Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today that Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition is free to download from Thursday 23 April. Also announced were the simultaneous releases of Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition and Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix (UNR)

Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition delivers a range of feature enhancements to improve the user experience. Shorter boot speeds, some as short as 25 seconds, ensure faster access to a full computing environment on most desktop, laptop and netbook models. Enhanced suspend-and-resume features also give users more time between charges along with immediate access after hibernation. Intelligent switching between Wi-Fi and 3G environments has been broadened to support more wireless devices and 3G cards, resulting in a smoother experience for most users.

The judge in the Pirate Bay case, Tomas Norström, has been a member of several of the same copyright protection organisations as several of the main entertainment industry representatives, Sveriges Radio’s P3 news programme reports.

Peter Althin, the lawyer who represents Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde, has announced that he plans to demand a retrial.

“I will point that out in my appeal, then the Court of Appeal (Hovrätten) will decide if the district court decision should be set aside and the case revisited,” Althin said on Thursday.

Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. said Tuesday it is adding high-definition video to its on-demand service, offering consumers the ability to rent movies and purchase television episodes shown in HD.

“Our customers have been asking us for two things: HD and the ability to watch movies and TV shows instantly on their television,” said Bill Carr, Amazon vice president of music and video, in a statement.

The Seattle-based company said it will add more than 500 HD TV shows and movies to its Amazon Video On Demand service. Titles are from major networks and studios like Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Showtime Networks, with new-release movie titles including “Twilight” and “Frost/Nixon” and TV shows such as “The Tudors” and “Smallville.”

Every time you print out a page on a laser printer you’re using toner made from petroleum-based products. Now there’s a greener choice that shows promise: a toner product derived from soybean oil.

While some customers might be wary, potential benefits are clear. It’s easier to recycle paper printed with soy. And perhaps more important in a sour economy, soy toners can cost less than the standard alternative. Soybeans are a renewable resource whose price is likely to be more stable than that of oil.

Newspaper, magazine and book publishers have shifted to soy-based ink in recent years.

Early results suggest soy toners work as advertised. In a recent test involving identical documents from two identical printers - one with a new Hewlett-Packard cartridge and the other a soy cartridge - the printouts were indistinguishable, equally dark and smudge-proof.

Apple Inc. pulled a 99-cent iPhone game called “Baby Shaker” from its iTunes store Wednesday after its premise - quiet a crying baby with a vigorous shake - prompted outrage.

According to screen shots posted on several Web sites, “Baby Shaker” displayed black-and-white line drawings of a baby. The iTunes description included the line, “See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!” Once the iPhone owner finishes shaking the device, the on-screen baby is depicted with large red X’s over its eyes.

Public outcry ensued, with organizations including the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome and the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation condemning Apple for approving the game’s sale.

The application was designed by Sikalosoft, which also makes a 99-cent “Dice Mosaic” iPhone program that converts digital photos into black and white mosaics made from dice.

With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday.

Of the targeted attacks so far this year, more than 47 percent of them exploit holes in Acrobat Reader while six vulnerabilities have been discovered that target the program, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of security firm F-Secure, said in a briefing with journalists.

Just last month, Adobe issued a fix for an Acrobat Reader hole that attackers had been exploiting for months, after issuing a patch for a critical vulnerability in Flash player the month before.

Part of the problem is people don’t expect that Acrobat Reader upgrades necessarily contain important security patches like they do with Microsoft software, he said.

Hypponen did not recommend a PDF reader, but said Acrobat Reader alternatives are listed on the PDFReaders.org Web site.

Researchers have discovered a major botnet operating out of the Ukraine that has infected 1.9 million machines, including large corporate and government PCs mainly in the U.S.

The botnet, which appears to be larger than the infamous Storm botnet was in its heyday, has infected machines from some 77 government-owned domains — 51 of which are U.S. government ones, according to Ophir Shalltin, marketing director of Finjan, which recently found the botnet. Shalltin says the botnet is controlled by six individuals and is hosted in Ukraine.

Aside from its massive size and scope, what is also striking about the botnet is what its malware can do to an infected machine. The malware lets an attacker read the victim’s email, communicate via HTTP in the botnet, inject code into other processes, visit Websites without the user knowing, and register as a background service on the infected machine, for instance. The bots communicate with their command and control systems via HTTP.