Kelly writes "An unsealed document in a Washington lawsuit filed last week at Seattle, Microsoft was well aware that the Xbox 360 was prone to damaging game discs even before the console was introduced in November 2005. Microsoft had three solutions for solving the issue, but all three solutions were rejected due to technical concerns or on the basis of cost. Microsoft settled on a cost-free fourth solution: a warning was added to Xbox 360 manual, which essentially placed the blame on users instead of the hardware." The scratching-disks problem was mentioned a few years back, too. I wonder whether more people would prefer a slight discount on the price of a console to the ability to reorient it while a disk was playing inside.

George Reese writes "It seems a lot of people are mistaking the very valuable benefit that cloud computing enables — dynamically scaling your infrastructure — with the potentially dangerous ability to scale your infrastructure automatically in real-time based on actual demand. An O'Reilly blog entry discusses why auto-scaling is not as cool a feature as you might think."

Wiseleo writes "Yahoo decided to massively screw up their entire userbase by changing all user profiles to blank. No warning, no automated way to get data back, and other unwanted changes. The blog has such choice quotes as 'We know this has been a rough transition for some of you and, and are committed to helping you use, understand, and (hopefully) enjoy your new profile,' and, 'We also know lots of you worked hard on your old profiles and want your data. If you feel like you're missing data, we've saved a copy of your old profile (and alias) and our Customer Care team can retrieve this information. You won't, however, be able to revert back to your old profile format, but you will be able to get any data that you think is missing. To do this, please go here to contact Customer Care.' There were 850 comments posted, all negative, on the first day. There are hundreds more today. There is even more outrage on the Yahoo Messenger blog."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Chicago, Illinois, a Kazaa customer has filed a class action against Kazaa, Lewan v. Sharman, U.S.Dist. Ct., N.D. Ill 06-cv-6736. The lead plaintiff, Catherine Lewan, was a Kazaa customer who was sued by the RIAA for her use of Kazaa, and paid a settlement to the RIAA, and she sues on behalf of others in her position. In her complaint(pdf) she alleges, among other things, that Kazaa deceptively marketed its product as allowing 'free downloads' (Complaint, par. 30); it designed the software in such a manner as to create a shared files folder and make that folder available to anyone using Kazaa, while at the same time failing to make the user aware that it had done so (Complaint, par. 36-37); and it surreptitiously installed 'spyware' on users' computers which made the shared files folder accessible to the Kazaa network even after the user had removed the Kazaa software from his or her computer (Complaint, par. 42-45)."

emil10001 writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has rejected a proposal suggesting that electronic voting have a paper trail. The draft recommendation was developed by NIST scientists, who called out electronic voting machines as being 'impossible' to secure." From the article: "Committee member Brit Williams, who opposed the measure, said, 'You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.' The proposal failed to obtain the 8 of 15 votes needed to pass. Five states — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and South Carolina — use machines without a paper record exclusively. Eleven states and the District either use them in some jurisdictions or allow voters to chose whether to use them or some other voting system." So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?
Update: 12/11 03:20 GMT by KD : Correction: It was not NIST that rejected NIST's recommendations, it was a federal panel chartered by Congress, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.

Country Lawyer writes "Washington state's anti-spyware law has just resulted in a $1 million victory for the state, the first successful prosecution under the new law. The weird thing? They sued an anti-spyware vendor." From the article: "Washington State went after the company after 1,145 state residents purchased the software and the complaints began rolling in. Secure Computer president Paul Burke will now pay $200,000 in penalties, make $75,000 worth of restitution to Washington residents, and pay another $725,000 to cover the state's attorneys' fees. The irony of an anti-spyware law being used against an anti-spyware vendor was not commented upon."

0xbl00d writes "Eweek.com is reporting a new Microsoft Word zero-day attack underway. Microsoft issued a security advisory to acknowledge the unpatched flaw, which affects Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac and Microsoft Word 2004 v. X for Mac. The Microsoft Works 2004, 2005 and 2006 suites are also affected because they include Microsoft Word. Simply opening a word document will launch the exploit. There are no pre-patch workarounds or anti-virus signatures available. Microsoft suggests that users 'not open or save Word files,' even from trusted sources."