Greg Knauss unloads on Mozilla yet again from his bully pulpit at Suck. (You may remember his previous piece on Mozilla’s sucky UI from earlier this year.) I really wanted to get indignant, but I agree with pretty much everything he said. I don’t want to be disenchanted with Mozilla, I just am.

Is it just me, or have people quit turning on word wrapping in their email clients? I use Mutt to read my email, and I’ve noticed that many, many email messages arrive that aren’t word wrapped — it’s annoying. If you don’t have word wrapping turned on in your email client, turn it on. (For the record, I think that most of the people who haven’t turned on word wrapping use Outlook or Outlook Express.)

Yahoo’s web beacons are a device that Yahoo uses to profile their customers and track user activity across multiple sites. They embed GIFs in various pages and messages to keep an eye on where their registered users go. This system is similar to those used by DoubleClick and HitBox, the images they deliver to you come with cookies that are associated with your profile. These systems can be used to violate a user’s privacy, especially the Yahoo system, but they’re not quite the same as Microsoft Passport, I don’t think.

Jason Levine rebuts the now widely distributed Joel Spolsky article on Microsoft Passport. He’s right to point out that many sites are putting all of their subsites in one network in order to share cookies between them, but misses the point that Microsoft is trying to get third parties to join the Microsoft Passport network as well. Passport isn’t just an MSN phenomenon, it’s used at all of these sites as well. Perhaps this is discussed in the responses to Jason’s article, I don’t know because I haven’t read them yet.

People are jerks.

Anti-Perl propaganda that I haven’t yet bothered to read: What’s wrong with Perl.

Cofax is an open source content management system developed by Knight-Ridder for use by the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers to publish content on the Web. It’s built using Java and XML.

The traffic at the Gnutella site has quadrupled since the Napster ruling. I doubt this surprises anyone.

Inside.com has an article that covers the legal arguments made by the RIAA and Napster at trial, and the judge’s reasoning in granting the injunction against Napster.

There are two interesting things to read over at Joel’s site: the first is an anonymous response from a Microsoft employee to his article blasting .NET as a non-entity, and the second is a deeper look at Microsoft’s Passport service. While Passport does offer some level of convenience for its users, it’s also a very, very scary thing. The thought that it will someday be built into the Web browser and operating system is downright chilling. (See why we need competition?)