Anyone who uses Skype has consented to the company reading everything they write. The H's associates in Germany at heise Security have now discovered that the Microsoft subsidiary does in fact make use of this privilege in practice. Shortly after sending HTTPS URLs over the instant messaging service, those URLs receive an unannounced visit from Microsoft HQ in Redmond.

In the tender for equipment for Regional Centre for Transferring Modern Technologies in Mielec, Poland, bidders can offer any IT solution, as long as it's not based on Free and Open Source Software.

At the beginning of December, we warned the Copyright Office that operating system vendors would use UEFI secure boot anticompetitively, by colluding with hardware partners to exclude alternative operating systems.

Want to know when a bit of news has really hit the mainstream? It's when the Taiwanese company Next Media Animation does a computer generated animation of the story. ... Yup, the battle over SOPA, which they animate by showing Hollywood lobbyists seeking to attack the internet, and showing not only how tech companies teamed up to fight this, but that internet users are pushing back.

Microsoft has announced that if computer makers wish to distribute machines with the Windows 8 compatibility logo, they will have to implement a measure called "Secure Boot." Secure Boot is designed to protect against malware by preventing computers from loading unauthorized binary programs when booting.

Is Microsoft using a next-generation computing boot-loading technology to lock out the use of Linux and other OSEs on certain computers? While Microsoft has denied malicious intent, one Red Hat developer maintains that this may be the case.

Karsten Gerloff, president of lobby group Free Software Foundation Europe, said the ongoing Microsoft arrangement was a "disgrace" for the European Commission (EC).
"It's astounding that every single agreement between the Commission and Microsoft since 1993 has been concluded without a public call for tender," he said.

After measuring the IQs of exactly 101,326 users and correlating their scores with the browser they had used to access the test, "There was a clear indication ... that the subjects using any version of Internet Explorer ranked significantly lower on an average than others,"