Peter Sayer

Microsoft Corp. failed in its bid to subpoena communications from IBM Corp. relating to an antitrust case against Microsoft in the European Union, when a U.S. District Court judge in New York quashed Microsoft's request on Thursday.

The European Commission will detail its plans to regulate the cost of international roaming for mobile phone users at a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday. "The objective is to promote competition and to ensure that consumers are not punished for crossing a border," said Martin Selmayr, a spokesman for Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media.

The European Commission will detail its plans to regulate the cost of international roaming for mobile phone users at a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday.

Developers at the Mozilla Foundation are readying the first alpha version of the Firefox 2 open-source browser, and could release it as early as Tuesday. The release includes a new "Places" feature intended to make it easier to find and return to recently visited Web pages.

Security will be a major focus this week at the giant Cebit show in Hanover, Germany. This year, the annual IT trade show will hone in on the multiple layers of security threats facing enterprise networks. Now it's not just data networks that are under attack; VoIP and even paper documents are at risk.

French businesses are offshoring more of their IT functions, but this is not a threat to French systems integrators, and the number of IT workers in France will continue to grow, according to the French association of the software and computing services companies, Syntec Informatique.

Could Malta, a little island nation with a population of 400,000, be the most IT-savvy country in Europe? Well, it all depends how you measure it. Technology exports, innovation, research spending or broadband usage: all skew the answer in different directions. Scandinavian countries lead in telecommunications deployment, Germany in patent awards and others in technology exports.

Users of the Windows OS should install an unofficial security patch now, without waiting for Microsoft Corp. to make its move, security researchers at The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC) advised.