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The Software Freedom Law Center said Thursday that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a consumer electronics company, Monsoon Multimedia, for allegedly violating the license that governs the use of the Linux operating system.

This is the first case filed in the United States against a company for allegedly not complying with the terms of the General Public License (GPL) version 2, according to the SFLC, which provides legal representation for free software projects. The GPL is used by Linux and countless other free and open-source software programs.

The suit was filed on behalf of the creators of BusyBox, a set of Unix utilities used in embedded systems and licensed under the GPL version 2. (Click here to see a PDF of the complaint.)

Under the terms of the GPL version 2, people can use GPL software within their own products. But when they redistribute that software, they must make the source code available.

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San Francisco—The next big thing for Intel is little. The company has used its Developer Forum, here, to extol the virtues of its forthcoming handheld device platforms for allowing consumers to connect to the Internet. Intel calls this “Internet in your pocket.”

Intel has been chasing the handheld space for some time without much success. It started with the Xscale processor, recently sold to Marvell, and is now taking aim with its own Intel Architecture or x86 processor technology. The first generations of its IA-based handheld platform, which use its low-power notebook processors and chipsets, haven’t done much to wow thus far. That’s partially because they have been wrapped in Ultramobile PC hardware, which costs around $1,000 and does not have a straightforward method to gain access to wide area wireless. For that price, you might as well just buy an inexpensive notebook. And that’s what most people do.

But Intel is touting significant improvements in device size, battery life and connectivity for its forthcoming handheld platforms, including one dubbed Menlow that is due in the first half of next year. It appears as if the Menlow has begun to win over some. The company listed companies including Samsung and Fujitsu as designing MID devices here at IDF.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has made new higher-resolution images and maps of the moon as well as multimedia content available on Google Inc.’s Moon Web site.

The updated information includes new material from the Apollo space missions, including embedded panoramic images, links to videos and audio clips, and information about the astronauts’ tasks on those missions, said NASA in a statement.

NASA also added detailed charts of various regions of the moon that can be used by anyone simulating a lunar mission, particularly scientists and amateur astronomers.

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Last night, Google unveiled the latest component of Google Docs, the long-awaited presentation component of its free, online office application suite. Like the word processing and spreadsheet components of Google Docs, Presentations are stored online and can be worked on collaboratively by a number of users at the same time.

As is the case with Documents and Spreadsheets, users can e-mail and upload documents to edit online. While Documents supports HTML, rich text, plain text, Word, OpenOffice.org, and StarOffice files, Presentations can only handle presentations created in PowerPoint, and those have to be under 10MB in size.

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Running Firefox or Opera as a default browser won’t save you from unpatched Internet Explorer vulnerabilities—a fact made explicit when a researcher showed how easy it is to put HTML inside files supported by Windows Media Player.

Researcher Petko D. Petkov said in a Sept. 18 blog posting that he’s found that a fully patched Windows XP Service Pack 2 system running Internet Explorer 6 or 7 along with Windows Media Player 9—the default, although the media player is now up to Version 11—will open any page of an attacker’s choice even if the default browser is not Internet Explorer.

The broader implication is that even users who think they’re safe because they don’t run IE are exposed to any IE vulnerabilities out there, Petkov said. This is true not only for Windows Media Player users but also for those who run Skype, GTalk and AIM, given that those applications all use IE for rendering incoming and outgoing messages, he told eWEEK in an e-mail.

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