The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an information investigation into the circumstances surrounding Mark Hurd's departure from Hewlett-Packard, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Like at least half the nerds in America, I applied to be part of Chrome OS beta testing program as soon as it was announced last week. On the surface, at least, I figured myself to be an ideal Chrome user?to a sometimes-scary extent, my life is already lived in Google?s cloud. Even on a Mac I default to the Chrome browser, where I write in Google Docs, check my feeds in Google Reader, and even sync Google Calendar and Contacts to my iPhone and iPad instead of paying for MobileMe. The company?s cloud-based operating system seemed the next logical step.

European regulators are looking closely at Intel's planned McAfee acquisition and may hold up the deal with an investigation, according to a report published Friday.

Four executives at publicly traded technology companies have been arrested on charges they sold inside information about their employers, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Oracle's net income for the quarter ended Nov. 30 rose 28 percent from a year earlier to US$1.9 billion, buoyed by strong software license sales and an improving hardware business, the company said Thursday. Revenue was $8.6 billion, a jump of 47 percent.

A member of the group of hackers credited with uncovering more than 100,000 iPad users' e-mail addresses on AT&T's website worked hard to get the story covered by the media, according to recently unsealed court documents.

Oracle on Wednesday announced the availability of Cloud Office 1.0, a Web-based productivity suite that is set to give online applications from Microsoft and Google a fresh dose of competition.

Yahoo confirmed that it has laid off 600 people, following news reports often based on Twitter messages from employees who had been let go.

At next month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft will demonstrate a number of new Windows-run tablets and possibly even an early version of the next generation Windows 8 operating system, according to reports.

The activists behind Operation Payback have come up with a new way to annoy corporations that have severed their ties with WikiLeaks: bombard them with faxes.

Dell has agreed to buy virtualized storage vendor Compellent Technologies in an all-cash deal worth US$27.75 per share, a little more than the $27.50 per share price tag it was discussing with the company last week, but still lower than the stock's Monday-morning opening price of $28.30.

McDonald's is working with law enforcement authorities after malicious hackers broke into another company's databases and stole information about an undetermined number of the fast food chain's customers.

Oracle wants SAP to pay it US$212 million in interest on top of the $1.3 billion awarded to it last month by a jury in the companies' TomorrowNow lawsuit, court papers show.

Protesting what it perceives as Oracle's undue control of Java, the Apache Software Foundation has resigned its seat from the Java SE/EE Executive Committee, the organization announced Wednesday.

A loosely organized group of Internet hacktivists took down Visa's website Wednesday, after organizing a similar attack on MasterCard.

Facebook is in breach of South Korean data privacy laws and needs to do a better job of getting consent from users when getting their personal information, a South Korean regulator said Wednesday.

Google opened its Web application store for Chrome browser users on Tuesday, offering highly interactive, graphically rich applications from a variety of sources, including National Public Radio, Amazon.com, Electronic Arts and Sports Illustrated.

Unisys on Tuesday introduced a dedicated, hosted computing service that lets customers quickly add extra capacity for short-term use, a feature Unisys says is unique among what it calls "hosted private clouds."

An online retailer who boasted that complaints about his business helped boost its standing in Google search results was arrested Monday.

BMC Software announced Friday it has purchased GridApp Systems, maker of software tools for database provisioning, patching and management in physical and cloud deployments. Terms were not disclosed.