Microsoft released this week an upgrade to a tool that helps secure applications for the Internet without having to recode them.

The U.S. and Canadian governments this week said that Toshiba is voluntarily recalling some Satellite laptops for posing a burn hazard to customers.

Laptops could overheat and possibly melt the area around the notebook's plug-in to the AC adapter, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada said in a joint statement.

After recent settlements by Hewlett-Packard and EMC in a long-standing government contracting fraud case, three major IT and consulting companies are still embroiled in lawsuits brought by two former insiders.

Google Wave, the social networking service canceled by Google, will morph into an application bundle for real-time collaboration, a Google engineer said this week.

Of the 135 people Fortune 500 employees targeted by social engineering hackers in a recent contest only five of them refused to give up any corporate information whatsoever. And guess what? All five were women.

Secunia has updated its Personal Software Inspector (PSI) with the ability to silently download and apply patches from multiple vendors soon after their release. PSI 2.0 is now available in an open beta test,

VMware customers attending VMworld are taking a look at Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software, but say the Microsoft technology falls a bit short and that it would be problematic to start over after investing heavily in VMware.

What makes an Apple Special Event special? How about a refreshed line of iPods, lower prices on iTunes rentals, and a new music-oriented social network? But Apple wasn't the only company serving up specials this week. For example: Intel continued its corporate shopping spree, while Google snapped up more companies in the gurgling social media space; TV pundit Glenn Beck joined the blogosphere; a powerful new ally just joined the fight against cyber crime; and Foursquare has a brand-new badge. Are you a fully informed geek? Prove it by getting a perfect score.

While acknowledging the importance of HTML5, Microsoft stressed this week that its Silverlight rich Internet technology extends the Web beyond what HTML5 allows.

SAS Institute announced on Thursdaya new toolset aimed at giving business users the ability to work with predictive analytics software, which has historically been the province of specialized statisticians.

Predictive analytics refers to the practice of crunching existing data sets in an effort to determine patterns and predict future outcomes.

Google and AOL have renewed a long-term partnership that gives AOL Web properties access to Google search and advertising services.

The partnership, in place since May 2002 and renewed for the third time, provides revenue-sharing from AOL in exchange for search services. The new deal will expand to give AOL access to Google's mobile search products and Google subsidiary YouTube access to AOL's video content, the companies said in a statement.

An information security company will soon release a tool that will allow companies to test their ERP (enterprise resource planning) software for security threats.

The first version of X1 works with SAP business platforms, said Mariano Nuñez Di Croce, director of research and development for Onapsis. The company eventually plans to add modules for Siebel, Oracle and PeopleSoft ERP applications, he said.

Dell on Thursday said it would not increase its most recent proposal to acquire virtualized storage vendor 3Par, paving the path for rival Hewlett-Packard to acquire the company.

Intel will release on Thursday an upgrade to its parallel development toolset for Windows application developers, adding both a tool to walk developers through parallelism, as well as support for Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 IDE.

Apple's iOS mobile operating system is now the third-most popular platform on the Internet, with a share nearly six times larger than Android's, a Web measurement company said Wednesday.

Virtualization has not stripped Windows of its relevance, a Microsoft official said in response to VMware CEO Paul Maritz's argument that operating systems are no longer the center of innovation in the IT world.

Hurricane Earl today continues to threaten the east coast of the U.S. in the midst of what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts will be an unusually active hurricane season .

3Par, which is already the subject of a bidding war between Hewlett-Packard and Dell, is now among a group of companies being sued by Crossroads Systems for patent infringement.

Crossroads' products include storage routers and storage bridges, a database security appliance, virtual tape appliances, tape encryption and file migration software.

ActiveState has updated its distributions of the Python programming language so that they provide developers easier access to databases, as well as new ways of creating GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces), the company announced Wednesday.

The ActivePython update also offers ways for programmers to create secure connections to databases and Web services, using OpenSSL and M2Crypto-based cryptographic modules.

VMware and Novell announced on Wednesday general availability of Suse Linux Enterprise Server for VMware, geared for use in virtualized and cloud environments.

Suse Linux Enterprise Server for VMware is designed to reduce IT complexity and assist with the evolution to a fully virtualized data center, the companies said.