Surprise this morning: Accessing my two Google mail accounts this morning, I noticed that something has changed. My available space was 1,067Mb for the first one, and 1,071Mb when I logged on to the second one (instead of 1,000Mb for both accounts previously).

In fact, Google is continously increasing all mailboxes storage capacity (you can see the current value on their home page), until the value reaches 2 Gb!!
This story is also available on news.com.

Gmail likes to make announcements on Fool's day apparently!

By the way, they also improved the composition window a few days ago, by allowing rich text formatting (not for me, anyway, I use only plain text mail!).

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0, the email client, was released yesterday, one month after its cousin, Firefox.

It is not sure it could have the same success (Firefox was downloaded more than 9,000,000 in four weeks), but at least it could help some people sick of Microsoft's Outlook Express to switch to a more secure (and more powerful!) product.

Reading Thunderbird's web site, you will understand that Thunderbird is probably one of the most complete email clients (especially when compared to Bill's favorite virus/worm spreader):

Safe and Secure
Thunderbird provides enterprise and government grade security features such as S/MIME, digital signing, message encryption, support for certificates and security devices.

Packed with Features
Thunderbird gives you IMAP/POP support, a built-in RSS reader, support for HTML mail, powerful quick search, saved search folders, advanced message filtering, message grouping, labels, return receipts, smart address book LDAP address completion, import tools, and the ability to manage multiple e-mail and newsgroup accounts.

Unlimited Features
Thunderbird lets you add additional features as you need them through extensions. Extensions are a powerful tool to help you build a mail client that meets your specific needs.

Still not interested? Just try it, and let me know what you think!

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 is out!

The Preview Release having being downloaded 8 million times, we could expect some interesting numbers with the long awaited final version!

The 6 years old Internet Explorer could have some trouble: Not only new flaws are discovered nearly every day (yesterday's one), but also M$ decided to stop the developments on the standalone version.

If you never tried a real browser, you should really have a look on this one... It's time to switch!

Apparently, Bobby Fischer (world chess champion in 1972) was caught in Narita Airport, while he wanted to flight to Philipines with no valid passport.
There are chances that he could be extradited to the United States, mainly for political reasons.

As he is my All Times favourite player, the most disappointing point for me is that he apparently frequented the Tokyo Chess Club (member of the JCA - Japan Chess Association), where I used to play a couple of years ago!!

Fischer's own web site (in Japan) has just been updated with a phone number for people wishing to help him in the current case (+81 3 3735 3675). This is... the number of the Club where I played...

If you wonder who is this guy, have a look on Wikipedia's Bobby Fischer entry.

I wonder how long many companies will still consider IE as a standard, despite its long history of critical flaws.

The latest flaws discovered should make anybody aware of the dangers of using this old browser, but even security teams are silent... Imagine that even over a secured connexion, your keystrokes could be recorded when you connect to your bank!

But nobody is going to put his balls on the table for a fight against corporate standards, I guess. Even (with knowledge!) IT teams go on buiding IE-only sites (the easy, lazy, and dangerous way).

Microsoft is going to sue Sergio Amadeu, President of the Brazilian government's National Institute of Information Technology for defamation.
Apparently, M$ does not appreciate Amadeu's opinion about their business practises:

"drug-dealer practice" for offering the operational system Windows to some governments and city administration for digital inclusion programs. "This is a trojan horse, a form of securing critical mass to continue constraining the country".

M$ considers in the document that this is "an excess in freedom of speech and freedom of thought" (Ooops!). Just remember Bill Gate's speaking in 1998 to make your opinion about the facts:

"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

Original document on lessig.org, and funniest comments on slashdot, as usually!

raoult.com hacked! This web site was just hacked. This article was not written by me (just in case ;-)

Now, Japanese can buy a home, and get their children pay for it!

Interesting.

And what will say your children's child, when he/she will receive two of these nice gifts from his/her grandparents?

This looks crazy, but this is not really new: In France, government is using this system (spending now and let next generations manage the deficit) for quite a long time, unfortunately.

Or even better: They found a better system: You pay now for something that you will never get back. The retirement system is the best example as my generation is paying full rate with absolutely no hope of getting any decent retirement allowance later). This exactly means that I am paying for a house that I don't get.

Not bad, is it?

Bill has trouble: Windows NT and W2K source code are available on the internet!

As Microsoft always pretended that closed source is better for security, I wonder what they think about this leak. Will we see hundreds of new worms/viruses appear in the next weeks? This could be funny anyway ;-)

Less than one year later, the free wikipedia encyclopedia doubled its number of articles, to reach 200,000 entries!

This number is for the English version. The next languages in terms of number of entries are German (around 49,000 entries), Japanese (~29,000), and French (~26,000).

All latest statistics are available here. They decided

N'oubliez pas une chose: Vos connaissances groupées valent beaucoup que celles d'un Larousse! Qu'attendez-vous pour publier?

FYI, on their 200,000 celebration page , the last message is currently: Well, we're getting slashdotted now. Of course, this should happen!

Something new on kernel.org. The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is no more a 2.4.X, but instead was changed to 2.6.0!

The Release Notes will show you the details of the last changes. If you don't know what is really new in 2.6, just read this article, or this french translation.

So what to do tonight? Install 2.6, or watching The Return of the King, which was also out today?