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Microsoft added an award for Rural Innovation for the first time to its Imagine Cup competition this year, and it attracted a number of projects aimed at solving problems faced by people in developing nations.

The squabble between Anil Ambani, chairman of Reliance Communications and his brother, Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries has worsened, even as the deadline for merger talks between Reliance Communications and MTN Group of South Africa ends this week.

Mad Scyldz Clustered storage system vendor, Panasas, is teaming up the Linux cluster house, Penguin Computing, to - well, obviously combine some of the former's goodies with the latter's..

Microsoft is adding a feature to its controversial SAM (software asset management) program that it claims will benefit corporate IT users by giving them a scorecard for evaluating their internal asset management processes.The SAM Optimization Model, which is being announced at Microsoft's Worldwide partner conference in Houston this week, is a free tool that can be used by corporate customers or by value-added resellers and other Microsoft business partners. Companies undergoing an evaluation -- always performed internally or by partners, never by Microsoft directly -- are given a rating for their SAM efforts on a four-stage scale, from Basic for worst to Dynamic for best.According to a Q&A with Michael Beare, Microsoft's director of license compliance, that was posted today on the software vendor's Web site, companies that treat software like they do other assets, such as real estate and intellectual property, are less likely to waste money buying products that end up being unused

Iain Thomson in san francisco, vnunet.com, Tuesday 8 July 2008 at 23:45:00 Internet Explorer users the worst of the bunch A new study has shown that Firefox users are the most likely to have fully patched browsers and thus be safer online....

Shaun Nichols in san francisco, vnunet.com, Tuesday 8 July 2008 at 23:31:00 Redirects were 'limited', says organisation The internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has spoken out about a recent round of attacks against its sites....

Iain Thomson in san francisco, vnunet.com, Tuesday 8 July 2008 at 21:08:00 Security schadenfreude The publisher of the Daily Mail, which has spent months lambasting the government on data security, has admitted that a laptop containing the personal information of thousands of staff and...

Cybercriminals are exploiting a bug in software used by Microsoft's Access database program in a new online attack, Microsoft warned Monday.The flaw lies in the Snapshot Viewer ActiveX control, which ships with "all supported versions of Microsoft Office Access except Microsoft Access 2007," Microsoft said in a security advisory , published Monday.Microsoft released few details of how the bug is actually being exploited, but said that it is investigating an ongoing computer attack that takes advantage of the problem. "The attack appears to be targeted, and not widespread," wrote Bill Sisk, a Microsoft spokesman, in a blog posting.Attackers are trying to lure victims to a specially crafted Web page that tries to run the attack code within internet Explorer. The bug gives attackers a way to run their malicious software on the victim's machine.Microsoft's Security Advisory offers a number of possible work-arounds for the problem, but the company has not said

Google appears unbeatable when it comes to winning hearts and minds of internet users. This could be lesson for other big media firms who consider challenging search giant on copyright issues.

Investor activist Carl Icahn gets an encouraging sign from Microsoft but has yet to outline his challenge for Yahoo's board of directors.