Tom’s on holidays, I’ll be your host for today. My name’s Frank P, you might remember me from such blogs as “BifSniff.comâ€,†FestivalShirts.net/blog†and “Aonach.com/chatterâ€.
Updated due to lateness of the hour when posting originally 
Well, despite being on holidays, Tom is not completely cut off from things technical - when I was talking to him today he had heard about the huge piracy bust in China today.
It seems Microsoft are chuffed with themselves for their part in the busting of two pirate software groups in China… the piracy groups were “in possession of illegal software with an “estimated retail value” of close to $500 million.”
“This case represents a milestone in the fight against software piracy—governments, law enforcement agencies and private companies working together with customers and software resellers to break up a massive international counterfeiting ring,” said Microsoft senior VP Brad Smith in a statement.
Lovely, says Tom, but if Microsoft really want to have done with people pirating their software Operating System they should just open source it.
Tom reckons battling piracy on a case by case basis like this is much like the little Dutch Boy sticking his finger in the dam - except in this case while the Dutch Boy celebrates, the dam is destined to burst in any case…
Open sourcing the software OS would indeed make pirating the software it redundant - if it’s freely available for a cost of zero, who’s going to go to the trouble of pirating it?
This is not the first time Tom has brought up the possible benefits to open sourcing for Microsoft.
Unfortunately, here’s where this post stops… this isn’t really my area of expertise, and Tom doesn’t have proper internet access going at the moment… this story really bugged him though, and while we were chatting about it, I said I’d get something up on his behalf - however I don’t know enough about the area to make a meaningful contribution.
I’m sure Tom will revisit on his return… but in the meantime, it’s over to you - what do you reckon? Should MS look at Open Sourcing their software OS? What would the benefits be? How would affect profits? How would any negative impact on profits be offset?
I look forward to being educated 
Akismet 2.0 is a life (and comment) saver
Akismet is the default anti-spam plugin which comes with WordPress and it has saved me from literally hundreds of thousnads of comment spam messages (124,200 last time I looked).
A new version (Akismet 2.0) was released the same time as WordPress 2.1’s release so it’s release was kind of drowned out in the hoopla.
To my mind, the most significant change in Akismet 2.0 is the ability to tell Akismet to automatically delete any comments on posts over a month old.
As Matt himself said:
Typically I used to get >500 comments per day flagged by Akismet. There was no way i could go through those looking for genuine comments accidentally flagged as spam by Akismet.
Today though, having configured Akismet to dump all suspected spam comments on posts over a month old, I now only have to check 20-30 comments per day.
And just this morning, I rescued two comments which had accidentally been marked as spam by Akismet.
Well done to the guys in Automattic again. I love Akismet.