Peter Bright has posted an article on ars technica reporting that the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft will default to “standards mode”. Though not exactly fully W3C compliant, IE8 will be a huge leap from earlier versions of IE. This is good news to frustrated web developers who have struggled with developing web pages that work and display equally across the major browsers. IE has notoriously not been standards compliant in the past and Microsoft has tried to muscle they’re own “standards” into the development community. It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft continues down this path, or succumbs to the temptations of the past.

As reported by CNET News.com, Microsoft has released a list of programs which will not function with the upcoming, and long anticipated, service pack 1 for Vista. The list is mainly made up of security and antivirus products, but there are a few everyday apps that will surprise many. After all the headeaches with the Vista launch, Microsoft doesn’t need another flop with they’re “fix”. Read more about incompatible SP1 applications here.

Following a California court ruling, wikileaks.org’s domain registrar, Dynadot, was ordered to stop resolving the wikileaks domain name to the wikileaks.org website. Wikileaks was designed as an anonymous way whistle-blowers could post government and corporate documents without fear of retribution. Not unexpectedly, this didn’t go over well in the corporate world. The case that brought wikileaks down was brought by a Swiss banking group, Julius Baer,  after they discovered hundreds of internal documents detailing its offshore activities were posted on the site. Allegedly, these documents showed that the group was involved in money laundering and tax evasion. Wikileaks claims the order was unconstitutional and a form of censorship. You can read more about the wikileaks.org case here.

According to techcrunch.com, Steven Spielberg is involved in building a new social network which will focus on the paranormal. According to insiders, the site will let users research and share ghostly and extraterrestrial stories. Expect a video component as well. Is this a good idea in the already crowded social media space? Normally we would say no, but perhaps Spielberg’s name is the ‘X’ factor that will draw visitors. Still, we doubt a crush of visitors will crash the servers when the site goes live.