Google has made arrangements to fully scan three university libraries as part of the “googleprint” program. Works which are no longer copyrighted will be generally available. Works with current copyright will be term searchable, and will allow viewing either of select pages, or will tell where the book can be viewed or borrowed. The University of Michigan has over seven million volumes in it’s library that will be scanned over the next several years.

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Two things happened this week, neither are certain wins, but both inspire the hope that somehow the good guys will eventually win the day.
The first one is that the EU has upheld the sanctions imposed upon Microsoft in it’s most recent anti-competitive litigation. Basically Microsoft were hoping to get a stay on the sanctions until they had completed their appeal. By the time they had dragged the appeal out to 5 years or so, the sanctions would be dust in the wind and not relevant at all. This we know because that is basically what happened when Microsoft was found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour by the US DOJ. Part of that case was about Microsoft putting Netscape out of business by including IE in Windows, but by the time it had its day in court, Netscape was already gone and the damage was done and Microsoft had already won.

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MicroSoft lost another key step in the landmark anti-trust case in the European Union. This article explains that MicroSoft must immediately release a thinned down version of it’s operating system, sans the media player, and give some proprietary information to the competition. In theory this should allow the competitors to better craft software to work within the Windows framework. A complete chronology of key steps in the litigation is here.

If you are running PHPBB on your site, now would be a really good time to ensure you have the latest fully patched versions of both the forum and PHP itself. The recently released Santy worm uses Google to find and target installed copies of the PHPBB forum that are at risk of recently disclosed PHP security flaws. If you see a site with the text “NeverEverNoSanity” on it (and not much else), then the chances are good that you are looking at a site hacked by the worm. Apparently around 40,000 sites have been affected so far.

Browsing an affected site will not cause any issues as the worm only infects the servers. You can read about the worm at F-secure If the full name is anything to go by, this worm was written in Perl sad to say, however it should indicate just how versatile and powerful Perl can be in the right (or wrong as in this case) hands.

INSERT! The day after this story was written, Google has removed Santy’s ability to search for vunerable systems to infect. That does not mean you don’t have to update your systems however, because a new variant could easily appear that bypasses Googles blocking mechanism.

Following our recent article on comment spamming of blogs, Movable type, a popular web log (Blog) has prepared a patch to stop the massive comment spamming problems that their users are having. The problem is getting so bad that web servers are being taken down by the load.

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After a setback in Maryland last week, where a court found Maryland’s anti-spam statute unconstitutional, a federal judge in Iowa goosed some spammers really well. An article in CNN reports the damage award to be in the billions. Of course the real problem is collection with spammers playing a shell game. As that article says:

Kramer’s attorney, Kelly Wallace, said he is unlikely to ever collect the judgment, which was made possible by an Iowa law that allows plaintiffs to claim damages of $10 per spam message. The judgments were then tripled under RICO.

RICO is a neat thing and something I have some experience with (from the good side of it I might add). Showing that the activity was that of a corrupt organization may allow you to hammer them with three times what you otherwise might receive. Good luck to them on collections.

Firefox has added live bookmarks as a great new feature to allow readers of your site to stay abreast of the latest news and postings via RSS feeds. If you see a little orange button to the very bottom right of your Firefox browser, then you can subscribe. This tutorial tells you how to enable your site for live bookmarks so that surfers to your site can subscribe to your RSS content with a few simple clicks.