Last night I watched The 1900 House on PBS. Forget Survivor, the Real World, and Road Rules, this show is the ultimate “reality” entertainment. A normal British family agrees to live in a style that duplicates as closely as possible life in the year 1900. The house they live in was remodeled so that it approximates a house circa 1900 (with gaslights and a tiny wood burning stove), and the family wears vintage clothes, uses vintage hygiene products, and eats vintage food. Everyone seemed to know they’d hate it, except for the family themselves. Truly great television.

Phil Agre offers some astute criticism of the coverage of Judge Jackson’s ruling in his latest notes and recommendations.

USA Today has a chilling story in today’s paper about “air rage”. A NASA study found that in 40% of the “air rage” cases they studied, the incidents caused pilot errors that compromised safety. Surprisingly, alcohol was involved in only 43% of the incidents. I guess the other 57% of the cases just involved morons with poor impulse control.

Suck has the dirt on the failure of apbnews.com. Like most dot coms that fail, they pissed away too much money on advertising.

More from the redesign front: The Register is now sporting a new look. They seem to have finally bagged that invisible frame that made the lives of webloggers everywhere just a little bit more difficult. Hurrah!

Not long after Odigo added functionality to its instant messaging software to enable its users to communicate with AIM users, AOL shut them out. That’s not surprising, given that AOL has done that to everyone who’s tried to tap into the AIM network. The fact that AOL controls a huge percentage of the instant messaging market is a big, big problem, because they have no desire to interoperate with anyone else. Standards are desperately needed in this area, and nobody seems to be working to make those standards fall into place. AOL is clearly trying to protect its market, and while Yahoo and MSN have both made noise about pushing for standards, neither of them have published the documentation for their IM standards. There’s an open source IM effort called Jabber, but I haven’t been tracking their progress.

Hey, here’s yet another article about redesign complaints. In this case, some eBay users are carping about the creation of eBay Motors, which occurred in April.

The New York Times has published a lengthy recap of the Microsoft trial, including the events that lead up to it, along with lots of insider quotes from people at Microsoft, government attorneys, and the judge. Even though I’ve followed this trial very closely from the beginning, I learned a lot from the article, and refreshed my memory of a lot of events that occurred that I had forgotten.

There’s an AP wire story on the new trojan horse discovered by NETSEC (a computer security firm). This trojan is apparently embedded in a video clip, and has been found on over 2000 computers. Unfortunately, the story is nearly worthless. It doesn’t explain how the video clip got onto the computers (I assume the users downloaded it), or how NETSEC discovered which computers were infiltrated. Fortunateley, NETSEC’s advisory contains more details. As usual, the trojan is being distributed as an executable email attachment. One interesting note: NETSEC discovered the trojan because one of their own workstations was infected and they noticed unusual outbound traffic from it.

Scott Rosenberg argues today that what ultimately lost the trial for Microsoft is their smarmy attitude and reckless disregard for the truth. Ironically, Microsoft has the same problem as Braves’ pitcher John Rocker. Their steadfast refusal to recognize or admit their wrongdoing is incredibly frustrating to people who would otherwise be inclined to give them a chance.