How about you show the modified date of whatever the official news source is, on the login screen.
.. eg: response Headers -
http://www.planeshift.it/main_01.html Last-Modified: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 19:27:06 GMT , or store the timestamp in some other file, like xml, that the client fetches, and display the publish date of recent news, and the URL to it.
I think the benefits speak for themselves if you think about it, and since the login screen already has internet capability, I suspect it wouldn't take much to fetch a remote string and display it. If I could write it in PHP, I suspect you guys could in C
