Novell this week unveiled Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0, which enables development of Microsoft .Net applications for Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X from within Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE.

Microsoft today said it will issue an emergency patch for the critical Windows shortcut bug on Monday, August 2.

The company said it is satisfied with the quality of the "out-of-band" update -- Microsoft's term for a patch that falls outside the usual monthly delivery schedule -- but also acknowledged that it has tracked an upswing in attacks.

Samsung appears to have won the race to be the first device manufacturer to gain approval from the Federal Communications Commission for a phone based on the 4G LTE standard.

Although not traditionally known for its contributions to the open source community, the German-based SAP is adopting more open source software, as well as contributing more of its own code back into the community, company officials said in an interview.

"In the past we didn't have an open source strategy," said Claus von Riegen, SAP's program director of technology standards and open source. "That has changed over the last two years or so."

Microsoft will ship a beta of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in September, a company executive said today.

If the timeline is accurate, the IE9 beta release will come a month later than earlier speculation, which had settled on August, a pick based in large part on PowerPoint slides purportedly from a Microsoft presentation that focused on Windows 8, the next iteration of the company's OS.

Citrix's VDI technology has surged ahead of rival VMware's, according to the Burton Group, which says Citrix's XenDesktop software is the first "enterprise-ready" server-hosted virtual desktop product.

Worldwide mobile phone shipments jumped by 14.5 percent in the second quarter, driven by sales of smartphones and entry-level handsets, IDC reported today.

LAS VEGAS -- The U.S. needs to consider working with other leading nations to develop rules of engagement in cyberspace, retired general and former director of the CIA Michael Hayden said during a keynote address at the Black Hat conference here on Thursday.

As the country with the largest stakes on the Internet, the U.S. has been somewhat reluctant to engage in such discourse because of concerns that any international negotiations will force it to reveal or limit its cyber capabilities, Hayden said.

A Defcon contest that invites contestants to trick employees at U.S. corporations into revealing not-so-sensitive data has rattled some nerves.

Contest organizers have been called by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and seen warnings issued by security groups and the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, (FS-ISAC) an industry group that provides information on security threats affecting the banking industry.

A court-appointed special master has rejected class-action status in an antitrust lawsuit against Intel, determining that the plaintiffs failed to show that PC buyers were harmed by discounts Intel offered to manufacturers.

The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware in 2005, consolidates more than 80 separate cases that generally accuse Intel of wrongfully offering discounts to computer manufacturers and causing computer prices to be artificially inflated.