1. "Sun’s McNealy: Don’t Restrict Foreign Technologists,"InfoWorld, 1/12. Sun’s CEO and chairman condemned efforts to try and restrict foreign IT professionals from coming to work in Silicon Valley as imposing limits on the brain power U.S. tech companies can draw on. Scott McNealy was speaking at an event that brought together all four Sun co-founders, two of whom are immigrants. Fellow co-founder Bill Joy revealed that Sun had tried to buy Apple and failed to partner with the company on a number of occasions.

2. "Jobs Introduces Intel-Based Mac Laptop, Desktop," PC World, 1/10. The event that garnered most attention this week was Apple’s unveiling of a new notebook and iMac computer that for the first time will use Intel’s chips at the Macworld show in San Francisco. Experts liked the performance of the new systems which are appearing six months ahead of schedule, but thought they were overpriced. Analysts are also waiting to see if stellar sales of Apple’s iPod music player will ultimately translate into market share gain for its Mac computers.

3. "IBM Leads Program To Improve Patent Quality," InfoWorld, 1/10.  Big Blue, Linux evangelist body the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are spearheading a move to try and speed up the patent approval process and improve the quality of patents. The hope is to lessen the number of high-profile. long-running legal disputes filed in relation to software patents.

4. "US DHS Funds Security For Open Source," InfoWorld, 1/11.  The U.S. Department of Homeland Security awarded a three-year grant worth over US$1 million to Stanford University and software vendors Coverity and Symantec to fund daily security audits and analysis of more than 40 open-source projects including Apache and Linux. By March, Coverity hopes to be running a public online bug database listing the security defects it comes across in the open-source software during its audits. Both Stanford and Symantec will provide advice to the U.S. government agency about how best to develop and deploy applications securely so as to lower the incidence of any attacks.

5. "ITAA Taps Sybase’s Robert Laurence As Interim President," Computerworld, 1/11. Trade group the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) has a new man at the top following the departure of previous president Harris Miller who plans a run for the U.S. Senate in Virginia. Robert Laurence, a vice president of public sector sales with database vendor Sybase, will lead the organization while it looks for a permanent new president. Miller was ITAA president for over a decade. Last week, Oracle quit the group in part to express its opposition to Miller’s Senate run.