The ex-chairman and the son of the founder of South Korean-based company Samsung, Lee Kun-hee has been found guilty of tax evasion by the Seoul Central District Court; however, he will not serve three years at prison after the court handed down a suspended sentence.

He was charged for not paying about 47 billion won (or US$46 million) in taxes, and fined him 110 billion won (US$109 million). Prosecutors wanted him to serve seven years in jail and pay a 350 million won (US$347 million) fine.

However, the judge refused to give him the sentence, saying that the crime was not enough to serve prison time that the prosecutors wanted, and gave him three years of prison time and five years on a suspended sentence.

”The extent of his crime is not serious enough to sentence him to prison,” the presiding judge, Judge Min Byung-hun, said.

This is his second conviction. In 1996, he was found guilty of making payments to the former president Roh Tae-woo, who served as the South Korean President from 1988 to 1993. He was not the only chief that was convicted, many South-Korean family-run conglomerates, also known as chaebols, were also found guilty.

A Windows patch released by Microsoft last week has left call centres at Telstra and a local security software distributor flooded with enquiries after they lost their internet access after installing the update, which was to plug a security hole.

Customers using ZoneAlarm found that they had lost their connection altogether, forcing the company to say that it was "incompatible" with ZoneAlarm and the maker, Checkpoint, had released a patch for the problem.

Microsoft’s spokewoman has said to Australian IT that they had published instructions for addressing the problem, but did not reveal if the company will withdraw the patch from Windows Update temporarily.

iPhone App Store (Image: Terence Huynh)

While it is a few hours early in America before that faithful date when the iPhone will be released, New Zealand has gotten its hands on it, with Australia coming soon in less than two hours. But, we have some screenshots of the brand new Apps Store in iTunes.

You will need to upgrade your iTunes to Version 7.7, which you can download here. After that, click on this link to access the store. If you can’t access it, there is nothing wrong - it is just that Apple is restricting it.

Screenshots

Joining the Office Open XML file document types, the International Organization for Standardization have made another popular type an international standard.

Adobe’s Portable Document Format, or the PDF, was announced as a standard on Wednesday morning, after Adobe passed the entire specifications over to the organization. It also looks like that there is no changes to the specifications.

The PDF format is a well known standard, thanks to the distribution of the Adobe’s own reader and other software that can open the files. As well, Apple and Google have integrated the file format, with Google allowing users to read the PDF as an HTML document.

According to the Wall Street Journal, some of the IT giants are teaming up to stop potential patent-infringement lawsuits against them.

Their plan is to buy up key intellectual property before it falls to other parties who could use it against you. They claim, from their sources, that Verizon, Google, HP, Ericsson and Cisco have joined a group known as the "Allied Security Trust".

The companies will pay $250,000 to join and will put in $5 million into the organization to buy patents. Not one of the companies mentioned commented about the story.

Microsoft has finally announced a second beta version of its next version of its internet browser, Internet Explorer 8.

IE Beta 2 will target ordinary web users, and will come out will all the features that will be there when the full, completed version is out - though some may contain bugs.

It has also pledged to deliver more updates to versions of Internet Explorer, after the Firefox browser (owned by Mozilla) has been slowly chipping away Microsoft’s share. Mozilla is also testing out a new version of its Firefox browser, Firefox 3.

While Microsoft has the backing of its Windows XP/Vista to support its browser, Mozilla has gain some market share after being affiliated with Google - who provided around 85 percent of revenue to the Mozilla Foundation, according to filings published last October.

No release date has been set for Internet Explorer 8. Its predecessor, Internet Explorer 8, was released in October 2006.

Microsoft’s Office Open XML may lose its ISO recognition after India, Brazil and South Africa launching an appeal against the decision, a standards agency said on Friday.

The Head of the IEC, or the International Electrotechnical Commission, Jonathan Bucks said that the "appeals were filed during the course of the week," to AFP.

The IEC and fellow agency the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) will now spend 30 days evaluating whether the appeal meets the criteria. If so, the appeals will be then transferred to the technical appeals committees in both standards agencies.

Last month, a vote saw the ISO approving OOXML as an ISO standard, with 26 opposing the move. Australia abstained from voting. The ISO is now looking at ways to make it compatible with its rival format - ODF, or the Open Document Format.

Microsoft has announced that it will be adding new formats to its Office 2007 software, starting with the next service pack, Service Pack 2 - due in the first half of 2009.

The new formats includes the Portable Document Format (PDF), XML Paper Specification (XPS) and its OOXML rival Open Document Format (ODF). This is not the first time since Microsoft worked with ODF, releasing a converter for Word users in late 2006. A converter is also in the works for older versions of Office, including 2000, XP and 2003.

As well, the company produced an add-on for users to save documents in PDF and XPS. Both OOXML and ODF formats are both ISO standards.

The British Education Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) has filed a formal complaint against Microsoft with the European Union, saying it has failed to support open standards in the latest addition of the Microsoft Office product line, Office 2007.

It claims that the Office Open XML is not interoperable with software from other vendors, and wants the EU to compel Microsoft to support open standards. And this is not the first time Microsoft and BECTA clashed. Earlier this year, it released a detailed advisory over what should they do with Vista and Office 2007.

The advisory has told schools to not use them, until the schools can find ways to have them interoperable.

Windows XP users who just upgraded to the new service pack will not be able to downgrade back to Internet Explorer 6 after that option would be impossible. This also applies to those who are running the beta version of IE8.

Jane Maliouta, deployment manager for IE8, has written on MSDN that the decision to prevent downgrading was "by design".

Those who have the Beta 1 version of IE8, you will not get SP3 in your Windows Update to dissuade users from finding themselves not able to downgrade.