The US Common Criteria Evaluation and Validation Scheme, the body that grants Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) ratings in the US has granted an EAL5 Augmented to BAE System’s XTS-400 and the STOP Unix operating system. This is the first OS to be granted a EAL5 or better and is the first public EAL5 granted in the US. Read more for details.

DeveloperWorks has released updates to two downloads: Version 1.05 of the 970FX Evaluation Kit, also known as PIBS (PowerPC Initialization Boot Software); register to download here. As well, part 2 of the SLOF download has been released: JS20 low-level firmware provides the base functionality to run Slimline Open Firmware (SLOF) on a JS20 server.

Hot on the heels of an AMD antitrust lawsuit against Intel and a recent ruling in Japan that found that Intel abused its monopoly power, European Comission officials and competition authorities from several European countries raided the offices of Intel and several computer manufacturers. These "inspections" were probably carried out under article 81 of the EU Treaty, which prohibits price fixing and other distortions of competition within the EU.

Microsoft has paid two unnamed informers $250,000 for help in tracking down the author of the Sasser worm. The Sasser worm infected over 18 million computers worldwide within its first week in the wild, costing businesses estimated millions.

Longhorn will have some new features that will be particularly interesting for hardware hackers: The Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSat) is basically a built-in benchmarking tool that should help with determining what affect a new component is having on the system, and another, unnamed feature looks for hardware changes on boot, and, if it finds any, will restart the hardware configuration process.

Have you ever gone on vacation and missed a day's news? Ever have a busy day and need to quickly catch up on what you missed? Well, your problems are solved with the new OSNews Digest. Read on for details. UPDATED

Mike Nash, Microsoft's security business and technology unit corporate vice president, has said Longhorn would accord end-users certain rights and privileges apparently ending the concept that everyone using their PC is also the PC's administrator. Update: More on new Longhorn features here.

The People Behind KDE interviews are back with a new series. First in the hot seat is aKademy organiser Antonio Larrosa. The People Behind KDE interviews take a look at the human side of KDE development by asking the important questions to our team of coders, artists, translators and everyone else who helps KDE.

Workplace Designer is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment that gives you an easy way to use document-oriented programming without requiring a comprehensive knowledge of Java. Workplace Designer pre-release supports several database platforms, including IBM Cloudscape, DB2, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. For more in-depth information, take a look at this introduction to Workplace Designer article.

The true reason for this article is to point out some sensitive points and to start a discussion. Hopefully, this discussion will produce some useful outcome and if some people in the Linux community are willing to listen to them, I would already be very enthusiastic. Let's start, shall we?

Two years ago, software engineer Shaun Walker got an e-mail from a Microsoft product manager, suggesting ways to keep Walker's development project from foundering. One important note: Walker's product is open-source.

Now that IBM has finally agreed to support Solaris on the x86 hardware platform, Sun executives are hoping that this may be the catalyst for a range of other agreements. Top of the list is having IBM become the first top-tier OEM for Solaris, but IBM officials are pouring cold water on the idea.

During the trip that BeBug made to yT's headquarters in Mannheim, they also had a talk with CEO Bernd Korz. They discussed marketing, future releases and much more.

TheOpenCD team is pleased to announce the release of TheOpenCD 3.0, now featuring a live CD based on Ubuntu. TheOpenCD traditionally provides a handy collection of quality FOSS applications for Windows, professionally presented in an elegant CD browser.