Playing with toys isn't always fun, as users of the popular social-networking site Facebook found out with the news that the owners of Scrabble — toy manufacturers Mattel and Hasbro — have requested that a popular Scrabble-like application be removed from the site.

The former CEO of networking manufacturer Brocade, Inc. was hit with the strongest sentence handed down to date in the ongoing trials of Silicon Valley executives caught falsifying company records to boost stock option payoffs.

If news days follow themes, then today's theme is acquisitions, as Oracle has announced their intent to buy BEA Systems, Inc. for $8.5 billion, the second billion-dollar acquisition of the day.

The last few days — indeed, the last few weeks — have been filled with much speculation over what Steve Jobs would produce as Apple's newest and neatest offering during his "Stevenote" at the Macworld exposition. He certainly didn't disappoint.

Buying an open-source offering is the hot thing in Silicon Valley these days, and Sun Microsystems doesn't want to be left out. According to today's announcement, Sun will be picking up the open-source database company MySQL AB for a cool $1 billion.

While Intel — the world's leading microprocessor manufacturer — is facing investigations by the European Commission, South Korea, and Japan over it's trade practices, the U.S. has been a relative safe haven. That's all changed, with the announcement last week that New York State will begin an investigation into whether the company's competition tactics against AMD went too far.

Sometimes, it seems like some people just won't learn from the past. Such appears to be the case with Microsoft, as the European Commission announced this week that they will begin another investigation into Microsoft's anti-competition practices, just months after having closed the last.

The torches and pitchforks came out Friday with the announcement of a new domain registration policy at Network Solutions that has garnered allegations of engaging in the very act it claims to prevent.

First there was The Rumble in the Jungle. Then came the Thrilla in Manila. Now it's time for the Wake in Salt Lake, as the trial in SCO's infamous lawsuit against Novell has been set for April 29th, and may well be the death knell for the failing company.

KDE fans, now is the time you have been waiting for! The long-awaited, eagerly-anticipated, it's-going-to-knock-your-socks-off-when-it-gets-here KDE 4.0 is now available.

In what may well be the most brilliant government decision in history, the UK agency tasked with overseeing information technology in schools has issued a report barring adoption of Microsoft's Windows Vista and Office 2007 in British schools.

Anyone who has ever had to deal with a bill in collections knows it isn't a fun process, but apparently for the FBI, it can even become a threat to national security.

The Department of Homeland Security — the government body tasked with maintaining security in the United States — wants to leave no stone unturned, and to do so, has uncovered security holes in nearly two hundred Open Source projects.

The One Laptop Per Child project has been all the rage lately, from the infamous split with Intel to reviews of the Give One, Get One systems now arriving to users — including one by our own David A Lane. Now there's even more news, and as usual, it's wild.

After a series of attacks on state government websites last Friday, administrators of Pennsylvania's web sites pulled the plug, rendering the sites inaccessible for hours.

The New York Times is reporting that during a panel discussion Tusday at the Consumer Electronics Show, internet service provider AT&T revealed that it has plans to begin filtering customer's internet traffic in a search and destroy mission against copyright infringement.

In an announcement that resembled a Jacques Cousteau special more than a security report, it was revealed today that the first iPhone Trojan has been discovered "in the wild."

In a bizarre case of retribution over a reduction in force, a former sysadmin from New Jersey has ended up setting the record for the longest prison sentence for computer sabotage.

According to a new journal article by two New York University professors, Java programming is ruining computer science students at NYU and elsewhere.

Linux founder and developer-in-chief Linus Torvalds met the hot-seat in the first of the Linux Foundation's new OpenVoices podcasts, and he used the opportunity to expound on why Linux is sticking with GPL2.