Five students have been arrested after planning to perform a shooting at their high school in Riverton, Kansas. The plot was foiled after one of the teens posted a message on the popular networking website, MySpace.

School officials were informed who then followed up the tip-off with the pupil in question and his friends. One of the students involved in the plot then revealed the plans to a North Carolina woman who immediately informed police.

Source: Neowin

Since the Windows Genuine Advantage debut as a pilot on 9/2004 Microsoft is slowly making the program more annoying and intrusive.

In the beginning the WGA was an opt-in feature, and then slowly it became mandatory. Users who choose not to validate their copy of Windows can not download updates from Windows update (they still can download critical security updates via automatic update feature in Windows).

On Tuesday Microsoft will make WGA more intrusive and will use scare tactics to make users validate and purchase a legal copy. On 4/25/06 Microsoft will start WGA Notification in the US, UK, Australia, NZ and Malaysia. The WGA notification has been running as a pilot in several countries such as Norway, Taiwan, Sweden, Israel, Denmark, Poland and other countries.

The new WGA notification campaign will have a new logo for OEM and system builders, as seen here exclusively for the first time.

The new Windows Genuine Advantage Logo

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Microsoft has hired Ask.com Chief Executive Steve Berkowitz to be vice president in charge of MSN, which includes the MSN search and Internet portal sites, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday

Source: News.com

Replikins, Ltd. has discovered of a group of virus peptides that predict whether a virus is rapidly replicating and whether it is likely to spread. The company has designed software which can now detect and count these proteins which may allow scientists to better predict viral epidemics, such as the H5N1 (avian) flu.

To date, no protein or other biological phenomenon has been known to correlate with viral epidemics. Researchers have had no objective quantitative protein based means to predict if, and what, strain of a given viral organism will become a public health threat. The current concern over when, or if, there will be an avian flu epidemic has drawn attention to the need for improved measures to help predict, prevent and prepare for emerging health threats.
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