Review The latest offering from Canon, the Digital Ixus 960 IS offers no less than 12.1 megapixel performance. But, as we shall see, offering more pixels means paying a price when it comes to certain aspects of performance.…

Sprint Nextel showed off a new iPhone look-alike from Samsung on Tuesday at the CTIA conference in Las Vegas that the operator says allows much faster data access then the Apple phone.

The Instinct, co-developed by Sprint and Samsung, looks similar to the iPhone, including a touch screen. Unlike the iPhone, however, it includes GPS and runs on Sprint's high-speed EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) Revision A network. Sprint's network offers an average data download rate as high as 1.4Mbps. By contrast, EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution), which the iPhone operates on via AT&T's network, usually offers less than 200Kbps throughput.

Users of the Instinct will be able to access the Web at high speeds, watch TV, download music, get directions, and access other entertainment services, said Dan Hesse, president and CEO of Sprint Nextel.

The Instinct features a 2.0 megapixel camera and comes with a 2GB microSD storage card. Sprint did not say how much the phone, which should be available in June, will cost.

The phone could be attractive to users of Sprint's new subscription plans, which Hesse said go further than competitors' plans. For $99, Sprint customers can get unlimited voice, text ,and data services. Other operators have recently rolled out similarly priced services that include unlimited voice but not unlimited data.

Sprint also hopes to make more applications available on the new phone by making it easier for developers to build applications for devices that run on Sprint's network, Hesse said. The operator plans to expand its virtual testing services so that developers can better test their new applications, and will update its software development kit to make developing for Sprint easier, he said.

Even while touting Sprint's existing network's broadband capabilities, Hesse also looked to the future. "EV-DO is still not fast enough for true broadband experience," he said. Sprint is building a WiMax network, already available after a soft launch in Chicago and the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area, to offer the next generation of wireless broadband.

Reuters - France has offered a medical mission to treat sick hostages held in the jungles by Colombian guerrillas, including French-Colombian captive Ingrid Betancourt, Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe said on Tuesday.

Shane Macaulay's attempt to sell a hacked laptop complete with Windows Vista attack code did not last long.

eBay pulled the listing within hours of its appearance Monday, saying that it could have harmed users. "You can't sell anything that would do harm," said a spokeswoman for eBay's public relations agency.

The company removed the listing between 11 p.m. Monday and 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, Pacific Time, after eBay employees noticed the post. "It was the wording of the listing that caught the attention of the trust and safety experts who monitor the site," the spokeswoman said.

Macaulay won last week's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver. He had offered the laptop he broke into for sale, claiming that his exploit code could probably still be extracted from the machine.

"This laptop is a good case study for any forensics group/company/individual that wants to prove how cool they are, and a live example, not canned of what a typical incident responce sitchiation [sic] would look like," his listing stated.

Although the laptop was listed on eBay just before April 1, a traditional day of Internet pranks, Macaulay insisted it was legitimate.

Macaulay, a researcher with the Security Objectives consultancy, was one of two hackers to claim laptops and cash prizes for penetrating systems during last week's contest. Organizers offered Vista, Mac OS, and Linux-based laptops for the taking, along with prizes that varied from $5,000 to $20,000, depending on the difficulty of the exploit. By Friday, however, only the Linux laptop remained unbreached.

Though the laptop he hacked runs Vista, Macaulay claimed that his Adobe Flash Player exploit will affect 90 percent of computers worldwide. He won a $5,000 cash prize, courtesy of 3Com's TippingPoint division, and the Fujitsu U810 laptop he had hacked into for his work.

Had Macaulay been able to sell his laptop before Adobe patched the issue, he would have violated his contract with TippingPoint, said Terri Forslof, the company's manager of security response. "We would have disqualified him from the program," she said.

The laptop had not been hit with any other attack code during the course of the contest, she added. "He was the only person who tried," she said.

Open source will start to dominate software infrastructure for providers of SaaS (Software as a Service) within three years. For them it's almost a no-brainer, according to Gartner analyst Yefim Natis.

"They will use it as much as possible," said Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

Lower cost and better flexibility, compared to what's available from closed source, or proprietary software, are key factors for the growing popularity of open source in this segment of the market.

In order to compete with on-premise vendors, SaaS providers will have to offer a lower cost, and open source helps them do that, according Natis.

One big difference between most enterprises and large SaaS providers -- or cloud-based providers, as Gartner likes to call them -- is technical know-how.

The latter are often very technically advanced, which means they can run open source by themselves.

"Since they don't require support, it's really free" said Natis.

For SaaS providers the cost of its infrastructure is also very important, since it in turns decides the cost customers will have to pay.

To keep costs low they have to optimize infrastructure, and open source is the best option to do that, according to Natis.

But for open-source vendors, the SaaS trend isn't all good news.

In next couple of years SaaS providers will also challenge open-source vendors, and become the preferred method for lowering IT costs.

Both promise lower costs. But moving to a service model requires less IT skills, while a move to open source often demands the opposite, according to Gartner.