A highly anticipated consumer release of Red Hat Linux announced last May has been delayed a few weeks until sometime in September, according to a statement made in an e-mail by product manager Gerry Riveros to Reuters.

The "delay" may actually come as good news to many Linux users who had not yet actually known for certain which month the product would be released. In May, Red Hat announced the product's "availability," before pointing toward later in the year; since then, users have been relying mainly on rumor and speculation.

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Many Vonage customers choose to hide their sometimes-bulky VOIP gateways under their desk. The company is hoping to change that.

A new gateway device produced by Ambit is now being beta tested by the company, described by the company as "cool and sleek, yet simplistic and approachable." Vonage is also hoping to gain some visibility for their service by making it more pleasant to look at.

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Although they have not been officially announced, Amazon may have let slip the release date for third-generation HD DVD players from Toshiba. Several sites linked to product pages -- which have since been pulled -- that indicated three new models are set to debut on October 1.

The HD-A3, HD-A30, and HD-A35 will retail for $299, $399, and $499, respectively, according to the pages. Specifics on the players were not available, although an announcement may be forthcoming at CEDIA. The event is scheduled for September 5-9 and commonly is a launch pad for new audiovisual products.

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UPDATED Sony is offering to repair 416,000 Cyber-shot DSC-T5 cameras following reports of the device's metal case warping and creating an edge that can cut hands. About 30 cases of cuts were reported in Japan, and several others overseas. Affected cameras were released in September 2005.

350,000 Cyber-shots sold in the United States, Europe and China are being recalled, along with 66,000 sold in Japan. Sony has posted a warning for customers, along with a list of the affected serial numbers and contact information for initiating a repair.

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Aiming to curb piracy, Microsoft said it had slashed prices on its Windows Vista as much as 67 percent to encourage consumers to purchase genuine copies of its software. As of Wednesday, the price of its Home Basic edition dropped from $201 to $66, and Home Premium was reduced to $118 from $238. The company hopes that the move will continue the downtrend in piracy in the country.

Piracy rates are still high: in 2006, about 82 percent of all software used in China was pirated according to IDC. However, this was down from 86 percent the previous year. Some of the reduction could be due to a new policy in China that requires manufacturers to ensure that legally-obtained operating system software is installed at factories.

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Popular torrent site The Pirate Bay says it will relaunch Suprnova.org, one of the most popular BitTorrent sites on the Internet and target of the ire of the MPAA.

The site had been hinting for about four months that it would be making some type of major announcement, and had made cryptic comments to those who had pressed for more details. The project also apparently has the blessing of the former owner of the site.

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Fans of Grand Theft Auto will have to wait a bit longer as Take-Two Interactive Software said Thursday that the next installment in the game series has been delayed until 2008.

The company said it wanted to have more time to perfect the game, with its chairman saying in a statement that "certain elements of development proved to be more time-intensive than expected," and that its dual development for both the Xbox 360 and PS3 contributed to the delay.

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Though security consultant Charlie Miller went through with a scheduled demonstration late yesterday afternoon of how he and his colleagues discovered how to hack the Apple iPhone to obtain personally identifiable information from it, he and his company's Web site both acknowledged that Apple had patched the vulnerability.

The demonstration took place at the BlackHat convention in Las Vegas, where apparently Miller used an unpatched iPhone. Though the specific hole Miller discovered was apparently sealed over, the techniques he demonstrated for uncovering those techniques, and the information he learned along the way, indicate that this may not be the only hole to emerge from what could be characterized as a design flaw.

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Sales of Sony's PlayStation 3 recovered somewhat in Japan in July, closing the gap between it and market leader Nintendo according to sales data compiled by Japanese gaming publisher Enterbrain. The PS3 is now being outsold by the Wii by a four to one margin, as opposed to the six to one margin in June. By the numbers, the Wii sold 396,752 consoles to the PS3's 91,987 units. The Xbox 360 sold 17,970.

There really is no single reason that the uptick in sales can be pinned to. However, Sony has made a concerted effort to get more gaming titles on store shelves. This, along with the PS3's high price, have been seen as the biggest problems that it needs to overcome. The Wii sells for 25,000 yen in Japan, half the price of the base-level PS3.

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Tuesday's 4-1 vote by the US Federal Communications Commission begins a process whereby a portion of the UHF television spectrum - specifically, between 775 and 793 MHz, in the midst of what we now call Channels 64 through 67 - would be auctioned off only to companies willing to keep a promise: To allow customers of wireless services they deploy on that spectrum to use the devices of their choice, rather than the ones the carriers choose for them; they could use any applications they wish on those devices; and they would make their services available to public safety in emergencies.

Google had hoped for a few more concessions on the FCC's part, one being a net neutrality promise not to resell frequencies to select customers at discount rates, the other being a promise to allow smaller companies to purchase access to frequencies at wholesale rates.

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Amazon disclosed Thursday that it has begun testing an online grocery service to residents of a Seattle suburb. The effort mirrors similar but unsuccessful startups that appeared during the dot-com boom.

Those names -- WebVan and HomeGrocer.com -- read like a who's who of the dot com bust. Sales never managed to match the huge amount of capital investment the companies had to make in order to launch the services.

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Google has been testing the waters in the wireless industry, seeing if there is enough support for it to offer mobile phones customized to include various services provided by the company.

While the company will not manufacture the devices directly, it has apparently provided a list of specs to manufacturers, the Wall Street Journal reports. It has also apparently talked with at least two carriers, Verizon and T-Mobile.

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Yesterday, the US Dept. of Homeland Security acknowledged Apple's release of a set of security updates for its new iPhone. As the device's widespread popularity will bring it under much closer scrutiny than for any other smart phone, and also make it the target of attempted attacks, this release marks the first test of Apple's ability to respond to security threats under pressure.

Judging from descriptions on Apple's Web site, the first series of patches addresses a vulnerability that was the subject of a discovery by security researcher Charlie Miller and colleague Jake Honoroff. Apple credited the pair with the discovery of what its security page describes as a heap buffer overflow problem.

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VMware on Thursday announced it has completed development of "Fusion," the company's desktop virtualization software for Macs, which enables Apple computers to run Windows or Linux from within Mac OS X. VMware said over 250,000 people had downloaded the Fusion beta release since December.

VMware is going head-to-head with Parallels, the current market leader for virtual machine software on Macs, which has become possible with Apple's switch to Intel processors. Both Parallels 3.0 and VMware Fusion cost $79.99 USD and are available to download online. VMware says Fusion supports more operating systems and includes power management safeguards so a virtual machine isn't corrupted if a laptop runs out of battery. More information can be found on VMware's Web site.

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At TypeCon2007 Thursday, Apple renewed its font licensing agreement with Microsoft, which gives users of Mac OS X access to the core fonts in Windows. The deal covers popular document and Web fonts, including Times New Roman, Arial and Verdana.

The two companies did not say how long the new agreement will last, although it's unlikely that Microsoft would ever prevent Apple customers from using its fonts - especially since the company offers software for the rival platform. The joint press release notes that, "Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications."

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