Serious Windows flaws left to fester

Microsoft won't fix vulnerabilities in the latest versions of Internet Explorer or Windows during its regularly scheduled patch release on Tuesday. This means users will have to wait at least another month to get updates that correct the security risks, reports The Register.

The software maker said January's Patch Tuesday will include a single bulletin that fixes a vulnerability that carries a severity rating of "critical" in Windows 2000 and "low" in all other versions of the operating system.

This is one of the slimmest offerings since Microsoft began the practice of releasing security fixes on the second Tuesday of every month.

Xhead = Poor Web sites cost councils £11m

According to local government IT body Socitm, underperforming Web sites could be costing UK councils £11 million a month collectively as people turn to costly offline channels for information, says Computing.co.uk.

Data collected in September by Socitm Insight's Web site Takeup service showed that 42% of visitors to council Web sites did not find everything they were looking for, with half of these not finding anything they were looking for.

On average, this means 20 000 unsatisfied visitors per month for single tier and county council sites, and up to 5 000 for shire district councils with a total of nearly 4.4 million enquiry "failures" in one month, according to the body.

An academic has claimed that people who post intimate details about their lives on the Internet undermine everybody else's right to privacy, writes the BBC.

Dr Kieron O'Hara has called for people to be more aware of the impact on society of what they publish online. "If you look at privacy in law, one important concept is a reasonable expectation of privacy," he says.

The rise of social networking has blurred the boundaries of what can be considered private, he believes - making it less of a defence by law.

No decision has been made yet, but, if Friday's arguments before the US Court of Appeals in DC are any indication, it doesn't appear the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will prevail in exerting its authority over Comcast, states PC World.

Losing this battle may be just what the FCC needs to move forward with its efforts to formalise net neutrality guidelines.

The case before the court is an appeal from Comcast related to sanctions imposed on it by the FCC for discriminating against peer-to-peer networking file traffic in an effort to throttle bandwidth demand on its broadband network. Comcast's challenge claims the FCC has no such authority.