angry tapir sends along coverage from Good Gear Guide of a recent Microsoft !0-K SEC filing: "Microsoft for the first time has named Linux distributors Red Hat and Canonical as competitors to its Windows client business in its annual filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The move is an acknowledgment of the first viable competition from Linux to Microsoft's Windows client business, due mainly to the use of Linux on netbooks, which are rising in prominence as alternatives to full-sized notebooks. ... 'Client faces strong competition from well-established companies with differing approaches to the PC market,' Microsoft said in the filing. 'Competing commercial software products, including variants of Unix, are supplied by competitors such as Apple, Canonical, and Red Hat.'"

eldavojohn writes "So, you can't find the time to leave the World of Warcraft to seek help for your World of Warcraft addiction? Sounds reasonable. Well, addiction therapists are coming to meet you so you don't have to quit playing as they counsel you and your addiction. From the leader of this initiative, Dr. Graham: 'We will be launching this project by the end of the year. I think it's already clear that psychiatrists will have to stay within the parameters of the game. They certainly wouldn't be wandering around the game in white coats and would have to use the same characters available to other players. Of course one problem we're going to have to overcome is that while a psychiatrist may excel in what they do in the real world, they're probably not going to be very good at playing World of Warcraft.' Send in the level 5 counselor and let the games begin!" What happens when the therapists become addicted?

InfiniteZero writes "According to this WSJ story, 'Two teams of Chinese researchers working separately have reprogrammed mature skin cells of mice to an embryonic-like state and used the resulting cells to create live mouse offspring. The reprogramming may bring scientists one step closer to creating medically useful stem-cell lines for treating human disease without having to resort to controversial laboratory techniques. However, the advance poses fresh ethical challenges because the results could make it easier to create human clones and babies with specific genetic traits.'"

Several readers have written to mention that Microsoft has confirmed and unveiled the Zune HD. It has a "3.3-inch, 480 x 272 OLED capacitive touchscreen display, built-in HD Radio receiver, HD output," and it makes use of multi-touch input. More details will be forthcoming at E3, including how the device interacts with Xbox Live. Reader johnjaydk notes a PCWorld article that asks whether the Zune HD will be capable of competing with the iPod Touch. Quoting: "... the real competition between the Zune HD and the iPod Touch will come down to software. The new Zune will be based on a custom version of Windows CE, while the iPod Touch runs on the already popular iPhone platform, for which thousands of applications are available."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "With her trial coming up on June 15th, Jammie Thomas has received a motion by her lawyer to withdraw from the highly publicized case, Capitol Records v. Thomas. Ms. Thomas said in a written declaration (PDF) obtained from her by her lawyer that she was not opposed to the lawyer's withdrawal, and waived any hearing on the matter. The court papers submitted by the lawyer (PDF) also indicated that the RIAA was not opposed to the withdrawal — i.e. it graciously consented to Ms. Thomas having no legal representation — but was opposed to any continuance (i.e. the RIAA wants to make sure that Ms. Thomas does not have sufficient time to find other legal representation, or to prepare to handle the trial herself, or to enable new counsel to prepare to handle the trial). Nice of them."

An anonymous reader writes "Home directory encryption has been available on Linux for a while now, and it is definitely a smart, useful feature as it is not usually necessary to encrypt the entire drive, just the private documents and software profiles in the home directory. Windows is getting better about keeping everything that needs to be private in the user's home folder. Is there a similar solution for Windows to securely, and preferably transparently, encrypt the home directory only? (Preferably open source so that the code is available for peer review)."

Defeat Globalism writes in with a Canadian court decision that has ordered a man suing over injuries from a car accident to answer questions about content on his private "friends only" Facebook page. "Lawyers for Janice Roman, the defendant in the lawsuit, believe information posted on John Leduc's private Facebook site — normally accessible only to his approved 'friends' — may be relevant to his claim an accident in Lindsay in 2004 lessened his enjoyment of life. As a result of the ruling by Justice David Brown of Ontario's Superior Court of Justice, Leduc must now submit to cross-examination by Roman's lawyers about what his Facebook page contains. Brown's Feb. 20 ruling also makes clear that lawyers must now explain to their clients 'in appropriate cases' that postings on Facebook or other networking sites — such as MySpace, LinkedIn and even blogs — may be relevant to allegations in a lawsuit, said Tariq Remtulla, a Toronto lawyer who has been following the issue."

RichardDeVries writes "Three weeks ago, I contacted Google about a bug in Google Docs that shared documents without permission. The issue has been resolved and affected documents have had their collaborators removed. The documents' owners have been notified: 'To help remedy this issue, we have used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as being affected. Since the impacted documents are now accessible only to you, you will need to re-share the documents manually.' See my journal entry for details on my contact with Google. Although I think Google handled the issue admirably, this raises questions (again) about cloud computing, as well as Google's eternal beta-status for a lot of their services."

Creative Paper attracted worldwide interest for its paper made of kangaroo droppings in 2005. Well it's been four years and the best and brightest at Creative Paper haven't been sitting on their laurels. What's their great new idea? They have now launched a kind of paper made from wombat poo. Scat-obsessed Darren Simpson from Creative Paper says the paper is green or gold depending on the time of year the droppings are harvested. The wombat paper will be unveiled at an international paper conference in Burnie, Australia later this month.

DaMan1970 writes with news that Microsoft has purchased 3DV Systems, a company that specializes in motion detection technology. When early reports of this deal appeared last week, it led to speculation that this could be part of Microsoft's plans for future gaming technology. 3DV itself has been focused on the gaming market. "Now that graphics have become so advanced, it explains, the key to making a real difference lies in how you can control the game. The ZCam lets players control the game using body gestures alone, rather as PlayStation's EyeToy does, or Microsoft's Vision or Nintendo's Wii. 3DV Systems argues that its system is better than these, adding that you don't have to wear anything."

Iddo Genuth writes "Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) has announced its intentions to build a low-orbit space station which, according to the agency, will support future exploration of the moon and Mars. There's also a suggestion to extend the operational lifespan of the International Space Station by five more years, resetting its retirement date to 2020. The project proposal is already on its way for review by the Russian government. Some Russian sources also reportedly proposed the (rather ludicrous) idea of converting the ISS into some kind of an interplanetary transport vehicle, which would serve as the 'ultimate mother ship' in manned planetary missions to the moon or even Mars."

nitro writes "A fairly in-depth technical report by the security researchers at TippingPoint was released on how to reverse engineer the proprietary protocol for controlling a USB missile-launching toy system. They develop an iPhone application to control the device. 'The hardware is coupled with a simple GUI controller written in Delphi (MissileLauncher.exe) and a USB Human Interface Device (HID) interface written in C++ (USBHID.dll). The toys lost their allure within minutes of harassing my team with a barrage of soft missile shots. That same night I thought I would be able to extend the fun factor by coding up a programmatic interface to the launchers in Python. ... One interesting thing is that we have a lot more granular control of the turret movement now than we did with the original GUI. I wrote two simple loops to count the number of possible horizontal and vertical ticks and the results were 947 horizontal and 91 vertical versus 54 and 10 from the original GUI respectively. Granular control allows you to slowly and quietly reposition the turret for stealthy attacks.'"

crazyeyes writes "With Windows 7 set for release in Dec. 09, Microsoft is getting ready with their free upgrade program, which allows Vista users to switch to Windows 7 when it arrives. The folks at TechARP have consistently scored accurate scoops on Microsoft software releases. They have now revealed Microsoft's upgrade plans, schedules and even screenshots of the upgrade process."

Slashdot.org was unreachable for about 75 minutes this evening. Here is the post-mortem from Sourceforge's chief network engineer Uriah Welcome. "What we had was indeed a DoS, however it was not externally originating. At 8:55 PM EST I received a call saying things were horked, at the same time I had also noticed things were not happy. After fighting with our external management servers to login I finally was able to get in and start looking at traffic. What I saw was a massive amount of traffic going across the core switches; by massive I mean 40 Gbit/sec. After further investigation, I was able to eliminate anything outside our network as the cause, as the incoming ports from Savvis showed very little traffic. So I started poking around on the internal switch ports. While I was doing that I kept having timeouts and problems with the core switches. After looking at the logs on each of the core switches they were complaining about being out of CPU, the error message was actually something to do with multicast. As a precautionary measure I rebooted each core just to make sure it wasn't anything silly. After the cores came back online they instantly went back to 100% fabric CPU usage and started shedding connections again. So slowly I started going through all the switch ports on the cores, trying to isolate where the traffic was originating. The problem was all the cabinet switches were showing 10 Gbit/sec of traffic, making it very hard to isolate. Through the process of elimination I was finally able to isolate the problem down to a pair of switches... After shutting the downlink ports to those switches off, the network recovered and everything came back. I fully believe the switches in that cabinet are still sitting there attempting to send 20Gbit/sec of traffic out trying to do something — I just don't know what yet. Luckily we don't have any machines deployed on [that row in that cabinet] yet so no machines are offline. The network came back up around 10:10 PM EST."