Commentary by Andrew Orlowski. "Our jibe that the Wikipedia is the world's most useless encyclopedia drew precisely two angry responses. But both illustrate the condition perfectly."

Opinion article by Andrew Orlowski suggesting that Wikipedia has a long way to go before it's a stand-in for libraries and scholarly publications.

Criticisms of Wikipedia and of arguments used by its admirers in an article by Andrew Orlowski.

Reporting on the lost Altair BASIC source code [The Register]

At year's end, with version 5.5, Realbasic will support Linux as a target platform, but not as a host OS. It now runs on Windows or Mac and can target either OS from the other. [The Register]

Sun Microsystems backed industry body, Java Community Process (JCP) oversees development of platform and language, voted to alter community structure, officially supporting OSS implementations of Java, JCP 2.5. [The Register]

"Crowd surveillance kit using face recognition technology by Visionics has been a comic failure in tests by the Tampa, Florida police, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has discovered." By Thomas C. Greene. [Register]

Includes: MSXML may ignore IE security zone settings during a request for data from a Web site; and a VBscript problem which allows an attacker to read files on a victim's local drive, or eavesdrop on his browsing session.

The MS patch intended to fix a data binding flaw in IE, which enables a script to call executables on your Windows machine using the object tag, does not protect against malicious files launched from a local directory.

A fairly serious flaw in Internet Explorer which would enable a malicious Web page or e-mail to drop a cookie containing an HTML script on a victim's machine and run it in the 'Local Computer' zone rather than the Internet zone to avoid restrictions h...