too.

MCI has turned its back on Qwest and decided instead to be acquired by Verizon.

A Hungarian man who cracked into the corporate network of Swedish telecoms giant Ericsson was jailed for three years on Monday.

Sony will this month ship its latest hard drive-based personal digital music player, this time adding a removable battery to the feature set and an anti-impact system to the unit's hard disk.

Tiscali has sold its French ISP business - Liberty Surf - to Telecom Italia, both companies have confirmed.

Galaxies might have started to form far earlier than scientists had previously thought, according to new results from teams working on the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes.

RSA Security has warned that it will miss revenue targets for the first quarter.

Apple's Japanese operation may be taking its time launching a local version of the Mac maker's iTunes Music Store, but eager iPod buyers can at least now order one of the company's music players using only their mobile phones.

AnalysisThe trouble with one business model that works for one area of digital media, is that it will rarely work, unchanged, for another area.

Site offerWith Unix becoming more and more ubiquitous, Unix users are becoming more ubiquitous as well - and a growing number of them are ready to move beyond just using the open-source OS to actually administering it. Not wishing to disappoint, The Register Bookshop has got just the ticket for these budding Unix consultants.

Demon Internet could be about to axe around 40 jobs in Scotland as it moves to close its tech support centre in Glasgow.

A European team of astronomers claims to have taken the first direct image of an extra-solar planet. Their announcement comes just weeks after two US teams made a remarkably similar boast, and has prompted a sceptical response from some parts of the astronomical community.

Computer Associates Tuesday announced a reorganisation of its business to place more emphasis on its core systems management and security operations. CA is dividing itself into business units rather than product-based divisions in a strategy that will see the software giant organised along the same lines as arch-rival IBM.

Measures to reform UK hacking law were aired in parliament yesterday. But a lack of mainstream political interest means that changes in the law are unlikely for some time.

ReviewApple's iPod line-up has, like it or not, become the benchmark by which other personal digital music players are judged. That's not to say they always measure up to the competition, and they've usually taken longer to adopt new features, such as colour displays and photo browsing, than their rivals have.

BT's Wi-Fi subsidiary, Openzone, has added Broadreach Networks' collection of hotspots to its own, courtesy of a roaming deal struck between the two companies.

Hynix may soon regain control of its destiny from its creditor banks. Originally due to take charge in the second half of 2006, Hynix's chiefs could get to run things before the end of June.

NASA has approved another 18-months of crawling around on the Red planet for the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. The rovers, which were originally designed to explore the surface of Mars for just three months, are holding up so well after their fourteen month stay on the red planet, that mission scientists say they are having to make long term plans for them.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is conducting drills in Connecticut and New Jersey to help first responders perfect their routines in anticipation of the next mass-casualty terror attack on US soil.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke has confirmed that controversial legislation to introduce ID cards has been shelved.

US Attorney General and former White House torture apologist Alberto Gonzales warned the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that certain temporary provisions of the so-called "Patriot" Act must not be allowed to expire as scheduled later this year.

If you're EMC, the last couple of hours haven't been terribly pleasant. That's because two of EMC's rivals - IBM and Network Appliance - announced a major alliance designed to crimp EMC's style in the network attached storage (NAS) market.

A group of MPs remains "unconvinced" for the need to split up BT maintaining that pursuing the "nuclear" option should only be a last resort.

Mozilla has patched a vulnerability in its popular Firefox web browser that could allow hackers to snaffle information from the PCs of surfers. The JavaScript-related security bug, which affected versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 of Firefox, created a means for hackers to seize potentially sensitive information in memory.

Adam Vaughan, managing editor of the gadget junkie's favourite, Stuff magazine, has started a greenie blog. Its all about ethical, environmentally friendly shopping and is loosely based on US site treehugger.com. Hippyshopper.com has all kinds of bits of kit that might well appeal to you, our lovely readers, so we thought we'd give it a nod.

Siebel has blamed poor execution and weak demand for its expected first quarter loss, ending a fragile recovery of the firm's finances.

Virus writers have created a mobile Trojan capable of rendering an infected Symbian Series 60 unusable. Fontal-A is a SIS file Trojan that installs a corrupted font file on the device, causing it to fail when the mobile phone is next rebooted.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds may soon be using a proprietary, closed source code management tool for Linux kernel development, to the dismay of many in the open source community. Torvalds today diplomatically postponed his final decision, explaining that he's taking a week offline, and he says actively exploring alternatives to the Bitkeeper software that's served as his primary code management tool in recent years. Torvalds' announcement follows a decision by Bitkeeper's Larry McVoy yesterday that he would focus on the proprietary version of the software, orphaning the free client.

His name was on the agenda, so you assumed he would show up. Still, we had some doubts.

A consortium including IBM, Nokia and Oracle has stepped up support for the EU, requesting to intervene on its behalf at the European Court of First Appeals.

Vintage documentation for what was once the world's fastest computer is up for grabs at eBay this week. Manchester's Atlas dates back to what Verity Stob calls the 'Robbie the Robot' era of computing. It was a collaboration between the city's university and Ferranti, was designed at the West Gorton site (familiar to visitors as the ICL building), and its valves first began to glow in 1961.