Global News Update: Tuesday, December 9, 2008

In today's podcast: AMD gets smaller stake in Foundry spin-off; Dell, EMC extend storage partnership; and U.K. censors Wikipedia article for first time.

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AMD and its Abu Dhabi investment fund partners have renegotiated the terms of their agreement, giving AMD a smaller share of its new foundry company and less money for selling a stake of the remaining chip-designing company, likely because of AMD's plunging stock price. Under the new terms of the deal announced on Monday, AMD will now own less of the foundry company: a 34.2 percent stake with the rest controlled by the Advanced Technology Investment Company, one of the Abu Dhabi funds. Under the previous terms, AMD would have owned 44.4 percent of the company.

Dell and EMC have agreed to extend their worldwide storage partnership, even though the existing deal -- which has generated billions in sales for the two companies -- doesn't end until 2011. The announcement comes amidst speculation about the long-term prospects of the EMC-Dell partnership. In particular, Dell's US$1.4 billion acquisition of storage vendor EqualLogic, announced in November 2007, led some to wonder if the companies might go their separate ways in 2011 as Dell beefed up its own storage product line. Executives said today's announcement aims to "remove any uncertainty" about the health of the Dell-EMC relationship and highlight a relationship where both companies anticipate continued growth

For the first time, U.K. Internet service providers have censored a Wikipedia article, one that includes an album cover image of a naked and possibly underage girl. The article concerns the album "Virgin Killer" by German band The Scorpions. The record has generated controversy due to its cover photo ever since it was released in 1976. The URL of the article was added to a blacklist published by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a nonprofit group that works with law enforcement to block and remove child pornography from Web sites.

Microsoft has released an early version of an open-source content management platform that developers can use to build sophisticated blogs or large Web sites. Called Oxite, its creators describe it as a standards-compliant and highly extensible content management platform. They built it not because there is a need for another blog engine, but because they were building the MIX Online] site for Web designers and wanted to offer an example of a use for ASP.NET MVC, according to Oxite Web site ASP.NET MVC lets developers use ASP.NET to build Web applications using an architecture called model-view-controller.

...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.