IBM researchers on Friday released free software to help public health officials prevent pandemics of diseases such as bird flu or dengue fever.

IBM's Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) is a tool for public health scientists worldwide to forecast how diseases will spread in the same way meteorologists predict the paths of storms, according to researchers.

Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) Web servers are more than twice as likely to deliver malware to unsuspecting users than the open source Apache Web server, according to a recent security survey performed by Internet search giant Google. That's quite an allegation, coming as it does from one of Microsoft's chief competitors.

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Microsoft has quietly hired Tom Hanrahan, formerly the Linux Foundation's director of engineering, to become its Director of Linux Interoperability. As part of his responsibilities, Hanrahan will manage the Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab that Microsoft began staffing up earlier this year.

"The time will come when the folks at Microsoft who have a clear vision for the company as a participant in this community, rather than as a hostile antagonist, will win. At that point I’d love to work with Microsoft. It’s not an evil empire. It’s just a company that is efficiently grounded in the 1980s. New leadership and new thinking might make it a more effective partner for us."

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It's never been tried before, letting the public provide the USPTO examiners with a helping hand. The goal is to find ways to block stupid patents at the applications input level, so they don't get approved, issued, and subsequently hurt people and companies. I think of it as bug spray to kill off stupid patents before they can multiply.

New York has become the latest U.S. state to ponder whether to use open standards for government document formats, though the move is not necessarily good news for proponents of the ISO standard ODF (Open Document Format).