The One Laptop Per Child Project and Microsoft plan to make both Windows and Linux available on a version of the project's XO laptop, the companies said Thursday.

It's not exactly how devotees foresaw Linux reaching mass-market desktop PCs, but it could be a turning point nonetheless. Taiwanese giant Asus is to embed DeviceVM's Splashtop Linux on millions of mainstream motherboards.

The first public release of Moonlight, which provides a Linux client implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application (RIA) technology, was made available this week.

The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems released a study Thursday showing that Cox Communications and Comcast have been blocking BitTorrent transfers within the United States at both peak and non-peak hours.

A recently disclosed vulnerability in widely used Linux distributions can be exploited by attackers to guess cryptographic keys, possibly leading to the forgery of digital signatures and theft of confidential information, a noted security researcher said Thursday.

A server problem at the US National Security Agency has knocked the secretive intelligence agency off the Internet.