Anonymous Coward Maximus writes with some interesting (and disheartening) bits found in recent EULAs from SUSE: "Apparently the Beta came/comes with an interesting EULA discussed in this Planète Béranger article that just makes me think where is this whole Novell/Microsoft ridiculousness going to end? One quote from the EULA to whet your appetite: 'The Software may contain an automatic disabling mechanism that prevents its use after a certain period of time, so You should back up Your system and take other measures to prevent any loss of files or data.' Hmmm... Here is the full Beta 3 EULA for you to dissect. Note that the final release has a different EULA that doesn't look that scary, but still mentions things like 'You acquire only a license to use the Software' and such." Personally, I find the "Benchmark Testing" section (under GENERAL TERMS in the final release's EULA) to be pretty irksome.

Pickens writes "Aaron Rower has an interesting post on Wired with the "Top 5 Reasons it Sucks to be an Engineering Student" that includes awful textbooks, professors who are rarely encouraging, the dearth of quality counseling, and every assignment feels the same. Our favorite is that other disciplines have inflated grades. "Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films," writes Rower. "Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores." For many students, earning a degree in engineering is less than enjoyable and far from what they expected. If you want to complain about your education, this is your chance."

Jeff recommends Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat's story from a community meeting with Northwest border control agents. Seems their monitoring for dirty bombs from the median of Interstate 5 caught a car transporting a radioactive cat. "It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear 'dirty bombs.' They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident. 'Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour... Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]. The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot.' Did he find a nuke? 'Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier.'"

At least one university liberal enough to accept the deeply flawed and mostly rejected Vista OS is recommending faculty and students stay away from SP1. "University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade their computers to the new service pack for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. The school's Information Systems & Computing department said it will support Vista SP1 on new systems where it's pre-installed, but added that it 'strongly recommends that all other users adopt a "wait and see" attitude,' according to a newly published department bulletin." And CIO magazine doesn't quite go so far as to call on Microsoft to throw away Vista, but it does ask its readers to weigh in on that topic.

buzzardsbay writes "We all know the complaints about young employees. They depend too much on their parents' money, they need constant hand-holding, they have no job loyalty, they demand more than they're worth, they disrespect older employees, and they're naive about corporate culture. But despite this conventional wisdom, there's growing evidence that the different working styles of Gen Y workers might be causing fundamental — and beneficial — changes in the way enterprises run, especially when it comes to IT. For example, they may show better judgment when making tech purchases and are often better with green IT initiatives. This is a nice counterpoint to a previous story (and resulting incendiary comments) that dubbed young tech workers a risk to corporate networks."

El_Oscuro writes "A genuine crack for Windows Vista has been released by pirate group Pantheon. The exploit allows a pirated, non-activated installation of Vista (Home Basic/Premium and Ultimate) to be properly activated and made fully-operational. 'It seems that Microsoft has allowed large OEMs like ASUS to ship their products with a pre-installed version of Vista that doesn't require product activation — apparently because end users would find it too inconvenient.'"

holy_calamity writes "Researchers have successfully added two 'unnatural' DNA letters to the code of life. They created two artificial base pairs that are treated as normal by an enzyme that replicates and fixes DNA inside cells. This raises the prospect of engineering life forms with genetic code not possible within nature, allowing new kinds of genetic engineering."

An anonymous reader writes "According to numerous posts on Apple's discussion forums (several threads of which have been deleted by Apple), as well as a number of popular video editing blogs, Apple's recent QT 7.4 update does more than just enable iTunes video rentals — it also disables Adobe's professional After Effects video editing software. Attempting to render video files after the update results in a DRM permissions error. Unfortunately, it is not possible to roll back to a previous version of QT without doing a full OSX reinstall. Previous QT updates have also been known to have severe issues with pro video editing apps."

climber writes "Just days after the first scareware for OSX, researchers are pondering the problems of an iPhone exploit that could lead to larger issues. The Trojan pulls legitimate apps off the phone if you try to remove it, but it only infects iPhones that have 'been modified or opened through a security hole in the system.' Though this worm is more of an annoyance than anything else, it could be a proof of concept for a more serious attack. 'The fear is hackers may be experimenting and gathering research that will increase the dangers of a more malicious attack in the near future. It is clear at least one writer -- the author of this piece at Web Worker Daily -- thinks that the iPhone should be left on the dresser in the morning. She offers several reasons that the device isn't a good corporate tool.'"

Serhei writes "It seems like the iPhone might not be released in France by this holiday season, since French requires by law that all cell phones sold there must be obtainable in an unlocked version. Apple will not be able to do so, since it has launched with a 5-year exclusivity agreement with AT&T. That deal will probably require exclusivity worldwide to avoid grey-market imports. (In return for this agreement Apple receives a large share of AT&T's monthly revenues from iPhone subscribers.) If the iPhone falls through in France, the country can join Belgium and a potentially long list of other countries with unlocking laws, whose Apple fans will have to make do with other, less Apple-y phones. Note that there is currently no mention of the iPhone on the Apple France page."

ktwdallas writes "Mathew Ingram from Canada's Globe and Mail writes that Microsoft will require at least the $299 Business version of Vista or higher if installing on a Mac with virtualization. Running the cheaper Basic or Premium versions would be a violation of their user agreement. According to the article, Microsoft's reasoning is 'because of security issues with virtualization technology'. Sounds suspiciously like a 'Mac penalty' cost that Microsoft is trying to justify."

An anonymous reader writes "Although antivirus companies will probably create a hype saying that iPods are prone to infections, a virus called 'Podloso' is a newly found virus that is just a proof of concept code that can infect iPods running Linux. Once launched, the virus scans the device's hard disk and infects all executable .elf format files. Any attempt to launch these files will cause the virus to display a message on the screen which says, 'You are infected with Oslo the first iPodLinux Virus.'"

An anonymous reader noted that Computerworld is running a story on the 20 must have Firefox extensions. Several of my favorites are in there so I'm looking forward to playing with the ones I haven't heard of.

Cuts and bruises writes "Hacker Joanna Rutkowska has flagged a "very severe hole" in the design of Windows Vista's User Account Controls (UAC) feature. The issue is that Vista automatically assumes that all setup programs (application installers) should be run with administrator privileges — and gives the user no option to let them run without elevated privileges. This means that a freeware Tetris installer would be allowed to load kernel drivers. Microsoft's Mark Russinovich acknowledges the risk factor but says it was a 'design choice' to balance security with ease of use."