If you've ever thought about becoming a member of the Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit organization responsible, among other things, for keeping Lead Penguin Linux Torvalds a'coding — then you might know it's been a bit of an expensive proposition in the past. The door has been opened a bit wider for individuals, however, as the Foundation is now offering an individual affiliate membership for the low, low price of just one easy payment of $49 per year.

Cisco — rulers of all things network — have set their sights on something new, and they've gone out and gotten it. The it in this particular case is Jabber, Inc., the company responsible for building an enterprise offering around XMPP — the "Jabber" protocol — and the go out and getting happened yesterday, as Cisco announced that it intends to buy the 54-employee company before the end of next summer.

The mobile phone industry is nothing if not cutthroat, with each manufacturer — not to mention provider — doing everything they can to show up and stomp out its competition. What isn't usually seen, though, is an old-fashioned public call-out.

Breaking News has just learned that Wikileaks — the website utilized to post materials obtained from Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo mail account — is, for undisclosed reasons, no longer available online.

It must be Hacker Day here at Breaking News — as though the Large Hadron Collider being hacked wasn't enough, it has now been revealed that the group known as Anonymous has successfully hacked into the Yahoo email account of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and released at least some of its contents into the wild.

If there weren't already enough problems at the European Organization for Nuclear Research — angry calls & letters, protests, panic, even death threats — surrounding the Large Hadron Collider — in addition, that is, to the chief problem of making the device work — there certainly are now, as a new and particularly frightening problem has arisen: hackers.