Google names Chrome OS partners

In today's podcast: Google names Chrome OS partners; Microsoft promotes Windows 7 chief; and DDOS attack hits South Korea again.

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Google has named some of the companies it is working with to develop devices around the new browser-based Chrome operating system it announced yesterday. The list includes the world's largest PC maker, HP, and China's largest, Lenovo, as well as two of Taiwan's top vendors, Acer and Asustek Computer. Noticeably absent from the list was Dell. Google also named three mobile phone chip developers involved in the work: Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Freescale Semiconductor. The world's biggest chip maker, Intel, was not on the list. The Chrome operating system will be based on a Linux kernel and will run on low-power microprocessors. Intel is behind another Linux project with similar goals, called Moblin.

Just months before the official release of Windows 7, Microsoft is promoting Steven Sinofsky to the new position of president of the Windows division. He was previously senior vice president of the Windows engineering group, where he's been credited with improving the development process for Windows 7, compared to its long-delayed and under-performing predecessor, Vista.

Storage vendor Data Domain has agreed to be acquired by EMC for around 2.1 billion dollars. Rival bidder Netapp has pulled out of the bidding war, saying it couldn't justify the expense. NetApp had made the first move with a bid of 1.5 billion dollars for Data Domain in late May. Data Domain data makes de-duplication software, which identifies redundant data and deletes it in order to save storage space. Such software can halve the amount of disk space required in some systems.

A distributed denial of service attack that took down some of South Korea's highest profile Web sites on Wednesday resumed Thursday evening, but targeted a smaller number of sites that it hit a day earlier. The targets included government Web sites and the home pages of the Chosun Ilbo newspaper and Kookmin Bank. The attacks sent a massive volume of traffic to the target sites, overloading the servers or their network connections.

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

Google Chrome OS