The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is a cool organization that raises money to protect free speech in comics. One of their money-raising projects is auctioning off stuff donated by comic artists and writers on eBay.

Everyone talks about how big open source software is in Europe, but I think this proves it.

I promise that I didn’t read Scott Rosenberg’s latest column before writing my blurb on Napster this morning. His column says the same thing I did, only in greater detail and more eloquently.

Unsurprisingly, the judge in the RIAA’s case against Napster has issued a preliminary injunction that will shut down Napster. Quick! Everyone over to Gnutella! It seems impossible to me that the RIAA doesn’t understand that by killing Napster, they only make the music piracy community stronger. Napster is the largest “music sharing” service by far today. Their weakness is that they’re a real company with venture capital, centralized servers, and lots of full-time employees. If they die, everyone will flock to decentralized services based on open source software, and then there will be absolutely nothing that the RIAA can do to stop piracy. If the RIAA keeps Napster around, at least they have some hope of getting a handle on this thing, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

Duncan Campbell has the inside scoop on Echelon, the spy system that listens in on electronic communications all over the world.

This O’Reilly Net article on Unix tools is a good introduction to the design philosophy behind Unix for novices. If you haven’t used Unix, or you have but you don’t really get what’s going on there, check out the article.

Gamasutra has an excellent article on cheating in online games. It’s thoroughly researched and comprehensive.

Bruce Schneier’s latest Crypto-Gram has a short article on SOAP and firewalls, explaining why using one to subvert the other is a bad idea.

I’ve seen a million pointers to articles like this one talking about secret CIA papers posted to a Web site, but none of the articles have links to the Web site. The documents are at cryptome.org (it seems to be down right now but there’s a mirror here).

The recent G7 meeting that President Clinton attended for about half a day cost 750 million bucks to put on. As the author of the article points out, you could end famine in some parts of the world with that kind of money. What a joke.