F_SMASH writes "The United States' Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has charged a group of companies and individuals with failing to include required warnings on 'sex' related spam e-mail."

Jimmy M writes "Microsoft has released three security bulletins for January, which correct vulnerabilities in the handling of Icon and Cursor files, Indexing Services, and HTML Help. Bulletin MS05-001 (HTML Help) is the Extremely Critical vulnerability (Demonstration) that Secunia warned about last week - nice to see a quick move from MS. All updates are available from Windows Update."

norburym (Mary Norbury-Glaser) writes "If you own the first edition of this book, then it's probably dog-eared and well thumbed-through, so now's a good time to upgrade to this extensive volume, Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, second edition. This book covers Fedora Core 2 (2.6 kernel) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3 (2.4 fork version with 2.6 kernel features) and includes Fedora Core on four CDs, which comprises the complete release. Mark G. Sobell accomplishes what many fail at: he has successfully crammed a huge amount of information into one volume in a compact, perfectly readable manner. This second edition serves two audiences, the end user and the administrator, and consequently combines two topics that easily could have filled separate books: Fedora Core and Enterprise Linux." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

Iphtashu Fitz writes "We've all heard it. The recorded message when you call technical support or your bank or credit card company: 'This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.' But has it ever occurred to you that people actually DO listen in? Approximately 2 percent of these calls are listened to either live or after the fact, and it may come as a surprise that Big Brother even listens to what you may say while you are on hold. The people who monitor these calls routinely hear arguments between spouses or parents and children, people yelling at pets, and all sorts of other domestic disputes."

1up.com has a great article up entitled Getting The Girl. Zoe Flower discusses female gaming stereotypes, the role of women in gaming, and the mythical "girl formula" for gaming success. From the article: "Lara Croft continues to personify an ongoing culture clash over gender, sexuality, empowerment, and objectification. It was while standing in my first-ever ladies' room line at E3 2004 as I pondered the Playboy bunnies, the return of Leisure Suit Larry, and the slew of buxom virtual ladies headlining each booth that I questioned whether the industry had evolved at all."

Smb4K is a SMB (Windows) share browser for KDE. It uses the Samba software suite to access the SMB shares of the local network neighborhood. Its purpose is to provide a program that's easy to use and has as many features as possible.

Ghost In The Mail (also known as gitmail) is an anonymous mail client for Linux. This piece of software allows the user to send email messages to any email address, but uses a potentially fake email address and name for the return address. gitmail can also send attached files by using MIME and Base64 encoding.

pop3proxy is an application level gateway for the POP3 protocol. Features are optional server selection (allowed servers can be specified), access control through external programs, proxy authentication, and POP3 before SMTP with smtpproxy.

Bist stands for "bidimensional structures" and is a chemical drawing tool. It is focused on organic chemistry, but it may be useful for chemists or teachers as well. Bist support many of the formalisms used to describe molecular structures like single bond, double bond, stereospecific bond, charges, resonance arrows, lone pairs, and so on. It can export both PostScript and PNG formats.

Miredo is a Unix daemon program which implements the "Teredo: Tunneling IPv6 over UDP through NATs" Internet draft specification. It can serve either as a Teredo client, a stand-alone Teredo relay, or a Teredo server. The purpose of Teredo IPv6 tunneling is to provide IPv6 connectivity to users behind NAT devices, most of which do not support IPv6, and not even Proto-41 forwarding.

RBBS (Raving Bulletin Board System) is a bulletin board system with Web interface. Users of RBBS can post new articles and can attach responses to existing reports. Although the principal purpose of RBBS is to be used as a communication system like a BBS, it is also useful for individual use and for one-to-many communication.

white_dune is a graphical VRML97 editor, simple NURBS/Superformula 3D modeller and animation tool. VRML97 (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) is the ISO standard for displaying 3D data over the Web via browser plugins. It has support for animation, real-time interaction, and multimedia (images, movies, and sounds). white_dune can read, create and display VRML97 files and let the user change the scenegraph/fields. It also has support for stereoscopic view via "quadbuffer"-capable stereo visuals, and support for 3D input devices like a joystick, spaceball, or magnetic tracker.

A number of announcements from the Mac World keynote this afternoon. The iPod Shuffle is pack-of-gum sized, no screen, weighs less than an ounce. Ships today, $99 for the half gig, $149 for a gig. The Mac Mini is the headless iMac... 6x6x2.5 with all the expected plugs, starting at $499. Lot's of tiger bits, spotlight, virtual folders in Mail.app. iLife '05 will ship Jan 22. iPhoto gets folders and video support. iMovie supports HD. GarageBand gets 8 channel recording. iWork includes Keynote 2, and 'Pages' the new word processor and ships the same day as iLife.

ravenII writes "Members of the European Parliament from countries including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden have asked for the software patent directive to be redone from scratch, according to a report on Monday."

UnderScan writes "Eric Ries, writer/programmer/CTO, authored an article 'Kenosis and the World Free Web' at Freshmeat [Owned by Slashdot's Parent OSTG]. Kenosis is described as a 'fully-distributed peer-to-peer RPC system built on top of XMLRPC.' He has combined his Kenosis with BitTorrent & removed the need for a centralized tracker. He states: 'To demonstrate Kenosis's suitability for these new applications, we have used it to improve upon another peer-to-peer filesharing application that Just Works: BitTorrent. BitTorrent does one thing incredibly well. Using a centralized "tracker," BitTorrent manages efficient distribution of data that is in high demand. We have extended BitTorrent, using Kenosis, to eliminate this dependence on a centralized tracker.' See also the Kenosis README for details on using Kenosis-enabled BitTorrent."

Firefox fever is spreading like wildfire, if the active community espousing the open source browser from Mozilla is any indication. SpreadFirefox.com is a Web site created by and for fans of Firefox. It's the hub of a quickly coalescing community dedicated to marketing and supporting the new browser.

An anonymous reader writes that "This bloke has turned a George Foreman Grill into a webserver using what looks like a mini-itx pc. This really does bring a new meaning to the Lean Mean FAT grilling machine!" This is actually a pretty clean looking design. Very well done.

jamshedji writes "Crackers are using the newest DRM technology in Microsoft's Windows Media Player to install spyware, adware, dialers and computer viruses on unsuspecting PC users."

jTagger is an MP3 tag editor. It can set tags for individual files, or change tags in batch mode for all selected tracks in a directory. It can change file names in batch mode to rename all files, and convert tags between ID3V1 and ID3V2. Before making changes to file names and title tags in batch mode, you can do a test run to check the changes before anything is written to disk.

CALimba is an application to manage your calendar and contacts. You can share your calendar with other users, grant read and/or write acces per user, manage your contacts, manage templates for repetitive events, and manage (and store) your query to generate reports.