Macromedia has released a beta version of the 8th incarnation of their web content player, Flash. This beta version is only available for Windows and Macintosh.

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.

The Tor Desktop Virtual Privacy Machine is a USB JumpDrive preloaded with a complete Linux OS and a roster of useful applications. Plug it into a Windows or Linux machine and launch a virtual Linux desktop that routes all network traffic through multiple network proxies using the Tor network. This provides a totally secure way to access your data, even when using an internet cafe PC or an untrusted network.

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.

Red Hat's Andrew Overholt announced on the Fedora Java development list that he has made automated tests for Eclipse available as RPMs.

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.

The head of Open Source Development Labs, Stuart Cohen, has added weight to rumours of greater collaboration between Microsoft and the open source community. He said: "I would not be surprised to see them participate in software that runs on top of Linux in the future."

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.

Consumers will soon be able to recognize Web sites specially designed for use by mobile phones by the new .mobi suffix, which will be introduced alongside the popular .com and other top-level domain names. Update: Opinion of a mobile phone web browser engineer on this (& ex-Be kernel engineer).

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.

Over the last few months Eric Seidel ported KDE's new DOM architecture "KDOM" as well as their Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) implementation "KSVG2" and render tree library "KCanvas" to WebCore. Safari has now integrated these changes into the WebCore cvs tree to allow the investigation of further integration of SVG support into Safari.

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.

Microsoft may love its partners. But that isn't stopping the company from continuing to encroach on areas that have traditionally been its partners' turf. Ballmer warned the company's channel partners that Microsoft has its sights set on some markets that partners have had to themselves until now. Elsewhere, MS countered claims it gave preferential treatment to adware maker Claria.

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.