According to the International Herald Tribune, Jerry Yang, the chief executive of Yahoo, apologized to the mother of an imprisoned Chinese dissident during testimony Tuesday at a heated U.S. congressional hearing on the company’s role in jailing the man.  Members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs repeatedly attacked Yang and Yahoo’s decision to give Chinese officials the e-mail records of journalist Shi Tao, who was accused by the Chinese authorities of leaking state secrets abroad and sentenced last April to 10 years in prison.”

Yahoo!News writes that “Sun Microsystems’ push to open source all of its software helped prompt one vice president, Larry Singer, to leave the company, Singer said at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon.  The company has been offering up to open source crown jewels such as its Java platform and the Solaris OS. Singer, who was vice president of Global Information Systems Strategy at Sun, stressed that he agreed with a lot of the open source efforts, such as open-sourcing Solaris and Java. But he said he thought the company was over-emphasizing open source when it should have been focusing on generating revenues; he disagreed with new CEO Jonathan Schwartz about the effort and this was one reason Singer left the company in March after having been at Sun since 2003.”

In a different article, Yahoo!News reports that “

[a] company whose name sounds like eBay Inc.’s has lost its appeal of a court ruling that protected the online auctioneer from ‘trademark dilution’ by e-commerce rivals with similar-sounding names.  A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower court’s ruling in September 2005 against Perfumebay.com and Perfume-bay.com.  EBay had argued that the names confused customers, who might think they were on an official eBay site.”

In a BBC News article on Google’s planned open platform for mobile phones, Android, a Symbian executive states that “Google’s dominance of the web will not translate to the mobile phone market.”  According to John Forsyth, vice president of strategy at Symbian, “Google [lacks] experience.  […]  About every three months this year there has been a mobile Linux initiative of some sort launched. It’s a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business.  […]  Search and a mobile phone platform are completely different things.  It’s costly, arduous and at times a deeply unsexy job of supporting customers day by day in launching phones. That’s something there’s very little experience of in Google’s environment.”

The Mercury News reports that “[a]fter a trickle of updates and ‘betas’ bearing the Windows Live moniker, Microsoft is ready to start promoting its official package of free desktop programs for e-mail, instant messaging, blogging and sharing photos.  The programs are "essentially a free upgrade for Windows," said Brian Hall, general manager of Windows Live at Microsoft.”