IBM chose the Deutsche Notes User Group conference in Germany this week to make a significant announcement about its adoption of the ODF (OpenDocument Format) in the next version of Lotus Notes.

The first beta, due out this fall, will include an ODF-compatible version of OpenOffice embedded in the Notes e-mail application. It will include word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications (or editors, as they are called), giving users the ability to create, edit, and save documents natively in ODF.

Source: InfoWorld

Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

Google Web Toolkit is a new publicly available software development tool that makes creating AJAX applications much easier.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Computer software makers launched a crackdown on illegal Internet sales of their products Tuesday by suing suspected pirates who have set up shop on the popular online auction site eBay Inc.

Usually fierce rivals Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc. teamed up to kick off the crusade by targeting five different eBay sellers in three lawsuits filed Monday in a Los Angeles federal court.

Source: AP

The recording industry sued XM Satellite Radio on Tuesday over its new iPod-like device that can store up to 50 hours of music, sending to the courts a roiling dispute over how consumers can legally record songs using next-generation radio services.

The federal lawsuit, filed in New York by the largest labels, accuses XM Satellite of “massive wholesale infringement” because its $400 handheld “Inno” device can record hours of music and automatically parse recordings by song and artist. The device is sold under the slogan, “Hear it, click it, save it.”

Source: AP

The latest report issued by Finjan’s Malicious Code Research Center highlights the growth of several emerging breeds of cyber-attack, including the increasing popularity of so-called “ransomware” and viruses that are being spread via fake anti-spyware applications.

The anti-virus software maker’s research arm said in its Web Security Trends Report, issued on May 16, that the growth of “rogue anti-spyware” and the emergence of hackers looking to hold stolen corporate data up for ransom are two of the fastest growing trends in the security threat landscape.

Hackers disguise the malware in programs advertised online as free anti-spyware applications. Once downloaded onto a user’s computer, the applications may deliver their own payloads of malicious code or expose affected machines to subsequent attacks.

Source: eWeek

New York’s Central Park and a number of other public spaces will become public Internet hubs starting this summer when the city’s parks begin offering free wireless net access, the city government said.

“We expect Central Park to be launched in July, and the rest of the parks in the late summer,” the Department of Parks and Recreation said.

Source: AFP

Borland Software’s Developer Tools Group has unveiled a three-year road map for its JBuilder Java integrated development environment.

Borland’s Developer Tools Group announced on May 16 at the JavaOne conference here that the JBuilder road map includes an update to JBuilder 2006 and a new underlying framework based on Eclipse in JBuilder 2007, code-named Peloton. The road map also provides information on future features of the product, including new team collaboration and developer productivity features, support for new Java standards and emerging open-source tools and frameworks, enhanced support for SOA (service-oriented architecture) and more, company officials said.

Source: eWeek

Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are teaming up to make their rival camps play better. Today the two will announce new ways in which Java and Microsoft’s .Net framework will cooperate in offering security, messaging and quality of service in building enterprise services.

Source: InformationWeek

Furthering its commitment to the Java developer community, Oracle today announced a series of significant contributions to leading open source initiatives. Oracle has donated more than 100 Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces components to the Apache MyFaces project.

Oracle also announced plans to augment this donation by contributing its next generation Asynchronous Javascript And XML (AJAX) user interface technology to the open source community. Oracle also announced its plan to support open source scripting communities such as Groovy and Grails and the new JSR-223 specification to enable scripting languages such as Groovy, PHP and Grails to be used in Java Server-side Applications.

Open source standards initiatives such as MyFaces and scripting communities like Groovy and Grails have become critical resources for the development community to simplify Web application development.

Answers.com released 1-Click Answers 2.0 for Windows, featuring AnswerTips - a new feature which provides users with direct, concise answers on their desktop without opening a Web browser.

Current 1-Click Answers users “Alt-Click” any word or phrase on their screen to learn more about the subject from the more than three millions topics on Answers.com, in their web browser. The new AnswerTips feature is a simpler pop-up “information bubble” explaining the term, viewed without launching the browser.

Forbes is reporting that the Supreme Court has just limited the power of patent trolls to obtain permanent injunctions against infringers as a matter of course. The court has ruled that the principles of equity apply, meaning that a court considering slapping an injunction on the infringer must consider how much damage is really being done

Source: Slashdot

This latest version of WinZip Self-Extractor supports the same improved compression technology (PPMd) and advanced encryption (AES with 128- and 256-bit keys) found in WinZip 10.0 and WinZip 10.0 Pro. This allows users to create self-extracting Zip files that are smaller and offers the ability to distribute encrypted information. WinZip Computing broadens the feature set of WinZip Self-Extractor further by adding support for enhanced deflate compression and high-resolution (XP-style) icons.