The ISPA awards, organised by the Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA, UK), were held on 19 February 2004.

The special award for internet hero went to Steve Linford and Spamhaus who were nominated "for educating people about spam, endeavouring to thwart spammers and urging the US to reject the opt-out approach to spam legislation ".

Whilst the internet villain was named as Verisign, who was nominated "for their presumption that they own the internet" and for "the domain name system hijacking scandal"

Another nomination for villain was the RIAA (as mentioned on this /. article).

The winners list in full.

New Scientist are reporting in this article that a new game, Project Entropia, will require real cash to fund purchases of in-game merchandise.

The game, due for release in Jan 2003, will be free to download. However, gamers will be required to pay real money for goods which are required to survive. The purchases will also degrade over time - so more money will need to be funneled into the game..

The upside, gamers can also find/accumulate money within the game world and convert it back into real cash.

The article optimistically declares that "The games developers say early glitches, like disappearing money, have now been eliminated."

Now taking virtual cash bets to predict how long before someone takes advantage of this 'game' :)

MS released a cummulative patch for 3 issues with media player today, only one of the issues is marked as critical.

The thing that got me was that one of the paragraphs stated a bunch of stuff about digital rights management including a comment that MS could in the future automatically download stuff to your machine without your permission that may even disable key OS components in the interests of protecting digital rights and secure content.

This struck me as quite a concern and it could just be me, but i don't recall ever seeing anything quite as ludicrous in a MS EULA before. That said, they have done some pretty draconian things previously, but this took it a step further.

Anyway, I didn't install the patch, I'd prefer to uninstall media player, its not like I use it often anyway.

How about you? Would you install a patch that gave MS permission in theory to do bizarre things to your machine (cos its not like they do that anyway, is it? :P).

This seems to me to be insidious and scary.. but maybe that's just me and my paranoia.

Microsoft was found guilty of software piracy last year by a French court but somehow the story escaped my notice at least ...

Vnunet are now reporting about it :)

Makes you wonder how many other interesting snippets slip through the cracks.

Just when you were getting over the idea of bees tracking down explosives..

Water pistols are apparently going to be used to destroy landmines.

Spud guns to destroy missles coming next.

Bomb sniffing Bees are being created/trained by the pentagon, according to Ananova.

Sounds like a funky idea, although they apparently have drawbacks too - can't use them at night or in the winter .. what next? Train them to diffuse the bombs?

Yahoo are reporting that verisign are being sued for false advertising by one of its rivals.

It seems that finally they're getting some payback for the widely publicised scare tactics they've been using to try to drum up some business for themselves.

Update: NewsBytes are also reporting this with a few other details.

Well, I finally got something on the front page of /., although I did it under an anonymous name of weirdlet so I can't really claim much credit cos people won't believe me :P.

So. I figured two things out, 1) from now on I'll submit stories using this name, 2) I'll keep a journal of stories I find interesting - that way even if they don't get on the front page I have my own mini-slashdot.

I'll enable comments on most things so that there is some sort of feedback route available.