Linux code certification will not prevent legal action, says analyst

Linus Torvalds and the Open Source Development Lab's new submission process for developers contributing code to the Linux kernel may not be the panacea they hope, an industry analyst has warned. Code that is put forward for inclusion into the open source operating system kernel must now be signed off with a Developer's Certificate of Origin - to document the provenance of the kernel and ward off future litigation such as that being brought by SCO. George Weiss from Gartner warns Linux users that the new system is not the panacea for Linux. ...more

Blackberry to get Google Talk and Google Local

Google's instant-messaging and mapping client for mobile will soon be supported on the BlackBerry wireless platform. The popular handheld device is to get the Google Talk and Google Local services. 'Instant messaging and local content are two increasingly important areas of focus for mobile applications and we are very pleased to work with Google in extending these two popular Google services to BlackBerry users,' said Mark Guibert, VP of Corporate Marketing at Research In Motion, the makers of the Blackberry. ...more

MEPs reject CMBA copyright requests

The European Parliament appears to have rejected calls to include copyright infringement among the activities that may be investigated under the forthcoming EU data retention laws. MEPs decided to dismiss a request by the Creative Media and Business Alliance (CMBA), a collection of record and movie companies and trade bodies. The organisation was asking them to modify the proposed laws so that stored data could be used to investigate any offence, not just the 32 crimes that the EU classifies as 'serious': terrorism, murder, drug trafficking and human trafficking. ...more

Search engines unite to fight spam

In a rare show of unity, all three of the major search engines have acted together act to fight the practice of comment spam. This is the practice where someone will comment on a particular article and add a link to their own web site purely to gain additional rankings in a search engine. Because search engine spiders will follow any link on a page, and award the linked site a page rank value based on the rank on the originating page, the practice of comment spam has become an epidemic throughout the web. ...more

Flash memory iPod rumours surface again

Rumours that Apple is preparing to enter the market for MP3 players using flash memory have surfaced again. AppleInsider reports that Yasuo Morimoto, senior executive vice-president at Toshiba, told the China Daily that Toshiba will begin selling flash memory to Apple in early 2005. Introducing a flash-based iPod - 'iPod micro' perhaps - would enable Apple to compete for a share of a market that is five times as big as the hard-drive market by unit sales and double its size by revenue. ...more