Amazon reviewers outed

The real names of anonymous book reviewers on Amazon.com were accidentally displayed on the company`s Canadian Web site last week, reports The New York Times.

Thanks to a system glitch, the reviewers who use such words as "masterful," "page-turner" and "tear-jerker" were outed. The author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers, confirmed to the Times that he reviewed the first novel of friend Heidi Julavits, calling it "one of the best books of the year," after he suspected rivals had panned it anonymously.

The report doesn`t say whether anyone is surprised that anonymity has helped breed a culture of self-promotion.

Microsoft has removed a swastika symbol, part of the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font in Office 2003 software, from the latest versions, and issued an apology. The Telegraph reports that, according to MS, the Bookshelf font is a third-party feature and was not produced by them.

A day after Sun CEO Scott McNealy said open-source software is his company`s friend, a prominent advocate of the collaborative programming philosophy has called upon the server maker to open the code of Java.

Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, said in an open letter on Thursday that Sun needs to choose between controlling Java and seeing it spread as widely as possible, reports CNet.

Cingular Wireless and Britain`s Vodafone were neck and neck on Sunday in the auction to acquire the number three US carrier, AT&T Wireless (AWE).

USA Today reports AT&T Wireless` board has been reviewing its options, and a deal could be announced as early as Tuesday, although that time frame could be extended. The formal bids were in the range of $30 billion to $35 billion and were described as competitive. NTT DoCoMo (DCM), which owns 16% of AT&T Wireless, and Nextel Communications (NXTL) did not bid by the Friday deadline.

Red Hat has released a test edition of Fedora Core 2, a version of Linux that incorporates the new 2.6 kernel at the heart of the open-source operating system, reports CNet.

The first beta of Fedora Core 2, introduced on Thursday, also includes new versions of two popular Linux user interfaces, Gnome 2.5 and release candidate 1 of KDE 3.2, Red Hat said. The 2.6 kernel the "test1" version is based on adds support for more powerful servers, a better ability to handle multiple software tasks simultaneously and other features.