Wow, this is kinda questionable. MS photoshops a black man out of their ad slated for Poland. Curiously enough, the asian man wasn’t cut and, of course, the white woman was left alone. What does this say about Poland?

A side note: whoever they hired to edit the image must be a beginner because 1.) the light on the pasted-in white guy is in total contrast to how the light falls on the other two and 2.) they did a horrible clone stamp on the wall behind him and 3.) THEY FORGOT HIS HAND!

Via Engadget

Wow. What appears to be an old retailer-channel promo video for the MS-DOS 5.0 upgrade has slipped onto YouTube and if I weren’t writing for this blog, I’d be speechless. In between uncomfortable half-laughs, the true brain-washing started to take hold as I found myself tapping my toes while lines like “everybody DOS now” and “MS-DOS 5 upgrade, take the image further, it’s like selling fries with every burger” flashed across my screen. Yes, must upgrade. Must….upgrade. GIMME 5!

Hmm, this is out there. MRT, a California-based development company and creators of the X1 SeCure Recording Control technology, have launched a series of far-reaching lawsuits targeting major media corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, RealNetworks and Adobe. The lawsuit stats basically that these companies are liable for copyright piracy and violating the DMCA by avoiding the usage of their copy-protection technology in their many and various products. Uh huh.

“We’ve given these four companies 10 days to talk to us and work out a solution, or we will go into federal court and file action and seek an injunction to remove the infringing products from the marketplace,” CEO Hank Risan said in a phone interview Friday. According to the MRT, the companies in question are responsible for 98 percent of the market’s media players, which are in turn used by CNN, National Public Radio, Clear Channel, MySpace, Yahoo, YouTube and others.

Read more: Apple, Microsoft and others targeted in weird lawsuit

Though not quite in the context I had hoped, Microsoft today stated that they’re ready to stick a fork in Vista, the software giant’s next operating system. With the announcement, it’s clear that MS is well on it’s way to meeting it’s revised release schedule for the new OS in the Windows line. MS is boasting improved graphics, more effective search integration and a new internet browser which still sucks to develop for.

Read more: Vista is done

Amazon has listed pricing on the various flavors for Microsoft’s next Apple OS X ripoff, Windows Vista with not much fanfare or surprises. Pricing for Windows Vista Home edition comes in at $199.00 USD, with the Vista Ultimate edition clocking in at $399.00 and various upgrades from Windows XP ranging from $99.00 – $259.00. To be honest, I don’t know why anyone would bother with Windows Vista now that Intel Apples are on the market (apple user alert!). I guess old habits die hard?

Read more: Amazon.com

Well, this is the big one. If no-one hears from us over the next few days, it’s because of Street Fighter II. As of today, anyone in the Western World (not Asia yet from what I hear) can now download Street Fighter II via the Xbox Live Arcade service for a whopping 800 points which is around $10usd. Features are packed with online muliplayer featuring 4 different player vs. player match modes as well as leaderboards, achievements, custom controller options, and get this, you ready, 720p HDTV. Yup, Street Fighter II in HDTV, can it get any better? (Well I mean, of course it CAN get better, but humor me here)

Read more: Street Fighter II on Xbox Live Arcade

ScatterChat is a new multiple IM chat client which is created specifically for non-technical political dissidents and activists, workers requiring a high-degree of privacy and security in their business, or privacy advocates wearing tin hats. ScatterChat is based on GAIM, currently only supporting Windows XP, with OS X and Linux distributions coming shortly. The client offers support for most of the major world-wide chat networks from AIM and ICQ to Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Zephyr and Jabber, offering heavy-encryption methods for authentication, chatting and file-transfers. ScatterChat uses 2048-bit ElGamal and 1024-bit DSA for encryption setup and authentication. For each individual conversation, ScatterChat will generate a new 256-bit AES message key, a 256-bit SHA-1 HMAC key, a 256-bit nonce, and a 256-bit AES file transfer key. The client is also immune to replay attacks, supports PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) and features limited message deniability properties. The creators of ScatterChat are currently looking for help with localization efforts, translating the documentation into Arabic, Chinese and Farsi as well as technical help with ports to various other platforms (openBSD, FreeBSD, Ubuntu packages, etc). Disclaimer: The use of heavy encryption is not exactly shined upon by many governments, so use of this software is most definitely at your own risk.

[ScatterChat | ScatterChat feature list]

Microsoft is allowing users to test-drive a beta version of Office 2007, currently in production and nearing release (someday). Users are able to take an interactive look into the newest version of Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and all of the other old favorites included in the Office suite. If you don’t feel like opening IE 6+ in order to take the interactive test drive, Microsoft also enables users to download the latest crippled beta release of Office 2007, with saving and printing functions disabled.

[Test-drive Office 2007 Beta]