Microsoft this week was sued in a Washington district court for allegedly violating privacy laws through Windows XP's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) copy protection scheme. Similar to cases filed in 2006, the new class action case accuses Microsoft of falsely representing what information WGA would send to verify the authenticity of Windows and that it would send back information [daily ip address and other details that could be used to trace information back to a home or user].

The complaint further argued that Microsoft portrayed WGA as a necessary security update rather than acknowledge its copy protection nature in the update. WGA's implementation also prevented users from purging the protection from their PCs without completely reformatting a computer's system drive.

Despite growing CSO and CISO recognition of the need to deploy end-users as standard users, and requirements by the Federal Government for the removal of administrator rights under the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) mandate, Windows 7 includes no significant changes to UAC for standard users.

"For enterprises, there is little benefit to the changes to User Account Control in Windows," said John Moyer, CEO of BeyondTrust. "Windows 7 introduces cosmetic changes to reduce the prompts that plagued Vista, but it does nothing to fix the underlying productivity and usability problems for standard users... Windows 7`s UAC slider puts end-users in charge of the security decision of what to run with administrative privileges, which is essentially an invitation for malicious users, hackers and malware."

I work at Best Buy (insert boos and hisses) and I was doing some Microsoft ExpertZone training. ... during my training modules, a "Linux vs Windows 7" module appeared. Here are screenshots of the lies Microsoft is portraying.

Okay so here's where it starts getting bad. [bogus claims that gnu/linux won't work your ipod, do video chat, play World of Warcraft and so on]

With Windows XP, I found, as I expected, that there is no easy way to upgrade. ...I had to reinstall every, last application, fonts and drivers. ... The only version of Windows that can be upgraded without jumping through hoops is Vista. Even Vista, however, can only be upgraded easily from the same version to another or to Windows 7 Ultimate. [Mossberg had to reinstall all of his programs with Vista, so the few who suffered through that may not really have it easier.]

In stark contrast, Ubuntu was easy to upgrade. There's simply no comparison. Mac OS X Snow Leopard is also an easy upgrade. Just like Ubuntu Linux, all you really need to do is put in the DVD, make a few mouse clicks, and go have lunch while it runs. Once installed, both Snow Leopard and Ubuntu ran perfectly. That's more than I can about Windows 7. [typical Windows networking problems follow]

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. Young people today write far more than any generation before them. Students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos, assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. ... In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. ... The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. ... new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis, from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs, has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.

Think most netbooks have single-core processors, 1GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard drive because their manufacturers like conformity? Right. The reality — never officially acknowledged — is that Microsoft doesn't cheaply license its operating systems to netbooks with specs that are too good (see the limitations at TechARP)

According to Ou, "What I have found is that Windows 7 battery life is (very slightly) better than Windows Vista. However, it's not quite as good as Windows XP" ... Personally, I've found the battery life on my laptop dipped noticeably after installing Windows 7 RC on my Windows Vista laptop. What's the mileage for you early adopters out there, who have tried out Windows 7 already?

Microsoft used its might inside the government to break apart those two willing partners ... one year later, Yahoo! is headed by a former Microsoft ally (Autodesk CEO) and a poisoned board of directors.

in contrast to Yahoo!'s recommendation of Firefox 3.0 last year (under Jerry Yang's leadership), Yahoo! now promotes IE8. Yahoo, and Amazon have decided to join together in the soon to be formed Open Book Alliance. Microsoft supported more aggressive actions, including lawsuits, against Google's book scanning [after giving up their own failed book scanning effort].

I was humming along with Windows 7 for most of this past week. And then something happened. My browser crawled to a stop yesterday. Im not sure what changed if anything but it was like someone had secretly snuck into my netbook and swapped the 2GB stick with a 256MB module. The CPU kept hitting 100 percent, so browser tabs were taking 15 seconds or more to render content. Thats a productivity killer for what I do, and after a few hours of torture yesterday, I went back to Windows XP.

among 1,808 respondents aged 18 to 24 that three-fifths of them used p2p services, and four-fifths of those did so at least once a week. ... The average size of CD collections was 70 (for 14-17 year olds) and 98 (for 18-24 year olds), ... 77% of respondents said that they would still buy original albums even if they subscribed to a music download service. ... [for] sleeve notes, the sound quality and the desire to own a physical object. 44% of respondents said that one reason for wanting a CD was that it "cannot be deleted"

They applied all the patches, called that build the RTM, then said the RTM was unaffected. Then [they] released a press release patting Windows 7 on the back for being more secure, even though at least half those bugs affected it too. You wouldn't notice this unless you had been following the Windows 7 build process pretty closely.

Users will have to erase their entire hard disk and re-install everything to switch to Windows 7. This video was weird because Mossberg was a huge booster of Windows 7 in January. Now [WSJ Mossberg] guy is providing a reality check. ... Apparently Windows 7 has changed enough so that you cannot drop it in as a new OS and expect it to run anything that has been previously installed. In the past, this upgrade-in-place was always feasible, although it was never as good as a clean install.

Microsoft and Intel have reached an agreement that the next generation of Netbooks will not have displays larger than 10.2 inches. Vendors that insist on making minilaptops with larger LCDs will not be eligible for the lower Windows 7 volume licensing rates for these machines.

Hundreds of millions of Internet users were annoyed because of Windows botnet-based DDoS aimed at one (1) person. ... Some people out there used no fewer than six Windows botnets to go after this one guy. And, in the process, they knocked out, for hours at a time, most of the major social networks.

It happened because Windows is an insecure piece of junk. Anyone who knows anything about security knows that this kind of disaster was only a matter of time. Windows botnets are responsible for DDoS attacks and most of e-mail spam. You cannot secure Windows. Microsoft keeps saying that they will, and they always fail. Period.

the results were mixed. Boot times, despite dedicated tweaking from Microsoft were slightly worse than in Vista SP2 or XP SP3 (by over a second). Shutdown times, though, showed much improvement over the slow XP, and even some improvement over Vista. Since the 7100 build, Windows 7's performance in Microsoft Office and iTunes has improved significantly. In the Office benchmark, though it still gets beat by both Vista and XP.