2600 is on the right side of a legal fight to permit them to link to the now infamous DeCSS software.

Here’s another typically moronic anti-open source editorial. I honestly can’t believe people are paid to write things that are provably false. Fortunately, Bob Young trots out some examples of successful open source creations so that I don’t have to. Bob Young leaves out Perl, Emacs, PHP3, gcc, and many, many other tools that are essential elements of the software pathos. Neither Linux nor Mozilla are the most interesting open source projects out there, and it’s unfortunate that they’re the most hyped. I really don’t want to come off as a zealot of any kind, and indeed, I use plenty of commercial software, but I have no patience for people who claim to be journalists but don’t even make a pretense of researching, much less thinking. (I found these links at Q Daily News.)

Online research maven Tara Calishain wrote a review of Raging yesterday.

Raging Search appears to be an inferior copy of Google from AltaVista.

We’re having a big problem at work with a worm called VBS.LoveLetter.A that infects Microsoft Outlook. (What doesn’t?) My suggestion is that we all just start using Mutt but the idea doesn’t seem to be catching on. The response time of the Symantec Web site seems to indicate that lots of people are running into problems with this worm.

Tom Christiansen’s Seven Levels of Perl Mastery. I’m somewhere between user and adept.

Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s CTO who’s been on sabbatical for one year, won’t be going back full time. I had a pretty strong feeling that he wouldn’t return. Not that I blame him. If I had been away from the office for a year already and had more than enough money to retire, I probably wouldn’t go back either.

A reader submitted a link to a San Francisco Bay Guardian story about the environmental and worker health problems associated with the manufacturing side of the high tech industry. It’s easy to forget about this stuff when your job involves reshuffling electrons all day, but all those monitors, RAM chips, and motherboards have to be made somewhere. The fact of the matter is that the computer hardware manufacturers aren’t ahead of their counterparts in steel mills, oil refineries, or lead mines. The story itself is a long investigative piece that’s definitely worth reading.

Salon takes a look back at the success of the dot com Super Bowl ads, three months after they ran. Unsurprisingly, they were a total failure. Also unsurprisingly, the morons who run the companies that bought the ads are excited about them anyway. Where were these idiots hiding before people started pumping money into the Internet?

Just to clear things up: RedHatIsNotLinux.Org.