Matthew Broersma

Microsoft has won the first round in its legal action against Google, with a restraining order that prevents a former Microsoft employee from engaging in competing work at the search company.

Open-Xchange, formerly Netline Internet Service, has released its well regarded open-source collaboration server for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), as part of the company's program of broadening its cross-platform support. Open-Xchange is the main commercial, open-source alternative to proprietary systems such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise.

IBM is launching itself into territory popularized by the likes of Google -- the Weblog. IBM this week announced two blogging tools, taking advantage of a practice increasingly prevalent in the enterprise. Weblog Preview, available as a trial download from IBM's AlphaWorks developer site, works with the Workplace collaboration platform, and will ultimately be integrated into the platform as a core component. IBM is also releasing a blog development component with Workplace Designer 2.5 in August.

Gentoo Linux has warned of a serious, unpatched security flaw in zlib, a compression library widely used in Linux and Unix applications. The bug could be exploited to crash any application using zlib, and possibly to run malicious code on a system, security experts warned.

Security vulnerabilities have been discovered in a widespread Web services protocol which could allow an attacker to take control of a vulnerable server. The holes, found in XML-RPC For PHP and PEAR XML_RPC, affect a large number of Web applications, according to an advisory from GulfTech Research And Development LLC, which discovered the flaws.

Sun has launched a fresh program designed to spur open-source developer interest in its Java application server software, placing the code under a license the company says is in the "spirit" of open source.

A new browser flaw could allow attackers to trick users into giving up sensitive information such as passwords. The flaw is unusual in that it affects every mainstream browser, and can be exploited on the Mac OS X operating system as easily as on Windows, said security company Secunia.

Apple Computer has fixed a number of security holes in Mac OS X, some of which could allow remote attackers to take over a system. The company has released patches for OS X versions 10.3.9 and 10.4.1, better known as "Panther" and "Tiger" respectively.