Off you go… into the purple yonder!

Another exploit is loose in Windows land; this one is for XP and 2003 server and there is no patch yet from Microsoft. It’s got to do with the parsing of WMF files, which apparently are Windows Meta Files (pictures etc). More info from the Washington Post. Am I glad I don’t use Windows…
The article [...]

Good news from Australia - the Australian government will soon legalize time and media-shifting of copyrighted materials for personal use. So it will become legal for Australians to make MP3s from their CDs, and to use their VCRs to record tv programming for later viewing.
The article is on news.com.au (thanks Slashdot :)) - and it [...]

A bit quiter for a few days, after all it is the holiday season. I’m in San Antonio visiting family, and I can now confirm that everything is bigger in Texas. Even the christmas tree ornaments.

Happy holidays!

So Microsoft is working really hard to derail the Massachusetts efforts to adopt a truely open standard for its documents.
Bravely, Massachusetts decided in September to adopt the newly finalized OpenDocument standard for all its office documents, ensuring that the documents will remain readable in the future, and effectively breaking the hold that Microsoft, the [...]

So, thanks to the Conservatives and Socialists in the European Parliament (the two biggest fractions), a European Directive has been passed for mandatory data retention. It needs to be implemented in national law within 2 years in all of the member states.
This means that information about the e-mails you send and receive will be kept, [...]

I’ve been looking at upgrading my work-from-home environment to make it more ergonomic. The department of labor has some information and a checklist that is quite handy to evaluate your current work setup, and see where improvements can be made. In my case, on quite a few of their points.
So I’ve been dreaming up an [...]

I had not thought I would (ever?) say this, but I’ve got a warm fuzzy feeling for Dell right now. They have done something no other computer manufacturer has done before: they’ve released a 100% GPL’ed solution for upgrading the BIOS on their systems, pretty much across the entire product line. Yes, that includes laptops, [...]

The BBC reports that India has embarked on a massive defensive publishing project. They are building the ‘Traditional Knowledge Digital Library’, a 30 million page (!) encyclopedia describing traditional medicine, and will release it into the public domain.
Why?
They want to stop the (mostly) Western parasites that are patenting certain qualities of plants, many of which [...]