According to a Chinese news publication, soldiers in Afghanistan may soon come up against a deadly new weapon in the war: monkey soldiers. The report claims that the Taliban are training the monkeys to shoot and kill American soldiers. They also claim to have pictures of monkeys holding AK-47s and Bren light machine guns. From the article: "The New York Magazine has reported about this in jest and stated on Friday, 'No invader has ever conquered Afghanistan, and now we know why. The monkeys will not allow it. It was a good effort, but it's time to pack it in. This is no longer a fight we can win.'”

An anonymous reader writes "I work for a company that repairs specialty devices that have an embedded Mini-ATX motherboard without a CD-ROM drive and run Windows XP Home. And while the USB flash drives we insert into them have a physical write-protect tab, we still encounter a (rather annoying) display dialog from malware/viruses to remove the write-protect so the malware can infect the flash drive. We don't remove the write-protect, obviously, but would like to offer our customers the option of removing the malware/virus without having to install any software. We would rather not install/uninstall antivirus software even for one-time use, due to various licensing issues, nor do we want to connect to the Internet to use web-based online scanners. Is there any stand-alone anti-virus/anti-malware software for Windows that can be run directly from the write-protected flash drive itself?"