PC Magazine had an article about New Year's Resolutions for digital photography. Let's look at how well you can keep those resolutions with free software.

1. Read the Manual - Free software has some of the best documentation and you don't need to hunt for dead tree copies of it.
2. Take a Class - This is not a bad idea because live in person help is the best there is. Visit your local computer club, LUG or free software organization. There is help for all levels of experience. Free software is all about community.
3. Carry a Tripod and Use it - Sure.
4. Get Your Photos Organized - PC Magazine talks about tagging and recommends M$'s new program. Free software has been at the party a long time on servers and the expertise has trickled down to the home user level. Digikam uses a real database for tags that won't let you down, has the most common tools in easy reach and more advanced tools that all work as well as can be. Sharing is not as integrated unless you install the same web server most commercial sites use - then you can skip the upload step all together.
5. Back Up Your Image Files - This is a good idea. Even if your file system is perfect, hardware failures happen. The best program to use is Grsync, which puts a friendly face on the industrial strength program rsync. Stay far away from M$'s home server because it corrupts your files.
6. Enter the Digital Focus Hot Pic Contest - Why not? Woops, bad idea, they call your picture and information their "property". If that does not bother you, go for it.

Free software is good for everything you do.

PC World has released it's year in review statistics and 2007 was not kind to M$. IE 6 users are equally likely to move to Firefox as they are to IE7 and no one wants Vista.

IE7 has steadily grown in usage over the year, going from around 24 percent usage to 37 percent today. But despite some predictions that it would strike a mighty Microsoftian blow against Firefox, it hasn't. Firefox started the year with 25 percent usage and ended it with 36 percent.

How much of an accomplishment is it for a new version of Windows to get to 14 percent usage in 11 months? The logical benchmark is to compare it to the first eleven months of Windows XP, back in 2001 and 2002. In that period, that operating system went from nothing to 36 percent usage on PCWorld.com--more than 250 percent of the usage that Vista has mustered so far.

Vistit the article to see the pretty graphs and to spike PC World's statistics more toward reality. It's clear that computer enthusiasts are not going for M$'s current offerings, show them what people really like.

Discussion is here.

The Vista Death Watch is PC Magazine's most popular column. That is just one of many items in Dvorak's review of yet another dissappointing year in Tech under the M$ monopoly.

ARM processor and early micro computer co-designer, Steve Furber has been awarded the CBE. His work continues to be interesting.

Professor Furber is currently building a new type of computer using the popular processors. The Spinnaker project aims to mimic the complex interactions in the human brain. arm chip The machine, nicknamed the "brain box", is designed to eventually contain one million ARM processors. "We are using ARMs like we were using transistors 20 years ago," he said.

We can assume he would be happy for you to imagine a Beowolf cluster of those.

File under blame the internet.

Cybercrime, the majority of which involves child pornography, is now the FBI's third-highest priority, behind counterterrorism and counterintelligence. The new program's proponents equate image viewing with rape and murder and punish those caught accordingly.

"Sending people to prison for five or 10 or 15 years for looking at pictures is killing an ant with a sledgehammer," said Peter Greenspun, who defended Charles Rust-Tierney, the former ACLU head sentenced to seven years in prison for downloading hundreds of images. "These people are being put on sex-offender registries, they are being ostracized from the community, for looking at pictures."

This despite statements by other government experts who contradict the program's rational.

[In 2002] the Crimes Against Children Research Center, funded in part by the Department of Justice, completed a study that revealed that rates of reported child sex abuse in the US have dropped by 30 percent in the past 10 years. The center's director, David Finkelhor, attributes this to effective public education, a general improvement in such child-welfare indicators as teen pregnancy and child poverty, and aggressive prosecution and treatment of those who abuse. Although he expresses concern that in certain people easy access to child porn might help develop the proclivity to abuse, or reduce the inhibitions against acting on those impulses, he says flatly, "There is no evidence that the Internet is fueling an explosion of child sexual abuse." He adds that "pornography is not one of the major causal factors" in the abuse of kids.

So, are we going to see this used as a tool to frame and remove political opposition?

If you don't like Vista, you must be a bigot or a liar. That sentiment expressed in this fanboy article has numerous echos on the M$ echo chamber. The author tries to prove that Vista is an upgrade to XP that delivered most of the features M$ promised. The author dares anyone to remember what M$ promissed and then goes on to dismiss a substantial list of features present in XP that are no longer in Vista as unimportant.

Roughlydrafted does a good job of remembering M$'s vaporware fraud. In 1991, the list of features was called Cario, and was designed to look better than Next and other competitors. When XP was released these features morphed into the "three pillars of Longhorn" and soon they will be a promised set of the next version of Windows. If you cut through the buzzwords what you get is a promise of speed, stability and portability from code rewrites that are never delivered. Vista, with it's digital restrictions insanity, is a larger throwback than ever. The feature set delivered was the one that big media asked for, not customers. The shiny, dumbed down UI has done more to infuriate customers than fool them this time.

The backlash against Vista is universal and well grounded. Everyone, from PC Magazine editors and hardware executives to working moms, has expressed their dissapointment and dissatisfaction. The groundswell of people noticing that Vista is a downgrade is encouraging. Hopefully, they will notice that things have always been this way and head for the speed, stability and standards compliance offered by free sotware and honest vendors like Apple or Sun.

It's good to have a memory.

The Washington Post reports mice cured of sickle cell anemia using stem cells from ordinary skin.

Using a recently developed technique for turning skin cells into stem cells, scientists have cured mice of sickle cell anemia -- the first direct proof that the easily obtained cells can reverse an inherited, potentially fatal disease.

the technique depends on the use of gene-altered viruses that have the potential to trigger tumor growth. "The big issue is how to replace these viruses," said Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., who led the new work with co-worker Jacob Hanna and Tim M. Townes of the University of Alabama Schools of Medicine and Dentistry in Birmingham.

Congratulations to the successful team.

Symantec and Ericsson security experts are concerned that, Teredo, Vista's IPv6 networking, bypasses network security through such devices as firewalls and recommend blocking it.

"Teredo is not recommended as a solution for managed networks. Administrators of such networks may wish to filter all Teredo traffic at the boundaries of their networks. The easiest mechanism for this would be to filter out incoming traffic with Source Port 3544 and outgoing traffic with Destination Port 3544."

Teredo is enabled by default in Windows Vista [and] network managers may not be aware that some of their hosts are using IPv6 through Vista and are now globally addressable.

The authors go on to list six or seven problems that revolve around the lack of tools to inspect and filter M$'s new system. Unspoken is the simple fact that Windows is still not ready for the internet and needs special protection.

System builders continue to feel the heat of Vista and Office 2007 rejection, which is creating a paradoxical situation where companies are paying two and three times for their seven year old software.

Downgrade rights, which are only available through volume licensing, have existed for more than a decade with Office, and since 2001 for Windows. But system builders and other Microsoft partners say they're witnessing a large and growing number of customers exercising downgrade rights to roll back Windows Vista to XP Professional, and Office 2007 to Office 2003.

"The whole concept that you have to buy an upgrade so you can downgrade to an older version is perverse anywhere but inside Microsoft," said DeGroot [of Directions On Microsoft]

One Microsoft partner who requested anonymity said growing interest in downgrade rights is an undeniable trend, as is the "bizarre denial" from Microsoft over the slow pace of Vista adoption. "For whatever reason, Microsoft executives have had their heads in the sand on Vista from day one. At the highest levels, there really seems to be a lot of denial over what's really happening with Vista."

The usual Wintel suspects are proud to announce that Vista has become begware. Ira summarizes:

With Service Pack 1, Microsoft is doing away with reduced functionality mode in favor of putting prominent notifications on systems that are not found to be genuine.

Also with SP1, Microsoft is closing two key loopholes that pirates have used to evade Microsoft's security measures. ... the process used by large computer makers to preactivate their Vista machines, [and] the grace period that customers have to activate their machine ...

Now, if they could only make the system work when it's not trying to annoy the user and less prone to call users criminals when WGA has bugs. For most people, these measures will be too little too late.

All your games are belong to Vivendi.

In a deal that creates the biggest independent video game publisher in the world, Vivendi announced Sunday it plans to acquire a controlling stake in Activision.

Activision's emphasis is on making games for consoles, like the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360. Its game franchises include the Tony Hawk skateboarding games, the Call of Duty war game series and one of the industry's current best sellers, Guitar Hero, which allows players to strum along on a plastic guitar to tunes played on the television. Vivendi's strength is in online multiplayer games, such as World of Warcraft, which has more than nine million players worldwide.

CRN lays out the consequences of the WAPD bug present in all versions of Windows:

The vulnerability could ultimately compromise millions of home or office machines, particularly those located outside the U.S., subjecting them to attack by cyber criminals who could then acquire passwords, monitor Internet use, or steal personal, financial or identifying information.

"The real risk here is, someone else may automatically configure your proxy for you and redirect traffic through their malicious server," said Oliver Friedrichs, Symantec (NSDQ:SYMC) security response director. "A lot of that traffic is encrypted, but the attacker could intercept it and cause it to be unencrypted."

Craig Schmugar, threat researcher for McAfee. "You could be sitting in Italy and your Web browser traffic is going to China before its intended destination. The person in the middle could influence the information if it was not encrypted."

As reported before, this bug is eight years old. A six year old fix was only good for ".com" TLDs.

While rolling out a partial fix, M$ finally admitted that the 19 hour WGA outage three months ago was a real system failure.

While [Microsoft's] Kochis called the incident a "temporary service outage" in his newest post, three months ago, he denied that the word applied. "It's important to clarify that this event was not an outage," he said on Aug. 29, five days after the servers went down [and downplayed the incident].

"I was looking for two things from Microsoft, and the first was that they would acknowledge that there was a failure," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Kirkland, Wash.-based Directions on Microsoft. ... "Second, I wondered if Microsoft would acknowledge that failures are going to happen, that something's going to go wrong no matter how many drills they have. And when that happens, what would they do? But I don't see anything like that here."

Since the outage, M$ has actually made WGA worse with even more reductions in functionality that will spring up the next time.

The Register is reporting a serious Windows bug that was supposed to have been fixed years ago.

the flaw affects every version of Windows including Vista and is actually the continuation of an old vulnerability that Microsoft supposedly fixed years ago.

The bug, according to Symantec's DeepSight threat notification service, resides in a feature known as Web Proxy Autodiscovery (WPAD), which helps IT administrators automate the configuration of proxy settings in Internet Explorer and other web browsers. The vulnerability can be "widely exploited" to "intercept web sessions, direct browsers to malicious proxies, and effectively gain control over unsuspecting users' web traffic,"

Microsoft appears to have released a patch for the vulnerability in 1999. But the patch only protected domain names ending in .com