One more example of Microsoft trying to pull the wool over consumer’s eyes.

Deceptive, yea that’s an understatement!

11/28/2007
Microsoft’s ‘Vista Capable’ marketing slogan deceptive, lawsuit claims
Lawyers say company misled consumers with software’s pre-release campaign

A Microsoft Corp. product manager couldn’t correctly explain the “Vista Capable” marketing slogan, according to recent filings in a lawsuit that claims the company misled consumers with a pre-release Vista campaign last year.

IT Business

25/02/08
A US judge has given the go-ahead for consumers to file a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for providing misleading information about Windows XP computers being able to run Vista.

Channel Register

03/07/08
Microsoft has petitioned a federal appeals court in an attempt to overturn the judge’s Feb. 22 decision granting the lawsuit class-action status.

Seattle PI

04/21/08
Microsoft Corp.’s attempt to reverse a lower court’s ruling in the ongoing “Vista Capable” lawsuit was denied by an appeals court on Monday. The decision means the case can resume.

It also means that new insider e-mails subpoenaed from Microsoft and nearly 30 other companies could be made public.

Computer World

Technorati Tags: Windows Vista, Vista Capable

While large cheap hard disks allow you to keep your audio collection in a lossless format such as FLAC on your home network, when you are on the move you probably want to squeeze the most out of every gigabyte by using a compressed format. This article takes a look at three tools aimed at making audio conversion for portable music players a painless task.

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Technorati Tags: Multimedia

Dell will sell and support systems with the Windows XP operating systems to its customers even after the June 30 cutoff date set by Microsoft.

What will happen is that Dell will leverage on the “downgrade” license inherent in Vista Business and Vista Ultimate to pre-install Windows XP Professional on a selection of Dell desktop PCs and laptops. This will save users the hassle of having to do it themselves, says a Dell spokesperson. This service will be offered on some Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision systems for free. Some Vostro and XPS systems will also get this offer — for a small fee.
These computers will also come with the relevant Windows Vista installation media so that users can switch to Vista at a later stage if they wish.

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Technorati Tags: News, Windows

Web threats have risen significantly in the first quarter of 2008, with one Web page being infected every five seconds, according to a new report from security vendor Sophos.

Released Wednesday, Sophos said in its Security Threat Report that an average of over 15,000 Web pages were compromised daily between January and March.

In contrast, the daily average for the entire 2007 was about 6,000, or one infected Web page every 14 seconds.

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Technorati Tags: Security

Proof that there is a bump in Saskatchewan, I’m going to get so killed when someone sees this.

Technorati Tags: Personal

“Race to Zero, a sideline competition being set up at this year’s DefCon, already has some Antivirus vendors steaming over the objectives of the contest. They are upset because it is essentially a polymorphism exercise. Entrants are given a set of malware samples which they must then modify to pass through a battery of antivirus scanners without detection while still carrying a viable payload. Even if competitors ignore the published vulnerabilities and weaknesses affecting antivirus vendors, the competition should turn up some interesting results. It may provide technical insight and concepts for further research as similar competitions have done in the past.”

Technorati Tags: News, Security

The lobby for US-style copyrights in Canada has gone into overdrive, recruiting a powerful Member of Parliament and turning public forums on copyright into one-sided love-fests for restrictive copyright regimes that criminalize everyday Canadians.

Dan McTeague is the Liberal MP from Pickering-Scarborough East, and he’s set to become the successor to Sam Bulte, the MP who lost her job for funding her campaign to get elected and appointed Heritage Minister by lining her pockets with massive donations from the very industries she would have ended up regulating. Reliable sources tell me that he’s the guy who pushed for Canada signing onto the WIPO copyright treaty in the committee’s anti-counterfeiting report last year, and that any time anyone in committee mentions fair dealing and user rights, he has a complete melt-down and shouts them down.

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Open source diary – ProInfo and Linux Educacional – KDE in Public Schools in Brazil

One of the highlights of fisl9.0 for me was getting to know better the work that is being done by Brazil’s Ministry of Education (MEC). They have just unveiled the numbers for the ongoing ProInfo project. What is interesting about this project is that it not only provides infrastructure (computers and net connectivity) but also open content to students in public schools.
The software installed on these systems is “Linux Educacional 2.0″, a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games, and some tools developed by the project.

globeandmail.com: A real page turner

ANN ARBOR, Mich. In a dimly lit back room on the second level of the University of Michigan library’s book-shelving department, Courtney Mitchel helped a giant desktop machine digest a rare, centuries-old Bible.

Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Inc.’s Book Search, a portal that will eventually lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.

“According to F-Secure, over 500,000 webservers across the world, including some from the United Nations and UK government, have been victims of a SQL injection. The attack uses an SQL injection to reroute clients to a malicious javascript at nmidahena.com, aspder.com or nihaorr1.com, which use another set of exploits to install a Trojan on the client’s computer. As per usual, Firefox users with NoScript should be safe from the client exploit, but server admins should be alert for the server-side injection. Brian Krebs has a decent writeup on his Washington Post Security Blog, Dynamoo has a list of some of the high-profile sites that has been hacked, and for fun you can watch some of the IIS admins run around in circles at one of the many IIS forums on the ‘net.”

Yikes does this mean that MS servers are not really better than linux? Billy would never fib to the masses would he? Baldy

Technorati Tags: Security