A federal court has ruled that the laws banning the export of encryption software are unconstitutional. This is incredibly good news, particularly because the ban on encryption software was completely unenforceable anyway.

Dean Gaudet posted the following message to the linux-kernel mailing list explaining the work going on to make Apache faster.

News from the Web server world: Apache is slow. Of course, it provides plenty of performance for 99% of the sites on the Web, so who cares?

Be is going public. Wow. Their financials are awful, and their future prospects are bad. This is a company that I want very much to succeed, but I’ll be surprised if going public is what they really need to do right now. Answering to shareholders is probably not what a company that did $1 million in revenue last year needs. However, since the bullet is already out of the gun, my advice to them is to change the name of the company to Be.com, and make their main selling point the fact that they own both the Be.com web site, and Becentral.com, portals for Be users! They also own BeDepot.com, a sales portal for Be software. It’s all about the pitch …

At Daemon News, Michael Maxwell tears into the Gnu Public License. There’s nothing better than a good religious war over open source software licenses. This particular author distinguishes himself by using antiquated non-word “Communistic” in his anti-GPL rant. Unsurprisingly, the author is a BSD license partisan.

I’m pointing at Jesse Burst’s column today, not because he says anything at all interesting, but simply to say that I think he’s an idiot. It shocks me that someone actually gets paid a salary to make witless observations for the sake of being provocative rather than insightful.

Reuters is reporting that Microsoft is about to invest 5 billion dollars in AT&T. People are speculating wildly about the areas of the industry that this will give Microsoft inroads into.

Kevin Mitnick’s victims claim that he did 300 million dollars worth of damage by compromising the security of their systems, but 2600 magazine is reporting that the damages were, in fact, a lot less. Basically, the companies who claim these absurdly high damages didn’t report such losses to their shareholders or the IRS.

Why is it that every story Declan McCullagh writes quotes a paid libertarian flack from the Cate Institute?

An interesting look back — Hobbes’ Internet Timeline.