This week, we're proud to report about a special event we visited last week. We get our share of "virtual" prizes and are proud about them, but they can't beat a physical trophy, which, sitting always present on a shelf, is a very nice sign of bundled encouraging appreciation by you, our users.

Last week, Deutsche Telekom's download portal softwareload.de presented the results of their Software of the Year 2008 survey in thirteen categories, and Spybot - Search & Destroy made the Gold prize as best Freeware, personally presented in 14 pounds of glass that'll look quite impressive among its colleagues. We thank all users who have voted in our favour there, even though we were lazy enough to not even advertise the voting here.

We're not just sitting on these merits of course, but are working hard on Spybot-S&D 2.0. We've justed added a screenshot gallery to the already existing weekly blog and project tools milestone for those curious about the future.

This weeks news start with our forums new Malware Removal Guides part. As you hopefully have noticed, we try to write down a few sentences about each threat Spybot-S&D detects. Thinking on how we could improve that service in preparation for Spybot-S&D 2.0, we decided to add more information. Removal guides are surely not a new idea, and not all can be really complete, since malware likes to use hiding methods that make them difficult to detect, and textual explanations already start to lack when it comes to randomized filenames. Still, some information is better than none, and we decided we'll just try and give our best in describing manual removal. Rolling out hundreds, if not thousands of guides will take a few days, maybe weeks, but you can already see the first ones here and comment here.

The Spybot 2.0 blog also has a new entry on usability for error handling concepts.

Spybot 2.0: Patrick Kolla, our chief software engineer, has started a series of small blog posts on features of Spybot-S&D 2.0, starting with a blog post about modularization, with more entries on various other topics already waiting in queue.

Recommendations: our page with recommendations about security software has been out of date for a while, so we decided to go ahead and rewrite it. You can view the new article here and comment on our blog here.