Bill Gates has stunned delegates at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, by claiming that we are now in what he called a "digital decade", where even teenagers use computers.

He also hinted that soon, computers would be linked together using some kind of international network, and that they might even be used to play primitive electronic games.

Microsoft have fired their first real shot across the bows of Apple's Ipod with the release of the Zune music player in the US - a 30gb model retailing for the equivalent of £130.

I'm loving the built in spell checker and redesigned tab bar.

Using the auto suggest on search as a calculator is nifty but annoyed me, so I've disabled that.

Making the RSS icon clickable, to subscribe to Bloglines was a great idea.

I've already had to use the session restore after my laptop froze. Works a treat.

Any one been using Firefox 2.0 or IE 7.0 and got any thoughts.

Microsoft have released a patch for the Vector Markup vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which hackers used when exploiting Hostgator's servers last Friday.

The patch fixes a vulnerabilty which allowed malicious code placed on a web page to install software on any visitor's computer - and has been used to install trojans and spyware on large numbers of PCs in recent days.

Difficult decision this one. If you've been on Mars over the weekend, you won't know that hackers exploited a massive security hole in the Cpanel software safeguarding a huge number of websites using shared hosting like this one - they just happened to target Hostgator, our host, which is exactly the sort of luck I needed and I'm sure you appreciated it too. The result was a lot of nastiness based around yet another exploit in Internet Explorer, which I think most of us avoided because I pulled the site before things escalated to that level. If you were looking at the site on Friday in Internet Explorer and you suspect you may have caught anything, try a free scan with the Ewido spyware scanner, it's cleaned up most reported cases from the other sites affected.

microsoft.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2005/11/22/banned-xbox-360-ad-best-ad-ever/

Unfortunately apparantly banned Still funny as hellThis message was edited by:Giz on 2006-01-27 06:31

According to Bill Gates, spam will be a thing of the past within two years. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, he predicted that new measures such as requiring email clients to calculate computations or solve puzzles before sending messages, would help block the spammers.

"That's easy for a machine sending a few e-mails" he said, "but gets very difficult and expensive for a computer sending lots of spam." Ultimately his idea is for a stamp system, based on the principle of payment for unwanted email - so legitimate messages will still be free to send and receive, but rejected email will incur a charge. Seems to me, this might actually work.

There's a new Windows worm doing the rounds, known as Palyh (or Mankx). Despite arriving in an email supposedly from "support@microsoft.com", experts are generally agreed that clicking on the attachment is not a good idea. When is it ever?

Microsoft care about your security. No, really, they do. Well they do now, anyway.

To supplement the (now seemingly daily) Windows Update feature, and the techie Technet bulletin for IT professionals/geeks, M$ now offer a free email security bulletin written for normal people who don't speak C++. You can sign up for it here, and the only personal information you have to give big Bill is your email address, country, and preferred language.

In return, the next time someone discovers that big "click here for my credit card details" backdoor in IE, they'll send you a nice friendly email (probably saying "click here for Windows Update").