Yahoo Inc. said Tuesday it had acquired DialPad Communications Inc., a 6-year-old company whose software lets people to place calls over the Internet for a fraction of the cost of regular telephone service.

The Internet’s leading portal will use DialPad to expand its product array in the burgeoning niche of Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, said company spokeswoman Joanna Stevens.

New products from Yahoo that integrate DialPad technology could debut within a month, Stevens said.

Source: AP

Network computing giant Sun Microsystems has rolled out patches for a pair of “highly critical” flaws in the Sun JRE (Java Runtime Environment) sandbox and the Java Web Start technology.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said the bugs can be exploited by a malicious hacker to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems.

The more serious of the two vulnerabilities, which affects the Java Runtime Environment, may allow an untrusted applet to elevate its privileges.

Sun said the issue can occur in Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 and in 5.0 Update 1 for Windows, Solaris and Linux; as well as in J2SE 1.4.2_07 and earlier 1.4.2 releases for Windows, Solaris and Linux.

Sun’s J2SE 1.3.1_xx releases for Windows, Solaris and Linux are not affected.

In a separate advisory, Sun Microsystems Inc. confirmed a privilege escalation security hole in Java Web Start, the technology used to deploy stand-alone applications over a network.

Source: eWeek

Microsoft posted June security patch builletin.

Included in this advisory are updates for newly discovered vulnerabilities ranked Critical (3), Important (4), and Moderate (3).

You can update your system by going to Windows Update

A leading Linux figure, Daniel Robbins, the founder of Gentoo Linux and its former chief architect, has announced that he has accepted a position at Microsoft Corp.

In a brief note to the Gentoo Foundation Inc. community, Robbins said he was leaving Gentoo and that he will be “helping Microsoft to understand Open Source and community-based projects.”

Microsoft confirmed that Robbins began work at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Wash., on May 23.

Source: eWeek

A little Melville for your MP3 player? Tom Clancy for your computer? The New York Public Library announced Monday that it is making 700 books — from classics to current best sellers — available to members in digital audio form for downloading onto PCs, CD players and portable listening devices.

The service started Monday. Users can listen to digital audio books through a computer, burn them to CDs or transfer them to many portable devices, library officials said.

Digital audio books are available for free to members through the library’s Web site. Users can borrow up to 10 digital books at a time, and after 21 days the materials will be automatically checked in and made available to others.

Source: AP

Sun Microsystems is expected to release Solaris as open-source software Tuesday; the move is a centerpiece of the company’s plan to regain lost relevance and fend off rivals Red Hat, IBM and Microsoft.

The company plans to post more than 5 million lines of source code for the heart of the operating system–its kernel and networking code–at the OpenSolaris Web site, said Tom Goguen, Solaris’ marketing chief. However, some source code components, such as installation and some administration tools, will arrive later.

Source: News.com