No offense, but the Southern Baptist church really is an organization run by pigheaded rednecks.

Ken Layne offers a poignant obituary for United Press International, a once proud newswire that fell into dysfunction, and eventually into the hands of the Moonies.

Lawrence Lessig spoke on the threat posed by AT&T and the MPAA at the WWW9 conference in Amsterdam. Lessig is a useful tonic for the optimistic/naive people who believe that if we on the Internet are “left alone” by the government, problems will sort themselves out. The big corporations have a strong agenda designed to make sure that they keep turning a profit, and they won’t let the Internet get in the way of that.

Boo.com died. While their “cutting edge” design is often cited as the reason for their failure, the real question one must ask is how they blew through 120 million bucks in 6 months, and what they needed 300 employees for. Clearly it wasn’t to fulfill orders.

OK, this is just stupid.

Now this is funny. Malicious people can subvert the seemingly innocent Office Assistant (you know, that crazy animated paperclip) to wreak havok on your computer.

Lycos merger with Terra creates global blah blah blah. Lycos in top 5 in terms of media reach but falling behind AOL, MSN, and Yahoo blah blah blah. Previously discussed merger with USA Networks scrapped because blah blah blah. I can’t believe people care about this stuff unless they have some skin in the game.

Salon has a fascinating story on Bill and Lynne Jolitz, the creators of 386BSD, the original Unixlike operating system for PCs.

Standards bodies guys carping at industry guys for implementing things without waiting for a standard to be written is always good for a laugh.

Domain registration is a total scam. Unfortunately, I don’t expect to see it improve at all anytime soon. Check out item 12 in the Network Solutions Service Agreement. By registering a domain name, you agree that it’s OK for them to send you spam. Then there’s item 19, which says that they can revoke your domain name for any reason. Then, you go to register.com and find out that domain name transfers can be rejected at the discretion of the losing registrar, so if Network Solutions doesn’t want you to leave, that’s their right.