By Gavin Clarke
3rd July 2009 00:13 GMT

Debian, the foundation of Ubuntu, has rejected claims that it's potentially holding Linux's future hostage to Microsoft by including an open-source implementation of .NET in its code. A project spokesman has said GPL daddy Richard Stallman was wrong to say Mono will be featured in Debian's default installation, adding Mono would be used by just a mall number of users.

Installations affected will be those that implement the Gnome desktop using a meta package with a dependency on Tomboy. These installations will need to pull in Mono, the long-running open-source implementation of .NET now sponsored by Novell. Tomboy is a note-taking application for Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X available under the LGPL. Debian developer and spokesman Alexander Reichle-Schmehl has written: "The default installation - or to be more precise: The default GNOME installation (there are installation media which install an KDE, Xfce or LXDE desktop by default, too) - hasn't changed. It still installs a more or less minimal Gnome Desktop without tomboy and without mono."

The reply came after Stallman, founder of the GNU project and a General Public License author, said the inclusion of Mono in Debian's default installation posed a "dangerous" risk to the open-source community. Stallman predicted Microsoft would challenge free and open-source implementations of C#, part of .NET and therefore Mono, using the threat of patents. In answer to Stallman, Reichle-Schmehl said Debian: "Has not [sic] 'to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy.'"

By Nick Farrell
Thursday, 2 July 2009, 11:50

A YEAR AGO Microsoft announced that Windows XP was deader than Elvis Presley and yet for some reason the operating system appears to still be going strong. But the June 30 kill date came and went. Based upon user complaints, the Vole kept XP going and even found it a new market in the netbook world.

Microsoft even allows PC makers to 'downgrade' new systems to XP, so Dell and Hewlett-Packard continue to offer XP on a selection of models. Reportedly they will not be able to do this from the end of the month, but it is still on offer at the moment. Then there are also online software sellers who are still flogging old licences that were bought years ago. Either way, it is impossible for the world to know how many copies of Windows XP are out there.

Analysts like Gartner's Michael Silver say the fact that the Vole allows downgrades for those who buy Vista means that we can't really be sure how much hardware still depends on XP. With companies not buying software or hardware because of the current recession, it is likely that Windows XP, rather than fading away, will remain in stable use on many PCs, particularly in corporate environments. Microsoft will have to convince those XP users that Windows 7 is worth the money.

Otherwise some of them might decide to jump to some of the more friendly XP-ish flavours of Linux instead. We should expect to see one of the Vole's most expensive marketing campaigns ever, all the way until Christmas. If that works, then it is likely that the outfit will make more money than it ever has before out of a single product. But in order to pull that off, Microsoft's marketeers will need to make both Windows XP and Vista users make the move to its shiny new operating system while also seeing off any rivals.

by Tom Krazit
July 2, 2009 3:40 PM PDT

Technical difficulties forced Google's Web application hosting infrastructure off the air for about four hours Thursday morning. Customers who run their Web applications on Google App Engine were forced idle Thursday by a series of issues involving "elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates," according to a Google employee posting in the Google App Engine Downtime Notify group spotted by TechCrunch.

A Google representative acknowledged the downtime and apologized for the outage. "Today at 8 am PT datastore access for App Engine applications was affected due to a cluster-wide issue. The team identified and fixed the underlying problem that caused the outage and service has now been restored to all applications. We apologize for the inconvenience and encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the System Status Dashboard or the Downtime Notify Group, which are both linked from the Google App Engine Community site." Google's cloud-computing service allows Web developers who can't afford to host their own applications a place to get their work online. Amazon Web Services does something similar.

By Ars Staff
July 2, 2009 4:30 PM CT

Lori Drew was accused of breaking federal law last year after helping to orchestrate a MySpace hoax that left a neighbor's child dead. Now, a judge has overturned her convictions, saying that the law in question doesn't apply to mere terms of service violations. "MySpace mom" Lori Drew has had her misdemeanor guilty verdict overturned by the federal judge handling the case, the LA Times reports.

Violating a website's terms of use is not, it seems, a federal crime after all. The guilty verdict against Lori Drew, prosecutors crowed, would send an "overwhelming message" to online bullies. Though she escaped conviction on felony charges, the 49-year-old Missouri mom could have still faced three years in prison or fines of up to $300,000 for launching an online harassment campaign that ended in the suicide of a teenage neighbor.

Drew was due to be sentenced today. But the "message," legal observers worried, may be that anyone who uses a website without paying close attention to those ubiquitous Terms of Service risks committing a federal crime. The judge shared those concerns. Drew's story is, by now, familiar: Concerned that her daughter Sara was being badmouthed by a former friend, 13-year-old Megan Meier, Drew took protective parenting way too far.

Together with Sara and an employee, Drew created a MySpace account for a fictional teen boy, "Josh Evans," who would extract evidence of Megan's trash talk. But after luring the girl in with flirtatious banter, the prank took a crueler turn, and "Josh" unleashed a barrage of vicious insults—publishing a number of Megan's intimate messages to salt the wound. The sudden betrayal proved too much for Megan, who had a history of depression: The girl hanged herself in her closet on an October afternoon in 2006.