A tiny patent-licensing company has once again lost a plea to prohibit eBay from using its patent covering the auction giant’s "Buy it now" feature, but the closely watched battle isn’t over yet.

Ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit whether an injunction is necessary in the long-running spat, U.S. District Judge Jerome Friedman in Norfolk, Va., ruled Friday that awarding monetary damages alone to MercExchange is enough to compensate any harms it experienced as a result of eBay’s infringement.

That’s in large part because the two-man Virginia company has shown public willingness to license its patents to eBay before, during and after the trial, suggesting money is its primary motive, Friedman wrote.

What’s it like to have a job where you have regular roundtable discussions with executives and have a barbecue in the backyard of the richest man in the world?

Is it possible to work with a company that is so eager to invest in your ideas you feel that as big as you can dream they will back you up, and where your only grievance is that you are having such a great time, you almost forget that it’s real work?

Just ask Nina Sundberg, who interned in the server and tools division of the systems management group at Microsoft.

There’s a new workplace etiquette for the new millennium, and, no surprise, it’s all about transparency and authenticity.

The new etiquette is driven by the fact that young people who grew up online don’t know how to operate any other way except transparently. The good news is this means they have great social skills; the bad news is they have no idea that they’re breaking all the old rules. Here are 10 tips to help people who aren’t used to living an authentic, transparent work life.

Netviewer has announced the findings of a new survey into IT helpdesks. The survey from independent research firm Vanson Bourne, shows that one in five users admit that they don’t always provide accurate information about the nature of a computer problem–the main reasons being a lack of insight (45 percent), a lack of time (30 percent), or a lack of appropriate vocabulary (25 percent). 15 percent said they felt too embarrassed.

However, 31 percent of internal IT helpdesk users are dissatisfied with the quality of support they receive. The figure rises to 48 percent for users of external (third party) IT helpdesks.

Rather than contacting a helpdesk, 40 percent of respondents prefer to stop working and try to fix the problem themselves. It also appears that many people rely upon non-professional help from colleagues, friends or relations with 92 percent of respondents saying that they have at some stage tried to assist someone at work with IT issues. This is a worrying finding given that 30 percent describe themselves as less than moderately IT literate.

2glue announced the release of MooseSync, a service that publishes your Outlook calendar to the Google Calendar service. MooseSync leverages the built in calendar publishing capabilities of Outlook so requires zero install. Calendar updates are published with every send/receive.

As Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz dug deeper into how the White House manages email, knowing what he does about how email works, the tiny little hairs on the back of his neck started to stand up. As he started to think about the implications from the perspective of our country’s security, he realized this was no longer simply about some missing email messages. Unchecked, some really, really bad things could happen. Prepare to be freaked out.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Spammers are once again taking advantage of an upcoming potential blockbuster film, Simpsons. Spam mails are being sent to email users trying to coerce them to take a survey, giving over their email address to spammers. SPAMfighter filters these types of mails from the 3.6 million SPAMfighter user’s, making them aware that this is a scam, and filtering the emails away from their inbox so they never have to see it.

The spam mail contains a picture of Homer Simpson in his underwear and asks the recipient if they plan on seeing the movie and to help fill out a survey by clicking on a link. Once the recipient does this, their email address is recognized as being active, opening them up for many more spam mails. In order to entice email users to enter this survey, they offer a prize for taking and completing the survey. As with many offers made by spam, this offer is fake, and there no chance of receiving the prize. The only reason for the mail is to get the email addresses of active email accounts so they can be slammed with spam mail later.

The Mozilla Foundation is dealing with yet another URL-handling issue–and this time, researchers have posted a non-malicious proof of concept that shows how the flaw can be used for remote command execution on machines running Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

Mozilla’s URL-handling hassles began earlier in July, when security researcher Thor Larholm found a zero-day vulnerability that can lead to systems getting hijacked. Larholm called it an IE zero-day at the time, blaming the vulnerability on an input validation flaw in Internet Explorer that allows users to specify arbitrary arguments to the process responsible for handling URL protocols. It’s the same type of input validation vulnerability that Larholm discovered in the Safari 3 beta, he said at the time.

Microsoft has recommitted to working with the open-source community, even submitting its Shared Source License to the Open Source Initiative for approval as an approved license for sharing code.

Bill Hilf, head of Microsoft open-source strategy, spoke at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention on July 26 and acknowledged that Microsoft’s relationship with the open-source community has at times been schizophrenic, but that the company has had good intentions.

Within the next few days, Microsoft will release key development technology to help developers build applications across a variety of platforms, including the Web, desktops, servers and mobile devices.

In an interview with eWEEK at the Microsoft campus July 25, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division, said Microsoft was about to release Visual Studio 2008 beta 2, the .Net Framework 3.5 beta 2, and Silverlight 1.0 RC (release candidate), "and we’re going to make available a Visual Studio add-in so you can use Visual Studio to target Silverlight 1.0, the RC version."