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Microsoft announced SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions), which can be seen as a two way item sharing (think bidirectional RSS). The extensions described in the Simple Sharing Extensions enable feed readers and publishers to generate and process incoming item changes in a manner that enables consistency to be achieved. For example, two or more will be able to co-edit a post, which can be a huge revolution in the blogsphere. If you are a technical person, you should take a look at the specification page, after all, Microsoft launched it under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Are the winds of change blowing from Richmond?

The end of the year is coming, so are lists of anything. In a couple of weeks, TV channels, magazines and newspapers will start to deliver lists of people, inventions, events, etc. So, let me try to do it now, be the first one to annoy you with this:

• 20 disposable email address services
• 25 best inventions of 2005
• 100 best products of 2005
• thousands of open source software packages

Thank you Nicolas and your team for this achievement, the $100 laptop. Watch the video where UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Nicholas Negroponte Unveil the $100 Laptop Prototype at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, and some photos on the MIT website.

This can be Sony's worst nightmare: first, Sony decided to distribute a rootkit in there music CDs, to be installed in your PC (without your knowledge), in order to hide is DRM software; second, Mark Russinovich discovered the existence of this rootkit, and make it public, which make people start to scream at Sony; third, someone took advantage of the rootkit and wrote a trojan codenamed Stinx-E, able to hide from Windows, so impossible to be detected and cleaned; fourth, Sony decided to provide an uninstaller to allow people to erase the rootkit, but this uninstaller raised new security holes; and finally, it seems Sony used some LGPL code, without delivering the source, so breaking copyright:

It turns out that the rootkit contains pieces of code that are identical to LAME, an open source mp3-encoder, and thereby breach the license.

This software is licensed under the so called Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL). According to this license Sony must comply with a couple of demands. Amongst others, they have to indicate in a copyright notice that they make use of the software. The company must also deliver the source code to the open-source libraries or otherwise make these available. And finally, they must deliver or otherwise make available the in between form between source code and executable code, the so called object files, with which others can make comparable software.

Sony complied with non of these demands, but delivered just an executable program. A computer expert, whose name is known by the redaction, discovered that the CD "Get Right With The Man" by "Van Zant" contains strings from the library version.c of Lame. This can be concluded from the string: "http://www.mp3dev.org/", "0.90", "LAME3.95", "3.95", "3.95 ".

So, after all the fuss around this issue, Sony decided to allow people to download an uninstaler for is DRM software. All you have to do is fill a form, download the software and run it. Know that you know that, don't do it. People from Freedom to Tinker found out that if you install Sony uninstaller in your PC, you are opening a huge security hole. Malicious users can execute code in your PC, all you have to do is visit one of there websites. Where (and when) is this going to end?