A company spokesperson has confirmed to The Verge that the 64GB edition of Surface Pro will have 23GB of free storage out of the box. The 128GB model will have 83GB of free storage. It appears that the Windows 8 install, built-in apps, and a recovery partition will make up the 41GB total on the base Surface Pro model.

The Windows RT operating system, that powers Surface RT, accounts for half of the 32GB disk space on the entry model.

Out of fears that Oracle is making MySQL a more closed software project and not being happy with the overall direction of this widely-used database software, Fedora developers are looking at replacing MySQL with MariaDB in Fedora 19.

MariaDB is a fork of MySQL that maintains API/ABI compatibility and was started by some of the original MySQL developers. From the get-go, MariaDB has been more community oriented than Oracle's MySQL and to serve as a drop-in replacement for upstream MySQL.

“We have successfully confirmed that a complete Java security sandbox bypass can be still gained under the recent version of Java 7 Update 11,” Java security researcher Adam Gowdiak of Security Explorations in Poland wrote a short while ago on the Full Disclosure mailing list.

Since then, calls to disable or abandon Java have gotten louder. Experts argue that few websites require the Java browser plug-in at the core of so many security issues, and that users would hardly lose any functionality online without running Java.

Attackers behind a massive espionage malware campaign that went undetected for five years relied in part on a vulnerability in the widely deployed Java software framework to ensnare their victims, a security researcher said.

The website exploited a critical Java vulnerability identified as CVE-2011-3544, allowing the attackers to surreptitiously execute malicious code on visitors' computers.

A previously unknown and currently unpatched security hole in the latest version of the Java software framework is under attack online, according to security researchers and bloggers.

According to researchers at Alienvault Labs, the exploits work against fully patched installations of Java. Attack files are highly obfuscated and are most likely succeeding by bypassing security checks built in to the program.

Windows 8 usage uptake has slipped behind Vista’s in the same point in its release. Windows 8 online usage share is around 1.6% of all Windows PC’s which is less than the 2.2% share that Windows Vista commanded at the same two month mark after release.

The New York Times have also said that U.S. consumer sales of Windows machines from late October through to the first week of December are down 13% compared to the same period a year previous.

Oracle will break the promises it made to European regulators on MySQL nearly three years ago, according to the open-source database's co-creator Monty Widenius. In fact, he says, it has already broken a few.

He also accused Oracle of obfuscating on security and bug fixes, as it has not released all-important test cases for MySQL 5.5.27.

He claimed that Oracle has already ceased to co-operate with the community on the development roadmap, with the giant only focusing on “one or two” areas for change – storage engine and replication.

Claiming that 64-bit Firefox is a "constant source of misunderstanding and frustration," the engineer wrote that the builds often crash, many plugins are not available in 64-bit versions, and hangs are more common due to a lack of coding which causes plugins to function incorrectly.

"Thank you to everyone who participated in this thread. Given the existing information, I have decided to proceed with disabling windows 64-bit nightly and hourly builds. Please let us consider this discussion closed unless there is critical new information which needs to be presented."

In a presentation at Ubuntu Developer Summit currently going on in Denmark, Drew Bliss from Valve said that Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming. Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is moving away from an open platform model.

Firefox 17 introduces the first bit of Mozilla’s plan to bring the social web into the web browser. Firefox 17 lays the groundwork for Mozilla’s new Social API. There’s nothing to see right now, but under the hood Firefox 17 is getting ready to move your social web interactions from individual websites into a sidebar within Firefox.

If social network integration isn’t your bag, fear not, Firefox does have a few changes aimed at web developers, most notably the new Markup Panel in the developer tools.