rimberg writes "The Department for Constitutional Affairs has announced it is going to trial Electronic voting using the internet and/or telephone. Bridget Prentice, Elections Minister at the department said 'We need to make sure that people can vote in more convenient ways consistent with a modern lifestyle. [...] More and more people, and particularly young people, are using the internet everyday. We need to see if we can use this to encourage people even more to participate in the democratic process.' The Open Rights Group (Think British EFF) have responded by saying 'E-voting threatens the integrity of our elections and we oppose its use in our democracy.'"

Michael J. Ross writes "Every Web developer knows that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) makes it possible to separate the contents of Web pages from the styling of the elements on those pages. This in turn confers tremendous advantages, such as allowing site-wide changes of appearance to be made just once, in a single stylesheet file, rather than in all of the pages containing the affected elements. The syntax and proper usage of CSS is not as simple as implied by many HTML/CSS books, most of which fail to provide enough detail as to how CSS is applied to page elements. Web developers relying upon these books soon find themselves hitting those limits, and becoming frustrated when trying to debug Web pages. CSS: The Definitive Guide, authored by CSS expert Eric A. Meyer, aims to fill that gap." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Security researcher Alex Ionescu claims to have successfully bypassed the much discussed DRM protection in Windows Vista, called 'Protected Media Path' (PMP), which is designed to seriously degrade the playback quality of any video and audio running on systems with hardware components not explicitly approved by Microsoft. The bypass of the DRM protection was in turn performed by breaking the Driver Signing / PatchGuard protection in the new operating system. Alex is now quite nervous about what an army of lawyers backed by draconian copyright laws could do to him if he released the details, but he claims to be currently looking into the details of safely releasing his details about this at the moment though."

Xampper writes to tell us that the OSSDI (Open Source Software Distribution Initiative) is a new organization that has cropped up to help not only spread the word about Open Source Software, but to help distribute the OpenOffice.org office suite starting with less fortunate school districts. The OSSDI describes their current status as still being in its "infancy as an organization. Because of this, all of our current resources are focused on gaining supporters, raising funds, and recruiting volunteers. Plans are under-way for our first software distribution, but we must first cover our operating costs. We are also interested in becoming a registered not for profit corporation so that donors will receive tax breaks for their gifts, but the registration process can also be very costly and time-consuming."

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has retracted their recent controversial patent application. The story was first brought to light by Slashdot on Saturday. Today, Jane Prey of Microsoft announced the retraction on the SIGCSE (Special Interest in Computer Science Education) mailing list. 'Many thanks to the members of the community that brought this to my attention — and here's the latest. The patent application was a mistake and one that should not have happened. To fix this, Microsoft will be removing the patent application. Our sincere apologies to Michael Kölling and the BlueJ community.'"