Asked by Google's lead attorney, Robert Van Nest, if the Java language is free, Ellison was slow to respond. Judge William Alsup pushed Ellison to answer with a yes or no. As ZDNet reporter Rachel King observed in the courtroom, Ellison resisted and huffed, "I don't know."

The Java programming language is in the public domain and free, but some aspects of Java require a specific license from Oracle. The complexities, such as different licensing schemes and their applications, will make it difficult for the jury to get a black-and-white view of this central issue.

MontyProgram AB, the company formed by MySQL creator Michael "Monty" Widenius in the wake of his break with Sun Microsystems, has released the latest version of MariaDB, a “drop-in replacement” for MySQL built on the MySQL 5.5 codebase.

Oracle has continued development of MySQL, but stirred discontent in the MySQL community when the company shifted the development model away from a fully open-source approach to an "open core," with new enterprise features offered under a commercial license only.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past week, you've probably heard about Flashback, a piece of malware targeting users of Apple's Mac OS X that's now estimated to be quietly running on more than 600,000 machines around the world.

While earlier versions that relied on a piece of software meant to look like Adobe's Flash installer were squashed as part of security updates, this latest variant went through Java instead. Oracle updated Java to patch the vulnerability the attackers were going through in February, though Apple took longer to patch the version it maintains and delivers to users through its software update tool.

"Flashback was patched by Adobe for all major platforms back in February, but Apple only patched it this week," Schoewenberg said. "Waiting two months is not acceptable, and we see OS X threats evolving."

PHP 5.4 brings improvements in memory management and performance, which in turn will make it faster, a built-in webserver for testing purposes, and features that had been destined for PHP 6.0.

Another important change is that Magic Quotes, a features that was supposed to improve security by preventing SQL Injection but in fact was notoriously insecure and had already been deprecated is finally removed. Other deprecated features have also been removed to provide a cleaner code base.

Oracle has reaffirmed that it's in the Linux business to stay by extending the support lifecycle of its own-brand build to ten years, and tempting Red Hat users with a trial offer of its Ksplice patching system.

"With the innovative zero-downtime update capabilities delivered through Ksplice, and the extended support lifecycle for Oracle Linux, Oracle continues to set the industry standard for Linux in the enterprise," said Wim Coekaerts, Oracle vice president of Linux and virtualization engineering, in a canned statement.

We know (well at least we figured we knew), that the game key can be used on three systems. That's fair, the first activation is used on my personal game rig. The second we installed on the AMD Radeon graphics test PC and the 3rd on our NVIDIA graphics test PC.

For the NVIDIA setup I take out the GTX 580, and insert a GTX 590. When I now startup the game 'BAM', again an activation is required. Once again I fill out the key and now Ubisoft is thanking me with the message that I ran out of activations.

Their reply goes like this: 'Sorry to disappoint you - the game is indeed restricted to 3 hardware changes and there simply is no way to bypass that. We also do not have 7 copies of the game for you'.

We have been contacted by bluebyte over the weekend, the company that developed the Anno series. Our key has been pretty much unlocked allowing us to properly work on this article.

Several reports surfaced earlier this month that hackers had managed to access the source code for certain Symantec products. Symantec identified the products as Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) 11.0 and Symantec Antivirus 10.2 but said the attack did not affect any current Norton consumer products.

Rob Rachwald, director of security strategy at Imperva, told CNET's Lance Whitney that the incident was "embarrassing on Symantec's part" but not likely to "keep the Symantec folks awake too late at night, and certainly not their customers."

Adobe will fix a slew of security flaws in Reader and Acrobat, including the critical 3D vulnerabilities that were discovered in December, as part of its quarterly update.

Adobe's quarterly updates will include fixes for two vulnerabilities that Adobe patched on Dec. 16 in the Windows versions of Acrobat and Reader 9 and earlier as part of an emergency update.

This is more than a new look, though, as many of the browser's features have been stripped out. This includes Firefox Sync, which allows seamless synchronization of personal data like bookmarks, passwords, and browsing history, and Mozilla's popular add-ons.

More HTML5 code is supported, Google's SPDY protocol for faster site loading can now be tested, Tilt support allows for 3D Web page visualization, and the HTML5 video controls have been redesigned.

Further analysis of the Duqu Trojan has revealed that the platform that was used to develop Stuxnet and Duqu may have been used to create similar Trojans, according to Kaspersky Lab.

Stuxnet took advantage of multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, including an escalation-of-privilege flaw and exploited Microsoft's AutoRun functionality to spread across computers via infected USB drives.

Duqu also took advantage of a zero-day vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows kernel.

Gostev said "with a fair degree of certainty" that the Tilded platform had been created around the end of 2007 or early 2008 and underwent significant changes in the summer and autumn of 2010.