Symantec has been signed up to protect Symbian Series 60 users from the growing threat of smartphone viruses. Nokia has entered a pact with Symantec to help secure its mobile phones from viruses that target certain kind of handsets.

Leading Wi-Fi chip manufacturers will be announcing a new industry forum on Monday to help accelerate efforts to create a new, faster Wi-Fi standard, says a source close to the companies. Intel, Broadcom, Marvel and Atheros have sidestepped the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers' process to work on a draft of the new 802.11n standard, which the vendors plan to submit to the IEEE's working group for consideration, sources say.

"Based on my experience with Virtual PC I would say that Virtual Server does not seem to have made significant performance improvements over Virtual PC. However, for many IT consolidation projects the performance penalty could be acceptable. Many older IT applications run on slower hardware and are not used heavily, and so Virtual Server will be a perfect fit. However, for your mission critical apps, you will certainly want to stick to 'real' rather than virtual servers."

"As many of our customers know, Libranet is a small company pioneered by the vision of Jon Danzig. The recent passing of Jon Danzig has necessitated changes to the way Libranet runs and does business. Libranet will be undergoing a period of restructuring during which we will not be be taking new orders. Libranet will continue to provide support for our existing customers, and the Libranet forum will remain open."

Following yesterday's release of Ubuntu 5.10RC, the Kubuntu developers are pleased to announce the Kubuntu Breezy Release Candidate. New in Kubuntu Breezy are KDE 3.4, modularized X.org 6.8.2, a new package manager (Adept), easier control center, OOo2, and much more.

Time Warner and Microsoft have restarted discussions about forming an alliance of their Internet units, AOL and MSN, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the situation.

"A crack team of QA and desktop specialists working at Red Hat is pleased to announce the public release of Dogtail. Dogtail is a GUI test automation framework written in Python that uses Accessibility (a11y) technologies to communicate with desktop applications. Dogtail scripts are written in Python and executed like any other Python program."

This tutorial shows how to develop sockets-based networking applications using Python. Python's high-level networking classes simplify the development of applications requiring application-layer networking protocols. The tutorial covers the basic sockets features of Python (free reg. req.), using a sample chat application as a guide.

As part of its monthly patching cycle, Microsoft on Tuesday plans to release eight security alerts for flaws in the Windows operating system. They also plan to release by year's end an initial test version of a new product to protect business desktops, laptops and file servers against malicious code attacks. "Unofficial" preview of XP SP3 pack includes log-on improvements and network fixes for Windows XP PCs. Elsewhere, on Wednesday, Neil Barrett was named trustee in the European Commission's antitrust case against Microsoft.

Imendio announced that it has been working on a port of native Gtk+ for Mac OS X.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, said that although Microsoft is seen as being very pro-patent at the moment, if every other software maker enforced its patents in the same way then Microsoft would find it very difficult and expensive to do business. "I think in ten years you will see Microsoft become a major opponent of patents and we will see very large software vendors turn around their position on patents," Shuttleworth said.

Aopen confirmed that it will introduce a mini PC closely resembling the design of Apple's Mac mini (code-named Pandora) in time for this year's Christmas season. Apparently the device will sell in two versions for $399 (E327), with Linux, and $499 (E410) with Windows. No specs have been released yet.

Microsoft moved a step closer to becoming a key player in the Internet security business with the announcement Thursday of a new enterprise-class anti-spyware product featuring technology to thwart viruses, worms and kernel rootkits.

Recently, several representatives from Windows IT Pro Magazine received a briefing about the Beta 1 version of Longhorn Server, the next member of the Windows Server family, currently due in the first quarter of 2007, or about six months after Windows Vista ships in late 2006.