kapaopango writes "Ars Technica is reporting that upgrade versions of Windows Vista Home Basic, Premium, and Starter Edition cannot be installed on a PC unless Windows XP or Windows 2000 is already installed. This is a change from previous versions of Windows, which only required a valid license key. This change has the potential to make disaster recovery very tedious. The article says: 'For its part, Microsoft seems to be confident that the Vista repair process should be sufficient to solve any problems with the OS, since otherwise the only option for disaster recovery in the absence of backups would be to wipe a machine, install XP, and then upgrade to Vista. This will certainly make disaster recovery a more irritating experience.'"

ack154 writes "Engadget has a story about Sony and Universal Music apparently denying Zune owners the ability to 'squirt' songs by certain artists to other Zune users. That's right, if you've actually purchased songs from the Zune marketplace and happen to run into another Zune owner, you're prohibited from sharing certain songs. From the article: 'In a non-scientific sampling of popular artists by Zunerama and Zune Thoughts, it looks like it's roughly 40-50 percent of artists that fall under this prohibited banner, and the worst news is that there's no warning that a song might be unsharable until you actually try to send it and fail.'"

quizzicus writes "Paperless electronic voting machines 'cannot be made secure' [pdf] according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In the most sweeping condemnation of voting machines issued by any federal agency, NIST echoes what critics have been saying all along, that due to the lack of verifiability, 'a single programmer could rig a major election.' Rather than adding printers, though, NIST endorses the hand-marked optical-scan system as the most reliable."

asv108 writes, "On the Hula general mailing list today, it was announced that Novell is no longer providing full-time developers to Hula. While the project will continue, it appears that Novell is not committed to developing a viable open-source alternative to MS Exchange. The Hula project was announced in February 2005 with much fanfare."

Mantrid42 writes "Schools in the UK are getting rid of their WiFi network, citing health concerns from parents and teachers. The wireless emanations, parents fear, may be the root cause of a host of problems from simple fatigue to the possibility of cancer. A few scientists think younger humans may be more vulnerable to the transmissions, because of thinner skulls. From the article: "Vivienne Baron, who is bringing up Sebastian, her ten-year-old grandson, said: 'I did not want Sebastian exposed to a wireless computer network at school. No real evidence has been produced to prove that this new technology is safe in the long term. Until it is, I think we should take a precautionary approach and use cabled systems.'"

prostoalex writes, "Wired magazine has coined a new term for the massive data centers built in the Pacific Northwest by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Cloudware is, ironically, a return of the centralized data and bandwidth power houses caused by the decentralized and distributed nature of the Internet. George Gilder thinks we're witnessing something monumental: 'According to Bell's law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born? How will we feed it? How will it be tamed? And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?'"

Roland Piquepaille writes "Major power outages like the ones which affected the New York state last month or Western Europe ten days ago are becoming more frequent — even if their causes were different. In some cases, the utility companies have to dispatch electricians all over the place to discover the cause of the power failure or simply to restore power. Engineers at the University of Buffalo think they have a better solution: deploy wireless 'nanotech' sensors to monitor the networks and to find the exact location of a failure. They also say that even if the technology is almost available, several years of research are necessary before such a solution can be used by electrical companies. Read more for additional details about this attractive solution."

Schneier is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security has decided to delve into why upper management doesn't "get" IT security threats. The results aren't terribly surprising to those in the trenches, stating that most executives view security as something akin to facilities management. "Thankfully", the $495 report (if you aren't a "Conference Board associate") helps tell you how to handle the situation.