From LinuxToday: A lot of people in the Linux community don’t want to hear anything about what’s happening with
Microsoft; but the truth is that anything remotely resembling “world domination” will only be achieved, by
Linux, “over Microsoft’s dead body” — that’s the way MS is playing the game.

I’ve been waiting for the past two years to write a story about Linux putting a serious dent in Microsoft’s
bottom line. If Linux is going anywhere at all, eventually it has to show up in Microsoft’s revenues. I have
no doubt at all that Linux is going somewhere, so I’ve seen it as only a matter of time before MS would
put out that historic quarterly report that showed its profits shrinking — or at least growing at a rate far
enough below the 30% per year investors have come to take for granted it would send shockwaves
through the financial markets. This is inevitable, if MS revenues drop much below the market’s
expectations — that’s the way the financial community is playing the game.

Sin City prepares for the male-dominated IT audience with even raunchier lounge acts and escort services on red alert. Boys will be boys. Wired.com reports.

A Wired News scorecard of Democratic tech votes in the U.S. Senate shows the president’s party generally supportive of the industry. By Declan McCullagh and Nicholas Morehead.

“Microsoft’s 25th anniversary book, inside out: Microsoft – in Our Own Words,
was released last week to mark a quarter-century of the quest for world
domination.

It contains the edited versions of interviews with 1000 Microsoft employees
spanning the company’s history, laid out in hypertextual style between, on and
around photos of staff playing indoor golf and factoids about Microsoft’s
brilliant career in colorful fonts.” Fairfax IT reports.

PCWorld tells us: The latest virus definition update for Network Associates’ McAfee VirusScan can freeze computer systems, Network Associates has confirmed.

A Palestinian group is waging an online battle against AT&T for repairing the website of the Israeli
parliament, urging its subscribers to cancel their services, Wired.com reports.

From OSOpinion.com: “The tyrant of technology uses government-guaranteed technological secrets to include or
exclude people, companies, even churches and other social institutions. Nobody owns numbers,
nobody owns letters, and nobody owns the laws of physics or the rules of mathematics. But
tyrants can own protocols, they can own file formats, they can own interfaces, they can own
filters. The virtual tyrants both now and in the future can control by using the laws they create,
even if they can no longer leverage their strength to control by means of natural law.”

“Here at the Microsoft Security Response Center, we investigate thousands of security reports
every year. In some cases, we find that a report describes a bona fide security vulnerability
resulting from a flaw in one of our products; when this happens, we develop a patch as quickly as
possible to correct the error. In other
cases, the reported problems simply result from a mistake someone made in using the product.”

Like the Star Trek captain he is so fond of, Richard F. Rashid, senior vice president of
Microsoft Corp.’s Research Group, leads the Redmond, Wash.-based company’s
voyages into uncharted territory. He took the helm earlier this year after the departure of
chief technologist Nathan Myrvold, who had hired Rashid from Carnegie Mellon
University in 1991 to create the research division. Rashid now directs a staff of more than
600 researchers in four labs in the United States, China and England. He recently spoke
with Silicon Valley News Seattle Bureau Chief Kristi Heim.

SecurityFocus: There are many reasons for a villain to crack Microsoft’s network… industrial espionage just isn’t one of them. Mitnick on Microsoft.