Microsoft has no current plans to join the Open Innovation Network, a move that some in the free and open-source community have suggested would benefit them both.

OIN is an intellectual property company that was formed to acquire Linux-related patents and share them, royalty-free, to any organization that agrees not to assert its patents against Linux or its applications.

With member companies including IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, Sony and Oracle, OIN represents a considerable patent litigation threat to any company that might try to take Linux to court.

SharedBook, the Reverse Publishing Platform provider, launched a Blog2Print widget in beta form this week. Content owners on Google’s Blogger platform and their readers can now turn blog posts into a printed book with a single click. Additional compatibility will become available later this summer.

The first 100 bloggers to add the Blog2Print widget to their sites will be entitled to a complimentary 20-page hard cover book, valued at $24.95. The offer is good through July 31, 2007.

Blog2Print is a quick and easy way for blog owners to compile their favorite posts in printed book format. The widget also gives bloggers the ability to monetize their content through the sale of newly created books. Content owners can sign up to receive a 20 percent share of the retail price of all blog books made by others of their content.

Karl Rove, Senior Advisor to the President of the United States, is one of the most powerful people in Washington. He conducts a vast amount of political and official business via his BlackBerry. He also apparently regularly loses his BlackBerry. Why do we here at ZATZ have this scoop when everyone else missed it? Read our special report to learn what else is disturbing about White House email in this latest article of our special report series.

Read this OutlookPower article.

A criminal case against some of the people implicated in the Hewlett-Packard pretexting scandal may wrap up Thursday in a courtroom in San Jose, California.

A hearing is scheduled in Santa Clara County Superior Court in the cases against former HP legal counsel Kevin Hunsaker, private investigator Ronald DeLia and research consultant Matthew DePante.

At a hearing in March, a state judge said charges against the three defendants would be dismissed if they performed 96 hours of community service and paid restitution to the victims. At that same hearing, state charges against former HP chairman Patricia Dunn were dismissed altogether.

On the face of it, Russia has strong tech foundations. Despite the economic tribulations that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse, its scientific legacy lives on in the form of 3,500 scientific research institutes employing 600,000 scientists and engineers. Russian universities churn out some 200,000 science and engineering graduates each year.

Spearheaded by President Vladimir Putin, with backing from leading businessmen and investors, the country has embarked on a sweeping program to promote a high-tech economy. The prize this time: a position in the emerging technologies that will shape the future global economy.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard jointly announced that both companies would pour millions into packaging Microsoft’s Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 suite with HP’s Unified Cluster Portfolio.

The announcement between HP and Microsoft comes at the start of the 2007 International Supercomputer Conference in Dresden, Germany.

Since Microsoft released its Cluster Server, HP has offered support for the operating system through its Unified Cluster Portfolio, which offers a combination of hardware, software and services designed for the HPC field.

Forty students from around the world got to pitch their software projects to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Tuesday as part of a worldwide software development challenge.

Gates as well as Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, asked questions about and tried out software innovations from the students, who visited Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters from Egypt, Japan, France, Poland, Korea, the U.S., and the U.K.

The Imagine Cup is Microsoft’s worldwide software design competition for students. This year it challenged participating teams to build a product that can enable better education for everyone. It has attracted 100,000 students in 100 countries. The final competition will happen in Korea in August and Tuesday’s event was an opportunity for some of the leading teams to present their ideas to Gates on Microsoft’s campus.

Windows Server 2008 debut About 2,600 Web sites are already running Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows Server 2008, a small but increasing number that indicates rising interest in the OS, according to new statistics from Netcraft.

Microsoft is now using Windows Server 2008 and its Internet Information Server 7.0 for its main Web site, www.microsoft.com, said Colin Phipps, Internet security services developer at Netcraft, which releases a monthly survey on what OSes are being used for Web hosting.

What do whale-feces researchers, hazmat divers and employees of Microsoft’s Security Response Center have in common? They all made Popular Science magazine’s 2007 list of the absolute worst jobs in science.

Microsoft’s Security Response Center made the grade this year because the job is just so hard and thankless. "It’s one of those classic jobs, which isn’t gross or dangerous in any way, but the overwhelmingness of the task at hand makes it so daunting that only the most intrepid would venture there," said Michael Moyer, the magazine’s executive editor.

The MSRC ranked near the middle as the sixth-worst job in this year’s list, published in the July issue of the magazine. "We did rate the Microsoft security researcher as less bad than the people who prepare the carcasses for dissection in biology laboratories," Moyer said.

Two police officers who moonlighted as private detectives have been convicted of bugging phones and hacking into computers on behalf of wealthy clients.

Jeremy Young and Scott Gelsthorpe set up Active Investigation Services and ran a service dubbed "Hackers Are Us".

In January, eight other men were sentenced after pleading guilty to conspiring to intercept phone calls or emails, or false accounting.