A reader points out that there’s a newer version of the jargon file (aka The New Hacker’s Dictionary) than the one I pointed to the other day.

You know what the problem with most conservatives is? They can’t take a joke. Salon columnist Dan Savage wrote a satirical article about his covert attempts to infect hardcore right wing Presidential candidate Gary Bauer with the flu, and lo and behold, everyone took it seriously. By everyone, I mean the New York Post, the Bauer campaign, and even the state attorney general of Iowa. Sorry guys, better get that egg off your face. (By the way, the article is genuinely hilarious in the mean spirited way that appeals to me so much.)

Somebody is already suing DoubleClick. That didn’t take long.

One of my favorite things on the Internet is the New Hacker’s Dictionary. My favorite thing in it: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer.

Rob Landley at the Motley Fool adds another voice of reason to the growing chorus of people who are aware of just how stupid the whole DeCSS lawsuit is. Unfortunately, the DVD people have been doing pretty well in court lately. I have abounding faith that they’ll be properly slapped down by the time it’s all over, though.

Yahoo! is part of the DoubleClick network, and I use their sites for lots of stuff. I used their feedback form to let them know that I disapprove of DoubleClick’s activities, and that I expect them to live up to their privacy policy.

I’ve long been one of those people who told everyone not to turn off cookies in their browser because they can’t really be used for nefarious reasons. Well, DoubleClick has proven me wrong. The sleazeballs at the Internet’s largest advertising network are doing their best to tie your surfing practices to your real name and address. I know that a lot of poeple have a “so what” attitude toward this sort of thing, but I firmly believe that as customers we don’t have to stand for it. The proper response to this, if it offends you, is not to hack your browser so that you don’t accept DoubleClick cookies, but to stop visiting Web sites on the DoubleClick network. There are 11,000 of them, but hey, there are lots of other good sites out there too. If you’re feeling really proactive, send feedback to those sites letting them know why you’ll no longer visit. Cookies are a very useful tool. Allowing advertising networks to subvert them so that the best thing to do is turn them off is unacceptable.

Rule number one for anyone doing anything online … never trust AOL to get anything right. In this case, people who use AOL Instant Messenger and aren’t AOL users are at risk. (I use Yahoo! Messenger, you should too.)

In case you hadn’t heard, we live in a disturbing world. Reuters is reporting that members of a group of geurillas led by 12 year old twins hijacked a school bus and took over a hospital in Thailand. “God’s Army” is holding the hospital’s staff and patients hostage in exchange for relief in border fighting with Myanmar.

Salon has an article today about the debasement of Martin Luther King, Jr by the white supremacist group Stormfront at the URL www.martinlutherking.org. That’s the interesting thing about URLs. In some ways, they’re just a location, like a street address or phone number, but unlike those arbitrary identifiers, they do say something about the content found there in a direct way. I wouldn’t dare argue that Stormfront shouldn’t be allowed to own that URL or use it in the way that they do, instead I would caution people to be careful not to read anything into a site’s content based on the URL that they possess. Some people more effectively hide their motives than the leadbrained Nazis from Stormfront.