EU to hit Intel with antitrust fine on Wednesday

In today's podcast: EU to hit Intel with antitrust fine on Wednesday; Sun shareholders sue to block Oracle takeover; and Microsoft to test Windows 7 update mechanism.

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The European Commission is expected to make one of the most significant antitrust decisions in its history on Wednesday when it punishes computer chip-maker Intel for stifling competition from smaller rivals. The official line is that the case is still ongoing, but one person close to the competition department said on condition of anonymity on Friday that the 27 commissioners will conclude the case, which has been under investigation since 2000, at their next weekly meeting on Wednesday. Intel is the latest giant from the IT industry to be slapped down by Europe's top competition regulator. Like Microsoft five years ago and IBM in the 1980s, Intel claims it is simply doing what any company would, only better. While IBM settled with the regulator, agreeing to change the way it competed in the market for mainframe computers, Microsoft and Intel have stuck to their guns. Consequently Microsoft was fined [euro]497 million (US$663.4 million) for abusing its dominant position in the software market, plus an additional [euro]1.2 billion for failing to respect the antitrust ruling.

Sun Microsystems shareholders filed three separate lawsuits last month in an effort to halt the company's pending sale to Oracle, according to a filing Sun made with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission Friday. The suits, filed in Santa Clara County, California, superior court, name Sun, some of its officials and Oracle as defendants. All three actions are aimed at blocking the US$7.4 billion sale, alleging the price tag is "unfair and inadequate." The defendants have yet to file answers to the complaints, according to Sun. More information about the lawsuits wasn't immediately available.

Microsoft plans to test Windows 7's update mechanism by feeding users of the just-issued Release Candidate as many as 10 fake updates in the coming week, the company said Friday. It will be the second time that Microsoft has released phony updates for Windows 7; in February, it tested the beta by delivering five bogus patches. People running Windows 7 RC, which publicly debuted late on May 4, will be offered the mock updates beginning on Tuesday, May 12. As before, the updates do not actually deliver any new features or fixes, but replace existing system files with exact duplicates

The University of California at Berkeley Friday disclosed that hackers broke into restricted computer databases in the campus health-services center, as the university began notifying current and former Berkeley students their personal information may have been taken. The attackers may have taken information related to health-insurance coverage and certain medical information as well as the University Health Services medical-record number, dates of visits or names of healthcare providers seen, as well as information such as Social Security Numbers. About 160,000 individuals are believed to be impacted, including about 3,400 Mills College students whose medical care is tied to health care at Berkeley.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.