A backflip by Liberal leaders to cut billions in regional telecommunications safeguards has triggered a boycott by shadow communications minister Nick Minchin and almost half the voting members of the Coalition.

With the deadline for NBN bids officially closed, much of the attention has been focused on Telstra's non-compliant bid. At 12 pages – almost 1000 pages shorter than the Optus-led Terria bid – Telstra's proposal to construct the NBN will be considered, communications minister, Stephen Conroy, said.

Sun Microsystems Thursday rolled out the first version of its JavaFX runtime and tools, which support the development of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that can run on desktops, in browsers, in mobile devices and on televisions. Sun said that JavaFX 1.0 is aimed at providing a unified development and deployment model for developers and Web designers to build RIAs with audio, video, rich text, advanced graphics, animation and Web services.

In sports, successful athletes narrow their focus during crunch time. They may concentrate on footwork, technique or increase their margin for error. Technology providers must do the same thing during tough economic times. You must focus on your customer and nothing but your customer, whether the customer is a consumer, another business, or internal departments needing technology and support.

AT&T will lay off 12,000 workers through 2009 as the company reorganizes and faces a tough economic environment, the company said Thursday.

With credit in a tight squeeze and the economy in free fall, the next few years should see the collapse of some small US PC makers and a restructuring of the rest of the industry, according to an industry research firm.

Huawei Technologies has been selected to build telco China Unicom's first 40Gbps optical transport network across five major cities centred around Beijing, according to Huawei.

Shortcomings of an MPLS service led printing firm Wise Business Forms to dump the network service in favor of an Internet-based VPN that delivers better speed at less cost and will pay for itself in 16 months.

Day Software may be best known for its CRX (Content Repository Extreme) Java Content Repository. But after testing the general release of its Communiqué 5.1 (CQ5) modular CMS, I think it's time to get reintroduced to the rest of what the company offers. This notable Web content manager will impress business users with drag-and-drop page design, in-context content editing, and a component library that includes Flash elements, form builders, and Google Gadget support. And it will impress IT with a nice complement of enterprise bells and whistles -- from integrated BPM to hot backup, disaster recovery, and clustering capabilities.

Mozilla will drop anti-phishing protection from the final version of Firefox 2.0 at Google's request when Mozilla updates the browser later this month, a company executive confirmed Thursday.

Put three geeks in a room and it won't take long to start an argument. Well, analyst Dennis Byron, veteran open source exec Stuart Cohen, and ex-Microsoft developer Keith Curtis weren't exactly in the same room, but all three have provocative opinions about the future of software in general and of open source in particular.

Mozilla will drop anti-phishing protection from the final version of Firefox 2.0 at Google's request when Mozilla updates the browser later this month, a company executive confirmed Thursday.

Microsoft Thursday said it plans to integrate RSA data-loss prevention technology into its products to enable security managers to monitor sensitive data and block unauthorized use. RSA is EMC's security division.

Microsoft will deliver eight security updates next week, six of them marked "critical," to plug holes in Windows, Internet Explorer, Office and other products.

A new computing fabric to replace today's blade servers and a "pod" approach to building data centers are two of the most disruptive technologies that will affect the enterprise data center in the next few years, Gartner said at its annual data center conference Wednesday.

Advanced Micro Devices expects revenue for its fourth quarter to be 25 percent lower than its third-quarter revenue, the company announced Thursday.

Day Software may be best known for its CRX (Content Repository Extreme) Java Content Repository. But after testing the general release of its Communiqué 5.1 (CQ5) modular CMS, I think it's time to get reintroduced to the rest of what the company offers. This notable Web content manager will impress business users with drag-and-drop page design, in-context content editing, and a component library that includes Flash elements, form builders, and Google Gadget support. And it will impress IT with a nice complement of enterprise bells and whistles -- from integrated BPM to hot backup, disaster recovery, and clustering capabilities.

Sun Microsystems Thursday rolled out the first version of its JavaFX runtime and tools, which support the development of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that can run on desktops, in browsers, in mobile devices and on televisions. Sun said that JavaFX 1.0 is aimed at providing a unified development and deployment model for developers and Web designers to build RIAs with audio, video, rich text, advanced graphics, animation and Web services.

The European Commission has set up an advisory panel including executives from Google and Intel to help it revise European Union laws on data protection.

A new computing fabric to replace today's blade servers and a "pod" approach to building data centers are two of the most disruptive technologies that will affect the enterprise data center in the next few years, Gartner said at its annual data center conference Wednesday.

Upgrades to the $10 billion National Broadband Network (NBN) will be hindered or impossible if sub-loop unbundling, part of a call for structural separation, is mandated, according to top Telstra chiefs.

Microsoft has come up with a faster, cheaper way to build its data centers over the next five years, and it says other companies could use its methods too.

The struggling global economy has taken a toll on worldwide smart phone sales in the third quarter, with sales growth the weakest in four years, according to new data from Gartner Inc.

After warning less than a month ago that the worldwide handset market would do worse than expected this year and next, Nokia on Thursday revised down its expectations again.