"It appears that our large competitors are injecting themselves into complaints by smaller firms against Google, likely in order to learn more about our business practices and use that information to develop a broader antitrust complaint against us," Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich told seattlepi.com. Microsoft denied to comment specifically on the Texas investigation, though a source said the company has not received any formal requests for information from the attorney general s office. (No formal request is needed -- investigators can call

Red Hat, Inc., the world s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced General H. Hugh Shelton (U.S. Army Retired) has been elected to serve as chairman of Red Hat s board of directors. A member of Red Hat s board of directors since April 2003, General Shelton previously held the position of Lead Director and currently serves on the Audit and Compensation Committees. He succeeds Matthew Szulik, former Red Hat CEO. "General Shelton is an individual of the utmost integrity. He has

We were recently talking about how so many in the video game industry seem so antagonistic to the used video game market, despite widespread evidence that a healthy secondary market helps the primary market in a variety of ways. Reader Johnny points us to the news that retailing giant Ikea is now planning to experiment with used goods sales itself via a website in Sweden. The company says that it won t make much money from the offering, but

The VMware ESX hypervisor could let IT staff steal sensitive data by abusing administrative access, particularly if customers fail to implement role-based access controls, the security vendor BeyondTrust argued last week at VMworld. IT staff with root access to VMware ESX can steal virtual machine disk files and then erase log files and other traces of the illicit activity by manipulating the service console, a Linux-based instance that manages the VMware hypervisor, BeyondTrust says. This could make it easy to steal

The federal agency in charge of protecting other agencies from computer intruders was found riddled with hundreds of high-risk security holes on its own systems, according to the results of an audit released Wednesday. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, monitors the Einstein intrusion-detection sensors on nonmilitary government networks, and helps other civil agencies respond to hack attacks. It also issues alerts on the latest software security holes, so that everyone from the White House to the FAA

The Downing Street communications chief Andy Coulson is under renewed pressure as it was announced