Bill Gates has slipped down to second spot and has subsequently become the world’s 2nd richest man.

Carlos Slim Helu of Latin America’s largest mobile company, America Movil has overtaken Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates by a cool $8.6 billion.

Slim Helu’s net-worth is estimated to be around $67.8 billion whiles Gates’s is estimated to be around $59.2 billion. The recent soaring stock prices of America Movil has enabled Slim Helu to climb to the top spot.

Pure cash aside, if you compare philanthropy, Gates has a huge lead over Carlos Slim Helu. According to Wikipedia, Bill Gates has donated $29 billion to charities since 2000. Slim Helu has committed to donate, by comparison a paltry $4 - $10 billion

Users of Google's free email service 'gmail' can now open Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and slideshows without needing PowerPoint installed on their computers.

Popular torrent search index Mininova achieved a major milestone today serving its 2 billion-th download! This, just 5 months after reaching the one billion download mielstone. The growth of the site since 2005 has been nothing but phenomenal with the amount of downloads doubling every half year!



Breakdonw of number of downloads per category. TV shows, by far, being the most popular.

Official story

US prosecutors said they captured on Wednesday a nefarious internet marketer responsible for so much junk e-mail they called him "Spam King".

Robert Soloway, 27, was arrested in Seattle, Washington, a week after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud.

"Spam is a scourge of the internet, and Robert Soloway is one of its most prolific practitioners," said US Attorney for the Western District of Washington Jeffrey Sullivan.

"Our investigators dubbed him the 'Spam King' because he is responsible for millions of spam e-mails."

Between November of 2003 and May of 2007 Soloway "spammed" tens of millions of e-mail messages to promote websites at which his company, Newport Internet Marketing, sold products and services, according to prosecutors.

Soloway routinely moved his website to different internet addresses to dodge detection and began registering them through Chinese internet service providers in 2006 in an apparent ploy to mask his involvement.

Spam messages sent by Soloway used misleading "header" information to dupe people into opening them, according to Sullivan.

Soloway is accused of using "botnets", networks of computers, to disguise where e-mail originated and of forging return addresses of real people or businesses that wound up blamed for unwanted mailings.

If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of $250 000.

Prosecutors want to seize approximately $773 000 they say Soloway made from his spamming-related activities.

A few months ago, the HD-DVD encryption key which prevents high-definition DVD's from being copied was cracked.

Not long after, it was circulated amongst various netzines. A few days ago, the key, 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0, a 32-digit hexadecimal number was posted to digg.com, one of the most popular sites on the internet.

Initially, digg's administrators began deleting stories that link to sites that contain the key due to a cease and desist declaration from an anti-piracy consortium that protects intellectual property rights and high-definition copy protection. Some users even had their digg accounts banned! That, however, wasn't the end of the story!

The users revolted...Posting link after link after link to a myriad of articles containing the key. Users dugg every story of they key they could find and at one point digg's entire front page comprised only stories that in one way or another were related to the key.

Digg received so much traffic that some users even reported getting 404 errors when trying to access the site! digg was forced to finally throw in the towel! Not long after, digg's founder Kevin Rose had this to say:

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my
thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might
be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying

And so after the revolution, digg's administrators decided to stand by its users and allow the key to be posted on its site once again and the users celebrated a victory!

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

Computer makers have been told they’ll no longer be able to get Windows XP OEM by the end of this year. This, despite strong demand for the OS. Analysts and computer makers are wondering if the move is premature given Vista’s ongoing performance and compaibility issues. Dell recently said it would reintroduce XP on a range of machines due to customer demand but Microsoft will only allow this until the end of 2007.