5 Free Alternatives to Expensive Productivity Software

Microsoft Promises Six Updates for Final Patch Tuesday of 2009 Next week is the final Patch Tuesday for 2009. Here is a quick look at the six security bulletins expected from Microsoft.

FCC Examines Verizon's Doubling of Early Termination Fees The FCC wants to know why the carrier doubled what customers must pay if they bail out of their contracts early.

Apple Should Approve Fewer But Better iPhone Apps With IDC predicting 300,000 iPhone apps by the end of next year, maybe it's time for Apple to be more selective in what it approves.

Google Strives to Make Public DNS Secure Google introduced Google Public DNS to offer an alternative DNS system and hopefully speed things up on the Web. Google has included additional security controls to address weaknesses in DNS security.

Google's Schmidt Strikes Back at Murdoch (In His Own Newspaper) While News Corp. and Google debate, quality journalism continues to die. Technology may come to the rescue--as Google suggests--but not quickly enough to save Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire.

Microsoft Bing Suffers Outage The Microsoft Bing search engine was offline Thursday night. The outage could hurt Bing's reputation, but this is one case where Microsoft is lucky to be the challenger.