Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities remain the most difficult for Web browser and tool manufacturers to thwart, especially because legitimate sites may be hosted by multiple domains. Today, Adobe Flash finds itself in the crosshairs.

A relatively ancient technique for hijacking a Web page's hyperlinks by overlapping them with different, invisible hyperlinks that lead the user someplace else, has reared its ugly head again, but this time outside the realm of HTML: Recently revealed proofs-of-concept show that invisible Flash elements can maliciously lead users to mock Web pages; and now it's been revealed that Adobe was already working with security engineers to fix the problem before the latest proof-of-concept was leaked.

Feeling hemmed in by the boundaries of Sun's corporate structure, MySQL co-founder David Axmark shot off a resignation letter telling Sun that he 'hates rules,' and he also 'hates breaking them.'

Complaining vividly about the corporate rules inflicted on him at Sun, MySQL co-founder David Axmark has quit his job there, leaving his own future -- and that of the Sun-acquired MySQL open source database project -- in some doubt.

A Pennsylvania judge has ordered the owner of a Web site dedicated to Lackawanna County, PA political affairs to disclose the identity of six anonymous posters for posting defamatory remarks about the Scranton City Council President.

This is a "Lackawanna Six" of a completely different nature. In a case centering around whether anonymity protects citizens from responsibility for defamation claims, an initial complaint was filed last year by Joe Pilchesky, a Scranton resident and webmaster of DohertyDeceit.com, a journal of local political criticism. Pilchesky claimed that he and his site were the victims of harassment, retaliation, and defamation at the hands of City Council President Judy Gatelli.

Mozilla on Tuesday launched another new experimental Firefox plug-in that adheres to the nascent W3C specification for geolocation APIs, and that's built to understand and manage users' location information.

Mozilla Labs' new Geode add-on communicates with sites that want to know where the user is, passing along as much or as little data as the user wishes to allow -- city, neighborhood, or exact location.

Tuesday, IBM added two new PowerVM servers for bringing together mixed Unix, x86 Linux, and IBM i workloads. And with IBM's PowerVM Active Memory Sharing now entering beta, virtualization moves from processors into the realm of memory.

On Tuesday afternoon, IBM launched a pair of new Power6-based servers for Unix, x86 Linux, and IBM i environments, along with hardware and systems management software enhancements.

So how close is a real, supported version of Firefox for mobile devices? Prototypes have been under way for months, but last weekend, Mozilla's CEO indicated a real Firefox-branded alpha could be made available "in a few weeks."

In an interview with San Jose Mercury News reporter Pete Carey published over the weekend, Mozilla CEO John Lilly made a statement that Carey didn't appear to follow up on: The first official test versions of Firefox Mobile should come this month.

Although the telecom industry lost 3,400 jobs from August through September of this year, the computer manufacturing business lost virtually none, and "computer systems design and related services" picked up 8,500 more employees.

With more workers from a lot of fields already hitting the unemployment lines in September, how are jobs at computer companies doing? Although it's too early to tell about the future fallout from the current global economic crisis, results were decidedly mixed in September, with some types of computer businesses losing jobs and others actually gaining, say the latest numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday.

There's a difference between building a new database engine, and building tools that are bundled with an existing database engine for a new product. So even analysts may be surprised to learn the next SQL Server is not two years away.

At a conference in Seattle yesterday that was apparently accompanied by at least one demo that was not on its original schedule, Microsoft made mention of a product with the code-name "Kilimanjaro," in association with SQL Server.

With consumers suffering huge losses on investments in their homes and retirement funds, will they really spend more on CE products this holiday season than last? Two categories should do well, a CEA analyst predicted today.

Regardless of the admittedly massive impact of the financial crisis, this year's holiday sales will increase 4.7 percent for flat panel TVs and other A/V equipment, and 3.5 percent for gaming hardware, an analyst for the Consumer Electronics Association said during an industry webcast today.

What do the Blackberry Bold, Nokia 5800, and the HTC Touch HD have in common? They're all 3G smartphones that have no US release date.

Research in Motion's latest BlackBerry, the 3G Bold, was released in Canada in August, but continues to be delayed in the US due to extensive testing of AT&T's HSPA network.

It's not April Fools Day, but if you're online at odd hours and perhaps a bit inebriated, Google's got a plan to keep you from making a fool of yourself.

Straight from the Gmail Labs (and, one might imagine, at least one in-house episode of tipsy oversharing), Google on Tuesday unveiled Mail Goggles, an e-mail option designed to keep you from doing online what a good wingman keeps you from doing if you're wearing beer goggles after too much fun at the club. (Technically, in that case, the function should be called Mail Wingman. Not that we'd know anything about that.)

In a costly loss in US District Court in Alexandria yesterday, a jury found all of Verizon's claims that Cox Communications infringed upon its VoIP-related patents to be without basis, and even invalidated two of eight patent claims.

Back in January, Verizon filed a patent infringement suit against a Virginia division of Cox Communications, which was establishing VoIP service in that state. It was a boilerplate case that asserted its claims to eight US patents in the field of Internet-related voice telephony. Those patents were mostly acquired by Verizon on account of mergers and acquisitions, having been originally issued to such one-time giants as MCI and Bell Atlantic.

11:45 am EDT October 7, 2008 - Developments in Universal City Studios Productions LLP v. RealNetworks Inc. published online yesterday reveal that Real made its RealDVD product unavailable over the weekend because of a temporary restraining order issued by District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel.

The text of the filing begins: "Defendants have already caused significant irreparable harm to Real by prevailing upon this court to institute a temporary halt to sales of RealDVD since the evening of October 3, 2008..."

In an effort to avoid embarrassment, Rambus sought to end a high-profile patent infringement squabble with competitor Samsung. A district court judge ruled Samsung couldn't let it go, but today the highest court says it must.

The US Supreme Court refused yesterday to hear memory maker Samsung's appeal in a case involving competitor Rambus -- an appeal which would have had wider ramifications on the market at large had it been heard.

Two Abu Dhabi investment firms, both arms of the Emirate's government, have helped the AMD in its "Asset Light/Asset Smart" stragegy, and with their investments, may have changed the path of the struggling company.

Mubadala Development Company, which took an eight percent stake in AMD last year, now holds almost 20 percent of AMD, and the Government of Abu Dhabi (as ATIC) has become a 50/50 partner in AMD's spun-off fabrication company.