Amazon has just launched a new website called Askville. Askville is a place where you can ask any question on any topic and get real answers from real people. It’s a fun place to meet others with similar interests to you and a place where you can share what you know. You can learn something new every day or help and meet others using your knowledge. It’s new, and best of all, it’s free!

Askville is a place to share knowledge about any topic versus a message board which is designed to focus on one primary topic. So in one sense Askville is a multi-message board community. However, to help the community find high quality answers in each topic we give experience points to users based on how good their answers are in a particular topic.

Askville was running is a closed beta for about 6 months and is now open to the general public.

California resident Dennis Sheehan took Gateway to small claims court after he reportedly received a defective computer and little technical support from the PC manufacturer. Gateway responded with their own lawyer and a 2-inch thick stack of legal docs, and claimed that Sheehan violated the EULA, which requires that users give up their right to sue and settle these cases in private arbitration. Sheehan responded that he never read the EULA, which pops up when the user first starts the computer, because the graphics were scrambled — precisely the problem he had complained to tech support in the first place.

A judge sided with Sheehan on May 24 and the case will proceed to small claims court. A lawyer is quoted as saying that Sheehan, a high school dropout who is arguing his own case, is in for a world of hurt: ‘This poor guy now faces daunting reality of having to litigate this on appeal against Gateway…By winning, he’s lost.

Symantec announced late today a free public beta for its new Norton AntiBot software that attempts to identify malware on your system by analyzing its behavior.

The stand-alone software is based on existing (and currently available) technology from Sana Security, with a few minor add-ins from Symantec’s SONAR behavioral scanning technology that is now included in Norton products.

Symantec says AntiBot is meant as a supplement to antivirus software, not a replacement, and doesn’t use signatures as traditional antivirus products do. Instead, it examines how a program behaves–where it runs from, what Registry changes it makes, what Internet sites it may attempt to contact, and so on. The company says it won’t conflict with other antivirus programs, either its own or those of competitors.