In the news

Acer buys Gateway and overtakes Lenovo as the third largest PC/Laptop manufacturer behind HP and Dell. This move dramatically increases Acer's penetration into the American market, where Gateway was the third largest producer. This is bad for Lenovo.

Privacy fears as Facebook makes member listings public: make sure you check your settings as the default is that your profile is indexed by search engines like Google and Yahoo.

XP SP3: TechNet and MSDN subscribers to get beta in two weeks: This caught me by surprise.

Sophos reports on the rise and fall of PDF spam: PDF trojan appears to have not worked.

Why watermarking is a bigger devil than DRM: There's one prediction I wish I had put on my list at the beginning of the year is the demise of DRM. Watermarking is a technique for creating a digital fingerprint on top of content that cannot be removed. It is supposed not to affect the quality of the original, but Ou makes a good case against that probability. Now I hate watermarking too.