ARLINGTON, Virginia - A security researcher released details of a critical flaw in Oracle's application and Web software on Wednesday, criticising the company for not cooperating with the security community and taking too long to fix software issues that threaten its customers.

A new ruling by the Irish courts could undermine people who have a genuine need for online anonymity and deter whistleblowers, lobby group Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) claims.

Sun Microsystems wants to prolong its relationship with partner Fujitsu beyond 2008 despite the companies' first, joint high-end servers hitting a delay.

Business Intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term for systems and processes that turn a mass of opaque data into useful business information. SQL Server 2005 incorporates radical changes into its BI capabilities.

Slowly but surely the standard tasks of the developer’s daily grind are being absorbed and packaged up by a growing number of vendors. Systems management tools, for example. Vendors have already subsumed much of the management coding that would in the past have been the developer’s lot, and now Intel is casting its beady eye on the potential from the other end of the spectrum.

IT decision makers are the target of an Eclipse Foundation campaign to make them feel comfortable adopting tools and integration strategies based on the group's open source framework.

IBM managers are in meetings across the country to hear about changes to the company pension.

Abit is to sell its motherboard division to fellow Taiwanese mobo maker Universal Scientific Industrial (USI) for TWD350m ($11m) and 20m shares. USI is forming a subsidiary into which the Abit operation will be merged.

Well, here's a bit of agreeable news for those readers who dread getting up in front of the board to deliver that mission-critical Powerpoint presentation: indulging in full-on rumpy-pumpy beforehand will help you face the ordeal in a state of hormone-induced calmness.

Nvidia has confirmed speculation that it will announce its next-generation graphics chip architecture at CeBIT. The head of the company's Taiwan sales operation, Paul Sun, this week said the chip maker will introduce a new high-end GPU in early March.

Nintendo is indeed planning to ship a redesigned version of its DS handheld console, despite apparent denials that such a move was being contemplated. The so-called 'DS Lite' is scheduled to ship in Japan on March 2, the video games pioneer said today.

Infinium Labs, the company behind the Phantom games console and broadband content service, yesterday said it had won $5m in funding - money it needs to begin manufacturing its Phantom Lapboard gaming accessory.

Brits can all sleep easier in their beds now that the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment has handed over £20m for a shiny new Cray XT3 super computer.

World+dog bought 244.9m mobile phones during the final three months of 2005, market watcher Strategy Analytics (SA) said today, adding that the figure is a record one. For the year as a whole, some 810.5m handsets shipped, up 19.1 per cent on 2004's total, 680.5m.

Xerox has slashed its European distributors from 49 to just three.

Washington State and Microsoft have joined forces to sue a firm that allegedly used scare tactics to sell ineffective anti-spyware software.

UpdatedA BBC survey into Brits' views on evolution has found that while 48 per cent of people opted for evolution as that which "best described their view of the origin and development of life", 22 per cent opted for creationism and 17 per cent for for intelligent design. The remainder of the pollees "did not know".

Book reviewI'm not that keen on the word “hacker” in the modern, pejorative sense (I remember when it meant a good UNIX programmer) and I'm generally not that that impressed by hackers either - mostly they're not particularly clever and just got lucky.

Research in Motion (RIM) will appear in court on Friday, 24 February to hear if it must close its Blackberry push email service to US customers or, at the very least, make them implement an upgrade.

European aircraft manufacturer Airbus has announced it will create 650 new jobs as part of an expansion of its wing-manufacturing plant in north Wales, the BBC reports.

Creative experienced a dip in profitability during the final three months of 2005, the second quarter of its 2006 fiscal year, despite big sales gains pushing revenues to their highest level in five years.

South Korea's second largest phone maker, Pantech, has launched a slider phone aimed at the local mobile media player market, touting the handset's near-widescreen display and its MP3 and video playback facilities.

CommentThe IEEE has abandoned its effort to create a UWB standard, but has agreed on a draft for the next generation of WiFi, 802.11n. The conventional wisdom is that this week's events are great news for Wi-Fi, and a disaster for Ultra-Wide Band, UWB, and by association, Bluetooth. In fact, the exact opposite is likely to be the judgment of the future.

Confusion and lack of leadership is leaving many UK businesses exposed to mobile security risks, according to a new study.

ReviewNow that German's Beyerdynamic has returned to studio-level audio equipment, it's let Sennheiser carpet the portables market with the kind of spread that Beyer boasted in the 1990s. At the same time, Sennheiser has updating the looks and prices of its headphones to make them attractive enough to replace regularly with the latest model...

Germany is leading the scramble to snap up new European domains, while the UK is being a tad .eusceptic.

Nintendo has opened its wallet to fund a £1m gaming retrofest at London's Science Museum where teary-eyed old timers can chew the fat about Space Invaders, Pac-man and Donkey Kong.

A Syracuse University research team has discovered something quite remarkable, if not immediately useful in everyday life*: bats belonging to species where the females are promiscuous have bigger testicles than those in species where the girls are more family-oriented.

Say hello to the latest weird watch: the Kerala Trance. Sounds a bit Ibiza to us, but it's got a geek angle too: the display's in binary. Two rows of four LEDs tell the time; hours above, minutes below. Next to each LED there's a number - add up the numbers whose lights are illuminated and you get the time. If the LEDs marked 8 and 1 are lit, it's Nine O'clock; if the lower-row 16, 8, 4 and 2 LEDs are on too, it's 9:30.

The Information Commissioner cast an eye over the Shoreditch home surveillance project this week as the man behind the controversial scheme assured residents their civil liberties will be protected.

The UK Government plans to toughen up computer crime laws under proposals outlined in the Police and Justice Bill on Wednesday. The bill would double the maximum jail sentence for hacking into computer systems from five years to ten years, a provision that will classify hacking as a more serious offense and make it easier to extradite computer crime suspects from overseas. Denial of service attacks, something of a grey area under current regulations, would be clearly classified as a criminal offense under amendments to the 1990 Computer Misuse Act (CMA) proposed in the bill.

VoIP networks such as Skype and Vonage might be used to control networks of compromised machines because of security shortcomings that give hackers a better opportunity to cover their tracks, security researchers warn.

Mobile phone average selling prices are in decline, Nokia warned today as it reported its Q4 FY2005 financial results.

The Linux kernel is not moving to the next version of General Public License (GPL), following objections from Linus Torvalds to the license's stance on digital rights management (DRM).

One in five PCs - and one in four desktops - now has AMD Inside, according to analysts at Mercury Research. The silicon contender saw the strongest growth in the server market, climbing from 12.7 per cent in Q3 2005 to 16.4 per cent in the final quarter of 2005.

Component shortages and a lack of manufacturing capacity have forced Microsoft's Xbox 360 console into hibernation, a situation that looks set to continue until Spring.

Microsoft may not be off the hook with the European Commission (EC), despite this week's sweeping promise to license Windows Server communications source code.