Oracle Corp. on Wednesday made its boldest move into Linux open source software, taking direct aim at top Linux distributor Red Hat in a bid to wrest away its rival’s customers.

Red Hat shares fell 16 percent as Oracle offered to provide half-price technical support to Red Hat Linux users, threatening the customer support fees that provide the smaller software company with a key portion of its revenue.

Source: Reuters

A Chinese court on Wednesday jailed a dissident for three years for inciting subversion with an Internet essay praising pro-rights protests in Hong Kong, a human rights group said.

Li Jianping was sentenced in Zibo, in the eastern province of Shandong, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said in a faxed statement on the latest example of China’s crackdown on Internet dissent.

An assistant to Li’s lawyer confirmed the sentence but could give no details. Li was tried in April.

Source: Reuters

Vivendi’s Blizzard Entertainment said on Tuesday it would delay release of “World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade” until January, missing the holiday season, to give developers time to polish the much anticipated online video game.

The new title is the first expansion of the original “World of Warcraft,” offering new content and game play.

“World of Warcraft” was released in November 2004. It now has more than 7 million subscribers globally and is one of the world’s biggest massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), supporting thousands of players at once.

Source: Reuters

High-tech crooks using spyware are costing U.S. discount brokerages millions of dollars to repay clients who have been victimized by fraud, the brokerages said in recent days.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission warned earlier this month that scammers were hijacking online brokerage accounts using spyware and operating from remote locations.

TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. on Tuesday became the latest brokerage to confirm the problem. It said it cost $4 million in the third quarter to make whole customers whose accounts had been hacked.

Source: Reuters

If you’re curious what the appetite is for Fedora Core 6, Red Hat’s newest version of Linux for hobbyists, the company has an answer: 10,000 downloads in five hours.

Doing the math, that works out to one download every 1.8 seconds. And considering that the minimum size of Fedora Core 6 is 3.4GB, it’s no surprise Red Hat’s servers fell to their knees after the release Tuesday.

Source: News.com

A hacker who as a teen cracked the encryption on DVDs has found a way to unlock the code that prevents iPod users from playing songs from download music stores other than Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes, his company said on Tuesday.

Jon Lech Johansen, a 22-year-old Norway native who lives in San Francisco, cracked Apple’s FairPlay copy-protection technology, said Monique Farantzos, managing director at DoubleTwist, the company that plans to license the code to businesses.

“What he did was basically reverse-engineer FairPlay,” she said. “This allows other companies to offer content for the iPod.”

Source: Reuters

Microsoft Corp this week will begin a coupon program for personal computer buyers to upgrade to the new Vista operating system when it premiers next year in an effort to avoid a drop-off in PC sales over the holidays and ahead of the software’s release.

Microsoft said on Tuesday the upgrade program will begin on October 26 for its much-anticipated Windows Vista operating system and Office 2007 software suite.

The program allows customers who buy a PC running Windows XP to still be able to upgrade to Windows Vista when the new operating system becomes available in early 2007. A similar program is in place for Office 2007, also due out early next year to consumers.

Source: Reuters