The Wall Street Journal writes that “Egypt and Saudi Arabia, long considered bureaucratic mazes, changed their laws and regulations to make it substantially easier to start and run businesses, according to a yearly World Bank report that tracks business reforms globally. 

[…]  The bank has regularly lauded the Eastern European countries, China and Colombia for reducing barriers to business; the emergence of Saudi Arabia and Egypt is new. Egypt was listed as the top reformer, having made improvements in five of 10 categories affecting business tracked by the World Bank.”

In a different article, the Wall Street Journal points out that “[f]or Internet users, the scariest night of this year may fall on the evening after Halloween. On November 1, the federal Internet tax moratorium is due to expire, and no committee in Congress has acted to make it permanent.  […]  [A] Congressional failure to extend the moratorium would quickly show up on monthly bills, and not quietly. Taxes on telephone service can run above 20%, more than triple the average general sales tax rate. Absent the moratorium, state revenue departments will begin to issue letters ruling that Internet access services are subject to these same sky-high telephone tax rates.”

Reuters reports that “[s]oftware maker Red Hat Inc., which had planned to introduce a new version of its Linux software for personal computers in August, said on Tuesday that the product won’t be out until next month at the earliest.  […]  Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said in an interview that the software maker is still working to translate the software into foreign languages, make sure it is compatible with different PC hardware and work out some issues relating to licensing of some of the software in the package.”

The Register reveals that there is “a new weakness that makes it easy for bad guys to silently put a backdoor in Gmail accounts.  The technique comes courtesy of Petko D. Petkov, a researcher at GNU Citizen, who writes in a blog post that the backdoor is installed simply by luring a victim to a specially crafted website while logged in to Gmail. The naughty site uses a sleight of hand known as a multipart/form-data POST, which writes a filter to Gmail that causes all email with attachments to be forwarded to [email protected].”

The San Francisco Gate writes that “[t]ech employers nationwide were still creating new payroll jobs at midyear,albeit fewer than last year at this time and at a lower rate than overall private-sector job growth.That was the gist of a report issued Tuesday by the American Electronics Association.”