Since new programs are released on a daily basis, and such news are not always really interesting, I am sure if I'm going to tell you about a way to earn some serious cash, I'll get your undivided attention in an instant. The sum is $20,000, and the "how-to" is very simple, at first sight - you have to find undisclosed security flaws in Microsoft's Windows by next month's end. How's that?

Obviously, this prize is not coming from a rich grandmother with nothing special to do, but from a security research company, as you have probably figured out already. The company's name is Digital Armaments, and this challenge is simply called "January-February 2008 Hacking Challenge". It is funny to notice the company doesn't have any phone number or address on their website, only contact emails, but...

"For the January-February Challenge, Digital Armaments will give a SPECIAL PRIZE OF 20.000$ for each submission that results in a Exploitable Vulnerability or Working Exploit for Windows or Windows Diffuse Application. This should include example and documentation. The submission must be sent during the January/February months and be received by midnight EST on February 29, 2008. The 20.000$ SPECIAL PRIZE will be an extra added to the normal vulnerability payment."

Since everything seems very serious, if you have the skills and the time required to take on this challenge, I wish you good luck! I am sure that even Vista still has a bunch of flaws waiting to be discovered and exploited, and since you're doing this for your "greater good", I see no ethical or legal problem... Do you?

In today's IT business world, the big fish seems to always end up with the smaller one in its belly, no matter how long the process takes. The last example is BEA's acquisition by Oracle, after an unsuccessful attempt that took place back in October. Let's find out more about this story, shall we?

Back in October, BEA turned down Oracle's offer of about $6.7 million, claiming the bid was too low. It took almost 3 months for Oracle to come with a better offer, but this time, BEA accepted the price put by Oracle on the table - no less than $8.5 million!

According to Trip Chowdhry, analyst at Global Equities Research, "It's a fair price. It's a good deal for Oracle. It's a good deal for BEA.", so everyone should be happy, including shareholders, since BEA's shares rose 19 percent on the Nasdaq, while Oracle's also took a slight rise in value, up to $21.43.

While Oracle also was producing "middleware" computer systems, BEA's Weblogic and International Business Machines Corp's WebSphere application servers are known as standards among this type of integration software, so now Oracle would have a lot to gain, but we should also take into account that, being given the global economical tendency, "Companies are more reluctant to buy from smaller companies in a recession because you have uncertainty.", according to Jefferies & Co's Katherine Egbert.

If you want to create your own icons for Vista, XP, or the Mac, there are plenty of programs that can help you get the job done, but most of them only have basic functionality. Today, I just found out about the updates got by one of the higher-class icon editing program (in fact, it's a small family), IconCool, and so I have to draw your attention to this topic for a while...

The IconCool family has 3 members - IconCool Editor, IconCool Studio, and IconCool Studio Pro. All of them got updated to the same version number, exactly 5.26 Build 80108. Now, let me tell you a few words about each one of these programs...

IconCool Editor, priced at $29.95, is the smallest member of the family. This program is an easy to use yet powerful icon editor that allows you to create from scratch or edit existing icons, cursors, and web graphics.

IconCool Studio and Studio Pro, available for purchase at $39.95, or $59.95, are both complete solutions for editing and creating 32 bit XP icons, as well as Vista ones. Featuring powerful marquee tools and one for creating lighting effects with ease, IconCool Studio also supports Photoshop plugins and is able to load or export PSD files.

Trial versions of these programs can be downloaded from here, and you'll be able to use them for 30 days. Since there are no special system requirements for any IconCool product, a decent computer able to run Windows XP, at least, should be more than enough.