Stories about: CNET

As the dynamic duo steering Microsoft together for the past 28 years, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have been a near-unstoppable team, combining Gates's technical vision and will to power with Ballmer's salesmanship and rousing, if polarizing, personality.

Whether or not mobile phones can actually lead to or accelerate health problems remains unclear but we do know the trusty little devices emit radio frequency energy, and it's a fact that too much radiation's not a good thing for humans. That's why the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) analyzes and measures mobile device radiation-emission levels before giving them the thumbs up for sale in the United States. That metric is called a Specific Absorption Rate (SAR), and to pass the FCC inspection, a phone's SAR must be equal to or less than 1.6 watts per kilogram (W/kg).

A less known part of the recent ARP attack against H D Moore's MetaSploit site was an attempted Denial of Service attack that coincided with the successful ARP attack.

When last seen in December, Gartner was advising companies that despite the fact that Vista had no discernible must-have (or even useful) enterprise functionality, they should adopt it nevertheless, because it would position them for Windows 7.

Score one for the good guys: Last week, Microsoft announced that not only would Office 2007 Service Pack 2 support the ODF (Open Document Format) standard, but the productivity suite would not offer support for the ISO standard version of Microsoft's own OOXML (Office Open XML) format until its next major version, release date unknown.

The kids are not alright

The tracer software that Hewlett-Packard investigators used to try to sniff out boardroom leaks sounded like it had been ripped from the pages of a bad science-fiction novel. That is, until the company began talking about it in detail at a congressional probe into the spying scandal.

An attorney hired by Hewlett-Packard to investigate the conduct of HP and outside investigators has provided new details of his firm's investigation of news leaks from the HP board.

Hewlett-Packard CEO and President Mark Hurd late Friday said HP Board Chairman Patricia Dunn is stepping down immediately from the board as the company continues an investigation into past efforts to plug corporate leaks.

Hewlett-Packard's board of directors took no action at a special Sunday meeting and will reconvene late Monday to continue discussions about the scandal that has occupied the company over the past week.

As US lawmakers debate the legality of the National Security Agency (NSA) domestic surveillance project approved by President Bush, tech insiders are raising serious questions about the effectiveness of the program.