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This article from Desktop Pipeline gives an overview of how Digital Rights Management is being used by some to turn the download of a digital license into a spyware download.

I don’t want to sound like gloom and doom but it’s not safe out there. You have to make sure you know what you’re downloading, and from where. And it’s getting more and more difficult to do so.

Reported in BetaNews, the article (link here) says that Sun has revoked FreeBSD’s Java license, preventing them from shipping Java support in their operating system.

Sounds like Scott’s been taking lessons from his most hated rival and is actually outdoing him!

Microsoft has a tool you can run on Win2K, 2003 Server and XP to see what ports are open and which process has them open. It’s called PortQryV2 and is available here. There’s also a GUI front-end to it called PortQryUI, available here.

Thanks to WindowsITPro for this information. Sign up for their newsletters here.

A free magazine from the UK, Home Computer Magazine is truly free, requiring no registration. It’s distributed as an unprotected PDF so you can download it, save it and view it on your own schedule. Comes in 4 versions: 2 broadband versions which include “all animated screens and interactive content” (1 regular and 1 for BitTorrent users) and 2 narrowband versions (1 regular and 1 BitTorrent). The difference between the broadband and narrowband versions is the amount of interactive content.

Don’t know if you saw this or not and I don’t think it was in the pack of updates that came out last week. eWeek has this article on it. The KnowledgeBase article id is 886185.

Microsoft has published KB885222 documenting the issues which can include a slowdown or complete inoperability of your IEEE1394 devices.

Good article in the Windows Secrets Newsletter, outlining the differences between IMAP and POP3. I’m an IMAP believer, having several computers and not willing to restrict my email activities to one of them.

Link is here.

Microsoft now include a ClearType Tuner in their PowerToys (available here. Very useful if you have a laptop or an LCD display.

See this link to the Lookout forums for more information. The latest version (v.1.2.3) is available here.

What is it? An free Outlook plug-in that makes it easier to search and find messages. More info is here.

They’ve brought Firefox another step closer to being able to function as a tabbed browser. Type about:config in the URLbar and scroll down to or filter browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs, right-click on it and set it to true. This will enable another set of options in the Tools->Options, Advanced (apparently someone found an unreproducible bug in one of the Firefox 1.0 previews so they disabled the feature in the release version). The options made available by setting this flag doesn’t appear to be a complete fix, though as bookmarks still seem to open in the same tab as do URLs typed into the URLbar. One can install Tab browser Preferences to handle typing into the URLbar and miniT Enhanced takes care of opening bookmarks into a new tab. Tabbrowser Preferences is a biggie, though, so it probably obviates the showSingleWindowModePrefs change/fix.