Microsoft has no plans to tweak its Office productivity suite for Linux anytime soon, despite the growing popularity of open source on the desktop, according to a company executive. Speaking at the LinuxWorld conference in London, Nick McGrath, Microsoft’s head of platform strategy, said that the software maker had no intention of porting Office to any of the Linux desktop distributions.

Looking to blunt the success of Linux in high-performance computing, Microsoft is ramping up its commitment to make Windows a better fit for data-intensive computing grids. Microsoft is creating a "Cluster Compute" version of Windows and intends to work more closely with grid industry standards bodies, Tony Hey, the company’s corporate vice president of technical computing, said in an interview with CNET News.com.

America Online is strengthening its shields against phishing attacks for its 20 million Internet service subscribers. The Web giant announced it has expanded its agreement with antiphishing specialist Cyota and signed new partnerships with security technology companies MarkMonitor and Cyveillance.

In a decision hailed by free-speech advocates, the Delaware Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision requiring an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who targeted a local elected official. In a 34-page opinion, the justices said a Superior Court judge should have required Smyrna town councilman Patrick Cahill to make a stronger case that he and his wife, Julia, had been defamed before ordering Comcast Cable Communications to disclose the identities of four anonymous posters to a blog site operated by Independent Newspapers Inc., publisher of the Delaware State News.

Diamond Multimedia, manufacturer of PC graphics cards, sound cards, and communications products, announced the company has launched the Diamond SupraMax DSL642WLG DSL Modem. This four-port wireless gateway features an auto configuration wizard to automatically detect telephone company settings for a high ease-of-use. It allows for full rate operation with up to 24 Mbps downstream data rate and up to 1024 Kbps upstream, enabling high-speed access to the ISP or corporate network. Its built-in support for Triple Play allows for voice, data and video transmissions over a single, high-speed connection, up to three times faster than standard DSL.

The US and the EU are headed for a showdown over future control of the Internet, if recent statements at a UN meeting are any indication. Noting that "the Internet is a global resource," EU spokesman Martin Selmayr called for a new cooperation model, AP reported. "The EU…is very firm on this position," he said. Meanwhile, a senior U.S. official reiterated Thursday that the country wants to remain the Internet’s ultimate authority, AP reported.

The USPTO has rejected two key patent applications around FAT, but Microsoft still believes it has a good chance of triumphing. Open-source vendors are holding their breath. In June 2004 the USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) said it would re-examine the patent Microsoft holds on FAT, a format used for the interchange of media between computers and digital devices.

With the first beta for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Solution barely out the door, the development team is already thinking seriously about features and functionality designed to make the next version of the product even easier to use and manage than its Linux competitor. The feature-complete beta for Compute Cluster Solution, a 64-bit operating system for industry-standard x64 processors, was released late last month. The product is designed to address the HPC (high-performance computing) needs of Microsoft’s enterprise and corporate customers, particularly at the departmental and workgroup levels.

Government regulators are trying to shut down a company they say secretly downloaded spyware onto the computers of unwitting Internet users, rendering them helpless to a flood of pop-up ads, computer crashes and other annoyances. The Federal Trade Commission accused Walter Rines of Stratham, N.H., and his company, Odysseus Marketing, of luring computer users with the promise of free software that would make peer-to-peer file sharing anonymous. The claim was bogus, the agency said, and the software was bundled with spyware that was secretly downloaded onto computers.

The Streamlined Sales Tax Project may sound to some like the states are getting ready to start charging state sales tax on all e-commerce purchases, but the reality is that simple. What the SSTA (Streamlined Sales Tax Project), a group of U.S. states united in trying to simplify state and local tax collection, is doing is setting up a system by which Internet e-commerce companies can voluntarily pay state taxes to the states in which their customers reside. The carrot that the SSTA is offering companies that agree to do this is that, rather than try to work out how much tax a company owes for each locality they can instead use a CSP (certified service providers).