darryl24 writes "Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia opened up TechEd 2006 in Boston Sunday evening by proclaiming that Windows Vista was the most secure operating system in the industry. But a bold statement can only go so far, and much of this week's conference has been spent reinforcing that point. Microsoft also acknowledges that nothing is infallible when it comes to computer security. In turn, the company has employed black hat hackers for what is called a penetration, or pen, test team."

RockClimbingFool writes "Tom's Hardware has a pretty good overview of what the current beta version of Microsoft Windows Vista has to offer. The article is written from an average user's perspective, specifically highlighting exactly which differences the average computer user can expect to see from Windows XP to Windows Vista. It covers everything from IE7, to the new Windows Aero interface, to brand new games." But if you'd like your eye candy open source and downloadable now, check out Lunapark6's review of the current version of Ubuntu Dapper, with "emphasis placed on helping someone set up the system for everyday desktop usage."

goldaryn writes "Valence Media, the parent company of Torrentspy.com, one of the web's largest torrent search engines, has filed a lawsuit against the MPAA for allegedly hiring a hacker to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets. From the suit: 'The Motion Picture Association of America willfully and intentionally obtained without authority, conspired to obtain without authority, purchased, procured, used and disclosed private information that it knew was unlawfully obtained through unauthorized access to Plaintiffs' computer servers and private email accounts, in violation of United States and California privacy and computer security laws.'"

isaacklinger writes "Time Magazine reports how it feels to play with the Wii. Overall it's a very enthusiastic review." From the Gamespot coverage: "Grossman traveled to Nintendo's headquarters in Kyoto, Japan, and was shown the Wii by legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. The reporter was especially impressed with the Wii's controller. 'It's part laser pointer and part motion sensor, so it knows where you're aiming it, when and how fast you move it and how far it is from the TV screen ... There's a strong whiff of voodoo about it.'" Update: 05/08 16:50 GMT by Z : Ran into a registration screen when I tried for the original article, but eldavojohn had more luck than I. The original Time article is available for reading.

Art Grimm writes to mention a post at Ed Bott's Microsoft Report on ZDNet. There, he talks about Vista's User Account Control, and the issues he sees with the setup as it exists now. From the article: "The UAC prompts I depicted in the first post are those that appear when you install a program, when you run a program that requires access to sensitive locations, or when you configure a Windows setting that affects all users. But as many beta testers have discovered, UAC prompts can also show up when you perform seemingly innocent file operations on drives formatted using NTFS. In this post, I explain why these prompts appear and why some so-called Windows experts miss the obvious reason (and the obvious fix)."

j79 writes "John Dvorak has written an opinion piece on why he believes Microsoft is dead in the water. He discusses Vista, Office 2007, MSN and MSN search, the Xbox 360, Pad-based computing, .Net, and Microsoft's obsession with Google. "

Lincoln 'PrOpHeT' Grixti writes "The Everglide s-500 Headphone is the ultimate tool for gamers that pass long hours using their headset for their gaming needs. It has been designed for gamers, by gamers, with the aid of leading world-wide professionals such as Sander "Voo" Kaasjager and other CPL World Tour Winners. The headset is available for sale with a price tag of $99.99 from Everglide Store. Some might say it's quite expensive for a headset, but when compared to other professional gaming headsets, the price is quite cheap." update Sorry folks, apparently the linked website barfed.

gr8_phk writes "An interesting article over at C|Net claims that playing DRMed music can reduce battery life up to 25 percent. Yet another reason to stick with plain old MP3 files." From the article: "Those who belong to subscription services such as Napster or Rhapsody have it worse. Music rented from these services arrive in the WMA DRM 10 format, and it takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself. Heavy DRM not only slows down an MP3 player but also sucks the very life out of them."