The developer of the Palm GameBoy emulator Liberty “accidentally” released a trojan horse masquerading as a cracked version of his application. The News.com story is really a pathetic piece of reporting, but this is the first known trojan horse for the Palm, and thus is linkworthy. If this starts a trend, it could mark the end of promiscuous application sharing among Palm users.

RSA’s encryption patents, one of the biggest roadblocks in the encryption industry, expire on September 26.

Salon has a great article on the huge copyright land grab Congress passed last November on behalf of the major recording labels, classifying all recordings as works made for hire (thus giving the copyright to the labels instead of the artists). The change was made without public debate, as a one line clause slipped into an omnibus spending bill. Not only does the article once again demonstrate just how evil the major labels are, but it also provides some insight into the utter corruption of the legislature. The Republican party is often associated with this sort of lawmaking for sale, but in this case, the corruption was very much bipartisan.

The New York Times has a long, rambling article on open source software today. There’s not much of interest in there for people who already have a handle on the whole open source thing, but it’s a decent introduction for the uninitiated.

The Agenda VR is a handheld with 8 megabytes of memory that runs Linux. Pretty cool.

Some grassroots journalism led to the discovery that CNN had linked to the DeCSS source code from one of their news stories. This is news because CNN is part of Time-Warner, which participated against the suit against 2600 in which the judge ruled that 2600 was not allowed to link to the DeCSS source. How can it be legal for CNN to link to it, but not 2600? You have to love corporate schizophrenia.

Emulex lost two billion dollars in market cap when a fake press release was posted to Internet wire and investors freaked out. Shares in Emulex’s sector also took a pounding as investors reacted to the fake news. Investigators are looking at investors who shorted the stock as potential suspects. The herd mentality among investors never ceases to baffle me.

A clever person has set the DeCSS source code to music (6mb MP3). The song is better than you might think.

After getting caught in miserable traffic this morning, I’ve decided I need a strap-on helicopter to make my commute to work more pleasant.

Here’s another comparison of C# and Java, this one from genamics.com.