Stories by: Peter Sayer

3D design software company Dassault Systèmes has acquired Netvibes, a website that allows the creation of personalized dashboards combining social network updates, news alerts and RSS feeds, the companies announced Thursday.

CSC ended four months of speculation about the identity of its next CEO late Tuesday, announcing that Mike Lawrie, currently CEO of British IT service company Misys, will become CEO of CSC by the end of March. He has already taken a seat on CSC's board.

A French laptop buyer has won a refund from Lenovo after a four-year legal battle over the cost of a Windows license he didn't want. The judgment could open the way for PC buyers elsewhere in Europe to obtain refunds for bundled software they don't want, French campaign group No More Racketware said Monday.

STMicroelectronics hopes to make blurry low-light images from smartphone cameras a thing of the past with a new chip designed to boost light output from LED-based flashes.

The European Commission is investigating the way Samsung Electronics licenses its patents on technology essential to mobile communications networks, concerned that it may be in breach of European competition law.

ARCEP, the French telecommunications regulator, has promised to investigate whether new network operator Free Mobile is still offering the level of coverage required by its license, following complaints by employees of rival networks. But it also warned the company's critics to stop whining, saying that the existing three network operators had all failed to meet their coverage obligations at launch.

France's antitrust regulator has declined Hewlett Packard's request for an injunction ordering Oracle to continue supporting its database on HP's Itanium server platform. HP's request that Oracle be ordered to align pricing for its database on Itanium servers with that of versions for other server architectures was similarly rejected by the Autorité de la Concurrence.

French ISP Free lived up to its name Tuesday with its launch of France's fourth mobile phone network.

Many web app frameworks are vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack targeting the way they handle hash tables, researchers revealed Wednesday, prompting Microsoft to announce an "out-of-band" patch for its ASP.NET platform just hours later.

Google has paid US$94 million for a stake in four photovoltaic power generation projects around Sacramento, California, bringing its total investment in renewable energy generation this year to $880 million, it announced Tuesday.