Happy Halloween.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s article on Bill Gates’ remarks at the Creating Digital Dividends conference in Seattle includes more great quotes than the Wired News article I linked to the other day. My respect for Bill Gates went up immeasurably after he started pumping serious cash into helping to eradicate preventable diseases in the Third World, and even moreso after his frank statements at this conference.

Speculating that free software hackers might have been behind the Microsoft break-in got Andrew Leonard into hot water with his readers. I wonder if comparing the ideology behind free software to a parable told by Chairman Mao in this article will help his cause …

Four ICANN “interim” board members have decided that they won’t leave after all, having changed the bylaws governing the organization so that they can stick around. Corrupt, corrupt, corrupt.

I’m a sucker for a good post mortem, and the Diablo II post mortem at Gamasutra is a fine read.

Nordstrom (the upscale depart store) suffered a black eye when they commissioned a commercial email campaign that targetted people who had shopped in their stores. They paid Acxiom to match Nordstrom’s customer list with a database of email addresses and then fired off the SPAM campaign. Unfortunately, it blew up in their face. Hopefully this will serve as a cautionary tale for other companies that think using such services is a good idea.

So as not to disappoint readers who come here expecting to find schadenfreude whenever something bad happens to Microsoft, I’ll mention that Microsoft’s internal network was compromised recently. According to Microsoft, crackers who used a password-gathering Trojan horse/worm, broke into an employee’s home machine that was connected to Microsoft’s network and then moved outward from there. Microsoft admits that the crackers did access some source code to a non-core product, and the duration of the compromise is not known. A lot of people are using this incident as a referendum on Microsoft the company, or on the level of security provided by Microsoft products. My opinion is that this can happen to anybody. I’d be surprised if this were Microsoft’s first compromise.

Way back on May 29, 1999 I made a snarky entry about Microsoft’s work on a new English dictionary. Well, last night, I saw the dictionary in a bookstore, and that led me to wonder how well the project turned out. (It was billed as being quite innovative at the time.) There are 41 reviews for the dictionary at Amazon.com, some good, some bad. I also found some reviews of the dictionary on the Web, but none of them were detailed or scholarly enough to provide information not found in the Amazon.com customer reviews.

Law.com has an article on the current status of UCITA, the evil software licensing law that the software industry desperately wants to see enacted so that they don’t have to take responsibility for their mistakes and so that they can abuse their customers at will.

Steven Baum’s research into the Social Security “crisis” over at Ethel the Blog turned up some fascinating information about future insolvency and also provides some interesting observations about privatization. You have to love it when people actually research the facts …