Geeks will appreciate this Emacs story.

Salon has the story on the disappearance of the Usenet archives at deja.com. This company can’t fail soon enough for me.

Anyone up for a doom and gloom economic forecast from the Center for Economic and Policy Research? I think that many people have the sense that we’re on an economic bubble of some sort, but the people who are driving up the stock prices apparently refuse to believe it. People have been predicting the burst of the bubble for years now, but nothing has come of it. The stock bubble appears to have been shrinking for the better part of this year, so maybe a really severe recession can be avoided. I don’t know what the ideological bent of the think tank that wrote the paper is, but one should always keep in mind that these institutions are funded by somebody, and they usually have an agenda, even if they don’t publicize it.

The city council of the District of Columbia is going to vote on changing the motto on the city’s license plates to “taxation without representation.” The district is subject to Congressional oversight, but the House member for the district isn’t actually allowed to vote on anything in Congress. Unfortunately, because Congress has the final word on everything that happens in the district, they’re going to refuse to allow the change to the license plates.

Steve Albini on the major recording labels. A nice complement to the Courtney Love speech I linked to last week.

SANS has a list of the top ten security holes on the Web. Anyone whose systems are exploited through one of these holes should have their wrist slapped, because they’re all very well known. Some of them (running an exploitable version of sendmail) are easier to fix than others (badly written CGI programs).

The Justice Project has a report on error rates in capital cases from 1973-1995. The report makes a very convincing argument that people who are sentenced to death often don’t get a fair trial at all when they’re initially convicted. Kind of makes you wonder about all of the other criminal trials that don’t get so much attention.

David Boies isn’t having trouble finding work after his utter humiliation of Microsoft on behalf of the DOJ in the antitrust trial. (Say what you want about the ultimate morality or legality of the government’s case, Boies absolutely demolished Microsoft’s witnesses during the trial.) His latest gig? Defending Napster against the rapacious RIAA. Now that they have Boies, I think they have a decent chance at winning.

Here’s a job finding tip for Web programmers: when you’re creating your r

AOL has finally published the instant messaging standard used by AIM. Once again the incredible influence of rc3.org is displayed. Only Monday I criticized AOL’s efforts to keep their instant messaging products proprietary, and as you can see, things have already changed. (Actually, yesterday was the deadline for submissions to the IETF working group on instant messaging, and I assume AOL wanted to get in under the wire.) If the AOL document is useful to you, save a local copy. Who knows when AOL will change their mind?