Slashdot

Technical Writing Geek writes "The results indicate that signature-based defenses for malware are no longer effective, the research firm said. Some 72 percent of networks with more than 100 workstations — and 23 percent of home users — are currently infected with malware, despite having operative antivirus or other signature-based tools in place, PandaLabs said.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=143424&WT.svl=news1_1"
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=143424&WT.svl=news1_1

Kleiba writes "On January 1st, the controversial reforms of German copyright law became effective. While the effects on the right to create copies for personal use have been discussed passionately in public, little attention has been payed to other fields affected by the changes, such as science. I am a scientist working at a research institute in Germany and I enjoy the fact that the web made access to colleagues' publications very easy: most of the time you can find a PDF on a researcher's homepage. Likewise I provide download links to my own papers. But now my institute points out that since the beginning of the year, it's not only illegal to make papers available for download of which you don't own the copyright (think reading assignments in seminars and university classes), but also even to download publications from sources other than the copyright holder. In practice, I assume this will be almost impossible to assess. Still, I will probably remove links to papers on my homepage myself: it's just too complicated and time consuming to think about who holds the copyright on each single publication (me? one of the co-authers? the journal? all of us?). Now, I was wondering what slashdotters think about what effects legal changes like these will have on the progress of science in Germany and in general."

Googling Yourself writes "Randall Munroe has an interesting post on his xkcd blog on a new approach to keeping the signal-to-noise ratio high when social communities grow past a certain point. While many forums use moderators to deal with noise as it happens, and communities like Slashdot use running peer-moderation, these methods don't seem to work very well for live time-dependent things like IRC channels. Munroe has put together an experimental auto-moderation system on the #xkcd-signal that uses "enforced originality" to keep content original and interesting. A moderator bot only allows members to say sentences that had never been said before and the bot mutes chatters for a period after every violation. "There would be no "all your base are belong to us", no "lol", no "asl", no "there are no girls on the internet." Just thoughtful, full sentences," says Munroe. So far the method seems to be working well with good, solid chat between relative strangers and very little noise. The Perl bot is available if you'd like to try it."

In another step towards universal free and open electronic documents, the Norwegian government has mandated the use of open document formats from January 1st, 2009.

Three formats have been chosen for all documentation between authorities and users/partners:

• HTML for all public information on the Web.
• PDF for all documents where layout needs to be preserved.
• ODF for all documents that the recipient is supposed to be able to edit

While government offices may publish in other formats, they must always also publish in one of these formats, so information will be available to people who do not wish, or cannot afford to use expensive proprietary software.

zxSpectrum writes "According to this blog post over at the The Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog, Internet Explorer 8 will pass the ."
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx

sjvn writes "The official word will be out any minute now, but in the meantime DesktopLinux has learned that Dell will be releasing Ubuntu 7.10 on a laptop and desktop with immediate availability. And, as an extra added bonus, they're tossing in legal DVD-playback capability. In a word: Neat."

http://homerecipesnote.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-to-play-tetris-on-ordinary.html