HP, Oracle in trade secretes row

Oracle says a former Hewlett-Packard (HP) executive has been falsely accused of stealing trade secrets in one of several ongoing legal skirmishes between the two technology heavyweights, writes AFP.

Oracle demanded in a letter sent to HP yesterday that it drop its lawsuit against Adrian Jones, a former senior VP who was in charge of HP's server, storage and networking businesses in Asia before going to work for rival Oracle.

HP says Jones resigned in February, before he was about to be fired for allegedly failing to disclose a “close personal relationship” with a subordinate, and submitting thousands of dollars in expenses for visiting the subordinate without a legitimate business purpose.

South Korea has blamed Chinese hackers for stealing data from 35 million accounts on a popular social network, notes the BBC.

The attacks were directed at the Cyworld Web site, as well as the Nate Web portal, both run by SK Telecom.

Hackers are believed to have stolen phone numbers, e-mail addresses, names and encrypted information about the sites' many millions of members.

Storage firm EMC admitted this week that this year's cyber attack on its RSA Security division cost it $66 million, reports Computing.co.uk.

According to a report in the Washington Post, the money was spent attempting to identify the source of the attack, and tightening security to prevent it happening again.

“We incurred an accrued cost associated with investigating the attack, hardening our systems and working with customers to implement our remediation programmes,” says David Goluden, executive VP, EMC.

Thirty years ago, the platform that would become MS-DOS was born, and went on to power the first PCs and underpin the earliest versions of Windows, reveals V3.co.uk.

In actual fact, 27 July 1981 was the date Microsoft acquired a product called 86-DOS or Q-DOS (quick and dirty operating system) from Seattle Computer Products, and hastily adapted it to produce the PC-DOS for IBM's new personal computer line.

However, Microsoft retained the rights to sell its own version of PC-DOS as MS-DOS from 1982, and this move is widely credited with opening the door for third-party PC-compatible systems, laying the foundations for today's personal computer industry.