Microsoft had to report a 30% slump in sales for the last quarter. Their report to the U.S. SEC includes a rundown of their risk and competition factors. Among their concerns are Linux and open source untertakings, but also their own partners HP and Intel.

Emacs, the extensible editor of the GNU project, is available in version 23.1. The release adds countless modernizations to the traditional program, such as font anti-alising and support for D-Bus and zeroconf.

Yahoo and Microsoft yesterday announced plans of a joint venture to challenge the search engine giant Google. The plans include Yahoo search running on Microsoft's "Bing" technology. In return, Yahoo will handle service support for both companies' premium customers.

Mozilla's bug tracker Bugzilla is now available in version 3.4. and developers have worked hard on the major release to make life for the user a lot easier.

The Live distro SLAMPP is now available in version 2.0. It is a system of Linux containing, among other things, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl, hence the moniker SLAMPP.

A specially crafted dynamic update message to a DNS zone for which the server is a master can raise havoc in BIND 9. An active remote exploit is already "in wide circulation."

At its iForum conference in Singapore on July 28, the Xen owner Citrix announced that its Citrix Receiver software for virtulized Windows systems would be extended to the Android platform. Until now it was available only in iPhone mobile devices.

Novell has announced its image building SUSE Studio to be ready for production and the Linux distributor has simultaneously started a partner-program aimed at software manufacturers who want to use SUSE Linux Enterprise as a base for software appliances.