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Munir Kotadia: Microsoft has killed off Windows NT, but it should now release its source code to the open-source community in order to fight off the challenge from Linux.

On 30 June, 2003, Microsoft withdrew support for Windows New Technology (NT). Windows NT users no longer have the right to download updates to Internet Explorer and will not get a patch when new security vulnerabilities are discovered in this version of Microsoft's operating system.

Very few companies are still using NT on critical systems, so the withdrawal of support is unlikely generate any real anger or resentment. However, now that NT has been retired, what is Microsoft going to do with the ageing operating system's source code? There will not be any new applications created for it, and it's difficult to display software in a museum or gallery. So after spending so many billions on development, what will happen? I can't imagine the code will be simply deleted.

However much the software giant would like us to forget that NT ever existed -- and push everyone into a Windows Server 2003 upgrade -- there are thousands of developers out there who would love to have the opportunity to turn the ageing OS into a masterpiece. So why not let them have a go by releasing NT 4.0's source code into the open-source community?

News source: ZDNet |UK|

"But the ironic thing," says Anthony, "is it wasn't supposed to be anti-war. It was mean to make six people laugh. I'm not pro-war but I think it was justified."

"It's just easier to take a potshot at George W Bush than anyone else."

Register fan Anthony says that this was no Googlebomb.

But the most notorious Googlebomb of recent vintage has also been Iraq-related... and was helped the top by the assidious manipulation of one of Google's own employees, one Jason Shellen. Type "French Military Victories" into Google and hit I'm Feeling Lucky and you're told that no web pages match the search string. Not by Google, of course, but by another prank page, this one.

There's an interesting analysis of how Shellen helped this to the top of Google's page results by Namebase founder Daniel Brandt, here. Brandt asserts that Shellen used "cloaking" techniques to achieve this result. Cloaking is the term for feeding Google's website crawlers specially modified pages. Shellen loaded 33 of his archive pages with links to the prank page, links which are not present on the regular pages. So the bot saw them, while we can't. Naturally, Google frowns on such practices and in its FAQ for webmasters warns that "Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings."

In an official response, Google said that Shellen had not used cloaking but declined to say if any disciplinary action had been taken against him.

Shellen has recently spoken out to assure a panicking tech-blog circuit - a giddy social whirl of conferences and and other airmile aggregation opportunities - that Google has no plans to remove weblogs from the main index. However the problem of downgrading the unwelcome results of blog noise - what one reader called "the lint of the Internet", referring to the low quality of information represented by empty trackback pages and mindless links - is a problem that continues to tax Google's celebrated phalanx of PhDs.

By contrast, Cox's prank has a much simpler genesis. He posted to the Usenet group uk.humour and word spread from there.

"I even heard from a marketing company. But I couldn't see how they could use it," he mused to us.

Congratulations to Anthony, for inadvertently finding a Googlebomb of mass hilarity. ®