Todd R Weiss

Hewlett-Packard Co.

By the end of the year, patients suffering from a painful gastrointestinal (GI) problem will be able to swallow a vitamin-sized electronic "pill" that can collect data from their bodies and wirelessly send it to a nearby device.

The Early California Population Project (ECPP) has brought scattered information together to provide researchers with a vast body of fully searchable information in one data repository. During the eight-year project, the huge database was developed by manually entering information from microfilmed images.

Firefox Web browser is again gaining over Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer. Use of Mozilla Foundation's open-source browser is growing in Canada and the U.S., a recent study shows.

In a deal that marries one of the IT industry's biggest data storage vendors and one of its best-known security companies, EMC Corp. unveiled plans to acquire RSA Security Inc. Under the deal, Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC will pay US$28 a share, or almost $2.1 billion, for Bedford, Mass.-based RSA, according to the companies.

At its third annual user conference, open-source middleware vendor JBoss unveiled its first-ever Seam 1.0 application framework for Web 2.0 and announced the broadening of its vendor certification program to "software as a service" providers as it continues to build a support base for its enterprise open-source offerings.

After the U.S. House of Representatives approved a controversial telecommunications bill Thursday and rejected an amendment that sought to keep large telephone or cable TV companies from controlling access to the Internet, supporters of that "net neutrality" amendment vowed to fight on.

Open source software is everywhere, but how does a large company