Two unrelated items, but I thought they were worth highlighting in case you hadn't heard the news...
First up, The Bruce has a post on "More European Chip and Pin Insecurity" talking about how the current implement of Chip and PIN capabilities in UK credit cards is so shoddy that it's hackable. Oh, sigh... it's hard to harp on the card brands here in the US to move to chip and PIN when the implementations aren't working very well. I'm personally of the opinion that we need smartchips with an RSA-token-like 1-time code displayed on the card itself to use with each transaction. Combine that with the CVV2 value, zip code, etc, and you hopefully would have enough factors to start getting a handle on credit card fraud... maybe... sort of... :)
Second up, if you've not heard, Microsoft is suing TomTom over some sort of wonky patent infringement blah-de-blah... *yawn* Ok, but anyway... it's starting to look, however, like Microsoft is really trying to attack Linux through this attack... Slashdot has a post on it here that's worth scanning... let's hope that MS is no more successful here than they were backing SCO... and, moreover, let's hope for the day when MS learns to embrace their competition, rather than resort to underhanded legal attacks... it's kind of an old, tired meme, don't you think? ;)