Java

Google is facing a lawsuit over patent and copyright infringement in developing its Android operating platform. Google is accused of copying at least seven and as many as 43 Android files directly from Oracle's Java source code. It is not known yet whether the files were actually included with the shipping version of Android, but they were open sourced by Google under an Apache license, and that alone could be legally problematic for the company.

According to a new report Oracle’s Java platform is exceeding Adobe applications as the most attacked software suit. Holly Stewart, a member of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, reported that warned she was seeing “an unprecedented wave of Java exploitation.” By the beginning of this year, the number of Java exploits “had well surpassed the total number of Adobe-related exploits we monitored,” she said.

Google and other industry experts believe that the lawsuit launched by Oracle against Android is not just an attack on the search giant but it targets open source Java community.

Oracle started a lawsuit against Google on allegations that the search giant has infringed its patents in Android phone software. The infringed patents and copyrights relate to Java.

"In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property. This lawsuit seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement," Oracle spokeswoman Karen Tillman said in a statement.

The suit was filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco and seeks a jury trial.

Microsoft has updated its Internet Explorer 9 preview in line with its promise to introduce updates to the app every eight weeks until releases the official public beta version of the platform. But the timetable for the release has not been specified again.

"The Platform Preview continues to be the thinnest possible wrapper around the Web platform, and as such is not intended for general purpose browsing," cautioned Dean Hachamovich, the browser team's general manager, in an entry on the IE blog today.

Google has released a new application developed to search for vulnerabilities in the websites. An open source security scanner known as Skipfish was designed as "security reconnaissance tool". It generates an interactive map of an application based on checks for certain security flaws, involving everything from self-signed SSL certificates to server-side SQL and XML injection.

While the scanner performs a recursive crawl of a site, it can also probe a list of pre-defined links.

Yahoo plans to close down its Go! service, that is a Java client, early next year, explaining that today it's easier to do things in mobile browsers.