Chalk another one up for the good guys–the morons at the DVD Copy Control Association got slapped down today at the preliminary hearing of their suit against publishers of DVD crack information and people who linked to it.

Elliotte Rusty Harold makes some good arguments in his response to RMS’s idea that software documentation should use the same license as free software.

Etoys.com seems to have thrown in the towel and decided to stop abusing etoy.com. Of course, they’re not actually dropping their suit (at least not yet), and the preliminary order by the judge barring etoy.com from using their domain name still stands (at least for now), so I wouldn’t clsasify this as officially over. The cynic in me says that etoys.com caved in because they knew that in a real trial, they’d lose anyway.

The DVD industry has decided to sue 72 hackers and Web sites that published information or linked to published information about hacking the DVD encryption scheme. I already linked to it from this page, I invite the DVD guys to sue me (not that I can afford to defend myself). The sad thing is that this pathetic bullying won’t do anything to uncrack their miserably ineffective encryption scheme anyway. Even worse, if they’d shared the technical details of how DVD works with the open source community, their encryption probably wouldn’t have been hacked. Companies falling back on the legal system to protect themselves from their own technical inadequacy isn’t new, but it is mighty annoying.

A column at InfoWorld admits that the real reason for their mediocre redesign was that their site was not Y2K compliant. Even worse, their software was in such a state that there was no way to fix it outside scrapping it all and starting over. Unfortunately, none of their problems are unfamiliar to me–most sites seem to eventually find themselves in the state that’s described in the article.

This Forbes story is just one of the many news stories pointing out that the LinuxOne IPO will be a great litmus test of investor gullability. If the IPO succeeds, investors are even dumber than I thought.

Today is officially Matt Haughey day here at rc3.org. I found a link on Metafilter to a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that explains how to uninstall Linux and install Windows 2000 or Windows NT instead. The worst step in the process is when they stick that straw in your ear and suck out half your brain.

From Matt Haughey comes this walk down memory lane.

The other day, Dave Farber forwarded Mike Godwin’s review of Lawrence Lessig’s book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, to the Interesting People mailing list. The review certainly makes me more interested in reading the book.

The ACLU recently ran some interesting ads in the New York Times classifieds.