The tech world has been hearing rumblings and whispers that Microsoft wanted to add Yahoo to its fold, but now it's official: Big Evil wants it bad.

It's always fun when Linus Torvalds — the originator and Grand High Developer of the Linux kernel — grants an interview, an altogether not-too-common occurrence, to be sure. On the occasion of Australia's Linux.conf.au, the Great One has granted an audience to Computerworld, and the results proved rather interesting.

Wednesday was a bad day in the Middle East and beyond, and 'twas almost as bad for Big Evil, while Firefox landed some good news. Let's get to it, the game is afoot!

There's plenty atwitter on the newswire today, some funny, some frightening, and some that just bears repeating. On your mark, get set, here goes!

Patent attacks against Open Source software are nothing new, especially to anyone who has read a press release from SCO or Microsoft in the last few years. Despite the resounding failure of such attacks, proprietary vendors just keep coming up with new ones, and this week it's ClamAV that's under the gun.

Once again we're overrun with stories you've just got to see, so we're bringing you todays gems right here in one convenient post. Without further adieu, Skype surveillance, missing iPhones, Craigslist killers, and much much more!

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission took a big step in protecting consumers from patent trolls last week by putting the smackdown on a company threatening to bring Ethernet to it's knees.

The U.S. Army is always looking for a better way to do the things it does, and increasingly, the better way is paved with technology. Regardless of how you feel about what they intend it to do, it's exciting to know that it will be Linux that leads the way.

It was a gala affair in Cannes this weekend, with the million-dollar launch of Qtrax, what was supposed to be the new face of file sharing. Everything was there, even Don Henley of the Eagles — everything, that is, but the music.

Trolltech — the Norwegian company behind Qt — is being bought out by cell-phone manufacturer Nokia in a deal valued at $153 million.

Attackers have myriad ways of gaining access to systems; some are as basic as asking their way in, while others are a bit more high-tech. According to a new Mozilla security bulletin, your Firefox extensions could be the key the hackers are looking for.

Trying to decide which to bring you of the many stories that hit the wire each — and trust us, "many" is an understatement — is always a challenge, but it's one we relish. This week, though, was especially packed with juicy nuggets of techy goodness, and we just couldn't let it pass without a roundup to share some of the most interesting and entertaining.

If you've been looking for free music but don't want to get busted by the Buzzkill Brigade de la RIAA, then Last.fm might just have the answer you've been waiting for.

Sometimes it seems like Google is the all-knowing oracle, with their millions of bots constantly indexing the internet and instant results for any term. That being the case, it's amusing to see what the oracle has to say about our beloved Linux.

It's always just a bit dangerous out on the information superhighway, but this week seems to be a bit more so than usual, with news of several particularly nasty bugs popping up in short order.

Ten years is a long time to spend in the same job, and a billion dollars is a lot of money. But, according to the Washington Post it's enough for eBay's CEO.

In a landmark move towards updating the foundation of the internet, yesterday the World Wide Web Consortium released the first draft of the HTML 5 specification — the first extensive upgrade to HTML since 1997.

There was a time when Yahoo! was on top of the world. Then along came a startup called Google, and things started to slide. Apparently, the slide has finally reached the forest, and the company is resorting to the axe to bring things under control.

If you're tired and grumpy, it may well be the fault of cell phones. No, not that everyone everywhere — from the grocery store to the golf course — is talking on one, as maddening as that is.

As a general rule, the perpetrators of website hacking wouldn't be classified as custodians of the greater good, however, on occasion they may well do a public service. Such appears to have been the case over the weekend, when a series of attacks brought the RIAA's website to its virtual knees.