The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California is investigating the stock options backdating activities of computer and consumer electronics manufacturer Apple. The federal action comes in the wake of the disclosure by Apple last month that it completed an internal investigation of options backdating and concluded that, although Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs recommended some backdating of stock options for himself and other Apple employees, he wasn't aware of the accounting implications of those recommendations. Luke Macaulay, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco, confirmed the existence of the investigation, but did not provide additional details.

Last July OSNews hosted the first version of the article "MorphOS - The Lightning OS" by Fulvio Peruggi as an entry to the OS Contest. The article has now been updated and extended, making it an even better introduction to the MorphOS operating system for a reader who does not know anything about MorphOS, and can be found here. Italian, German, Russian, Spanish and French translations are available as well.

The uIP embedded TCP/IP stack is a very small BSD-licensed implementation of the TCP/IP protocol stack that provides Internet-connectivity to 8- and 16-bit embedded microcontrollers. The memory footprint of uIP is very small; only about 5k code and less than 1k RAM, making it useful even in the smallest of embedded systems. The first version of uIP was released in 2001 and is currently used in a large number of embedded devices ranging from satellites and container monitoring systems to car engines and Cisco routers. But it all started with the world's first Internet-enabled Lego brick.

Lots of news on SkyOS. Kaffe using GNU Classpath (without AWT) is now working fine on SkyOS, just like Wine. Although there is no Wine graphics driver yet, you can already start Windows console applications directly from within SkyOS (once a Wine/SkyGI backend is available Wine should run on SkyOS as good as it does on Linux, and will be available via Software Store). On the driver side there is now an ACPI driver including support for ACPI power/sleep buttons (a SkyOS service, the PowerMonitor, will react on power events with configurable actions like shutdown, reboot, etc.). And finally, the SkyOS LiveCD is shaping together and should soon be available. Take a look at the changelog for all updates. Note: If you have problems accessing the SkyOS.org website, please click read more for how to solve this issue. Other than that, read more for a first glimpse of yet another improvement coming to SkyOS.

You may have missed it with all the news coming out of last week's Macworld Expo, but Apple recently distributed a new pre-released build of Mac OS X 10.4.9 to its developer community. The latest is just the second build of the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system update to make its way outside the company's walls since build 8P2111 was released to developers in late December. Since build 8P2111, which included numerous fixes for wireless and sync technologies, Apple has reportedly shifted the focus of Mac OS X 10.4.9 to some lower-level technology improvements.

In the Free and Open Source communities we are proud of our 'bazaar' model, where anyone can join in by setting up a project and publishing their programs. Users are free to pick and choose whatever software they want... provided they're happy to compile from source, resolve dependencies manually and give up automatic security and feature updates. In this essay, I introduce 'decentralised' installation systems, such as Autopackage and Zero Install, which aim to provide these missing features.