Wired News is printing a letter Chris Nolan sent to the San Jose Mercury News (the paper from which she is suspended) that they declined to print. If everything in the letter is true (and I have no reason to believe it’s not), then I can see why they didn’t print it.

The Justice Department is proposing legislation that will allow them to get a warrant to break into private residences to steal computer passwords and install software that will override encryption so that their wiretaps will then be more effective. It’s nice to know that these guys would be more than happy to turn into the Gestapo if we didn’t keep an eye on them.

Sun’s new HotDispatch service attempts to hook up technical support providers and people who need support with an auction-like service. It’s an interesting idea, akin to SourceXchange; it will be interesting to see how it works out.

Speaking of companies that have to shamefacedly disclose their quarterly results now that they’re public, Be just announced their second quarter earnings.

More news from the world of politics: Senator cum Presidential candidate John McCain blames hate-mongering Internet sites (and the media) more than guns for our culture of violence. It’s always fun to keep track of which candidates use the Internet as a scapegoat for society’s ills.

Here’s a link to the story that cost Chris Nolan her column.

I learned something new reading Today’s Papers today; the Richter scale (used to measure the magnitude of earthquakes) is based on a logarithmic scale, which means that for each point the reading goes up, the earthquake’s power goes up by a factor of 10. So an earthquake that measures 7 on the Richter scale was 10 times more powerful than one that measures 6. Everybody in California probably already knows this.

The Red Hat Wealth Monitor is keeping an eye on the guys who are getting rich through the work of free software hackers. It will be interesting to see how the shift to an environment divided between haves and have nots will affect the free software community.

There’s more wisdom on the deep linking issue from Scott Rosenberg today in Salon, although this story is more of a “cover all the bases” piece than a focused argument. My personal views on this issue fall into “a link is a citation” category, and thus deep linking is perfectly fair game. (I don’t feel the same way about people linking directly to images or multimedia files on other sites, especially presenting them inline on your own pages, you should get permission before you do that.)

Wired News has a story on the Bill Bradley campaign’s use of the Internet in boosting their underdog Presidential candidate. The story is somewhat interesting, but at the end you arrive at some statistics that make absolutely no sense. According to the article, Bradley’s Web site gets 3,000 hits per day, and 16,400 page views per day, and Gore’s gets 60,450 hits, and 6,671 page views. How can that be?