Today, Salon has the first hand story of a Linux hacker who was invited by Red Hat to participate in their IPO because of his contributions to the community. Unfortunately, when he signed up for an ETrade account, as instructed by Red Hat, he was denied the right to participate because ETrade weeds out everyone who doesn’t have a lot of money. Apparently, this has happened to a bunch of people that Red Hat wanted to let in on the IPO. It remains to be seen whether Red Hat can convince ETrade to do their bidding and let the hackers that were personally invited invest in the IPO.

A Virginia congressman has accused ICANN and the Department of Justice of colluding against NSI (which just happens to be based in his district). Maintaining the root name servers is a pathetically simple job, technically speaking. Running a registry for domain names isn’t much more difficult. Unfortunately, these jobs are so important that we can’t escape from all of the politically driven greedheads that want to control these two functions.

The Mozilla Project posted a mid-year status update a couple of days ago. It mainly deals with the extent of external (non Netscape/AOL) participation in the project.

Wired News has a story about EverQuest addiction. Anyone who saw a friend or fellow dorm resident flunk out of college because they wasted a semester or two playing a MUD is already familiar with this phenomenon.

More Congressional incompetence today: some Senators are investigating a bill that would ban drug recipes on the Internet. Not that doing so would help to prevent people from making drugs, or be constitutional. It sounds good in a TV ad during an election year, though.

Isn’t the current battle over instant messaging stupid enough without Apple jumping in?

As if to answer the query I posted the other day, Peter Merholz has created a Web page detailing the suckiness of Broadvision’s electronic commerce product. I also got an email message from Danny O’Brien of NTK chronicling the suckiness of Broadvision.

Looks like the government is planning to keep an eye on our computer networks for us, in order to protect us from evil intruders. Thanks, but no thanks.

PC Week is reporting that Microsoft executive Paul Maritz may retire.

Salon’s Janelle Brown takes John Dvorak to task for his absolutely repugnant column about the iBook. I didn’t link to his column earlier because I thought it was one of the most insipid and revolting things I’d ever read.