Facing worries about its tracking Web surfers' every move, Google Inc. is now offering a feature to track Web surfers' every move. Its free Web History service is strictly voluntary - Google users can sign up to have the Internet giant keep detailed records of every website they visit so they can easily find them again later. Web History's quiet debut this week came as privacy advocates continued to raise alarms about the prospect of Google combining its collection of information on individuals with that of DoubleClick Inc. Google has agreed to acquire the New York-based company, which distributes Web ads and tracks where the majority of people go on the Internet, for $3.1 billion.

With two overlapping events, Microsoft admitted what we have been saying all along, Vista, aka Windows Me Two (Me II), is a joke that no one wants.

The second that Vista came out, Microsoft makes it very hard for you to sell anything other than Me II. It can't do this on the business side because it would be laughed out the door, but for the walking sheep class, well, you take what you are shovelled.

The other equally monumental Me II failure? Gates in China launching a $3 version of bundled Me II. Why is this not altruism? Well, it goes back to piracy and how it helped enforce the MS monopoly. If you can easily pirate Windows, Linux has no price advantage, they both cost zero.

If you fit Microsoft's somewhat convoluted definition of poor, it still wants to lock you in, you might get rich enough to afford the full-priced stuff someday. It is at a dangerous crossroads, if its software bumps up the price of a computer by 100 per cent, people might look to alternatives.

That means no Me II DRM infection lock in, no mass migration to the newer Office obfuscated and patented file formats, and worse yet, people might utter the W word. Yes, you guessed it, 'why'. People might ask why it is sticking with the MS lock in, and at that point, it is in deep trouble.

Apparently, a college student discovered and published a pretty major vulnerability found in the routers the company uses, allowing anyone to access the routers remotely. Rather than thank the customer for finding and highlighting a pretty serious vulnerability, the company has cut off his service and threatened him with lawsuits. Oh yeah, they also haven't bothered to fix the vulnerability -- despite it being published 7 weeks ago. The reasoning from the ISP is astounding. They claim that since they can't find any evidence that anyone ever used the vulnerability, he must have discovered it by "illegal" means.

And, of course, the ISP told the guy he's not allowed to talk about its legal threat to him -- which isn't actually legally binding. It's not clear if the ISP doesn't understand what it's done or simply doesn't want to fix the vulnerability -- but the fact that it seems to think it's ok to leave the vulnerability there and just cut off the guy who pointed it out should make other customers of BeThere wonder about how the ISP treats their security.

Software King of the World, Sir William Gates III told a throng of Chinese in Beijing that he wanted to double the number of computer users to two billion by 2015.

Vole plans to offer a software package called Microsoft Student Innovation Suite for $3 to governments purchasing and giving Windows-based computer to primary and secondary students.

This would be the alleged "past its sell by date" software that Vole wants the Western world to abandon in favour of Vista which it will not be issuing it at home after the end of the year. Orlando Ayala, senior vice president at Microsoft's emerging segments market development group said that the move was not philanthropic.

Vole was fed up with seeing its software pirated and sold at a fraction of the price of a genuine product, he said.

Whilst Microsoft was bragging about the sales number of their latest OS Windows Vista, few would actually know that they have only managed to sell 244 copies in the whole of China in the first 2 weeks. You heard that right, and that’s the number quoted from the headquarters of the Windows Vista chief (90% national volume) distributor in Beijing.

Internet cookies might not be as reliable an indicator of distinct Web site visitors as previously thought, according to a Monday report from Internet research company comScore.

A growing number of Internet users have taken to erasing their computer's cookies, which are unique identifiers inserted on a user's computer that reveal what Web sites someone has visited. While this might not seem like a catastrophic event, the deletion of these cookies could lead to inflated traffic reports for a particular Web site, according to the report.

Researchers found that 31 percent of U.S. Internet users erased their first-party cookies over the course of the month. As a result, Web sites could be inflating their web traffic by as much as 150 percent, according to comScore.

The Liberal Party (Venstre) Congress states that today's legal frameworks for copyrights are not adapted to a modern society. New technology gives artists and consumers vast opportunities, but also creates challenges. The balance between consumer demands, a society's need for openness and access to culture, and the artists' right to revenue and attribution, must improve.

Copyright law is outdated. A society where culture and knowledge is free and accessible by everyone on equal terms is a common good. Large distributors and copyright owners systematically and widely misuse copyright, and thereby stall artistic development and innovation.

We need new ways of compensating artists and copyright holders, to make free file sharing possible. Laws and regulations, both national and international, need to be changed so they only regulate limitations of use and distribution in a commercial for-profit context.

Recreation of old works should be regulated as fair use, and the existing laws against plagiarism are more than enough to protect the rights of copyright holders.

The Liberal Party wants a shorter copyright life span.

The Liberal Party wants to prohibit technical limitations on consumers' legal rights to freely use and distribute information and culture, collectively known as DRM.

It seems that the most recent DVDs released by Sony — specifically Stranger Than Fiction, Casino Royale, and The Pursuit of Happyness — have some kind of 'feature' that makes them unplayable on many DVD players. This doesn't appear to be covered by the major media yet, but this link to a discussion over at Amazon gives a flavor of the problems people are experiencing. A blogger called Sony and was told the problem is with the new copy protection scheme, and they do not intend to fix it. Sony says it's up to the manufacturers to update their hardware.

Security vulnerabilities which cause Word 2007 to crash and burn have been defended by the spinsters at Microsoft.

Apparently, Word 2007 was designed to crash like that and Microsoft is proud of this particular feature.

According to ComputerPartner, the 'flaws' were spotted by an Israeli researcher Mati Aharoni of Offensive Security who was surprised when Vole didn't get back to him on them.

When Word 2007 runs out of ideas about what to do with a malformed Word document it crashes and thus saves it the trouble of having to think about it.

Anyway it was 'no big deal', she said, as users can restart the application to resume normal operations.

In response to widespread chatter on blogs and forums, Microsoft has acknowledged the presence of hacks that may allow pirates to bypass the product activation security feature in its Windows Vista operating system.

According to a post by Microsoft Senior Product Manager Alex Kochis on the Windows Genuine Advantage developers' blog, Microsoft has identified two ways in which hackers have broken the product activation security feature on original equipment manufacturer PCs that come bundled with Vista. But the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant does not yet have plans to snuff out this threat.

Reports of a vulnerability in Vista's product activation began to surface last month with word of a crack called "Vista Loader 2.0," an enhanced version of the "Vista Loader 1.0" that was devised by Chinese hackers, according to a March 10 post on the My Digital Life blog.