Declan McCullagh follows up today on yesterday’s USA Today story about government claims that terrorists are using steganography to conceal messages on the Internet. You can always count on McCullagh to fill in the gaps when stories like this break.

Artistic Style looks like a cool tool for those times when you inherit code that doesn’t follow the indenting style which you prefer.

I’m dissatisfied with the ArsDigita poll software. I think I’m going to write a polling system of my own to use on this site. I am stating this publicly in order to give myself motivation to actually do it.

Poor EToys. The heady days when they were suing etoy over a domain name to which they had absolutely no rightful claim must seem like such a distant memory.

Maybe it’s just me, but everything on the Web seems awfully slow today. I’m wondering if there are router problems out there.

Amazon.com is taking a page from PayPal’s book with the inception of the Amazon Honor System, a means by which Web sites can accept tips through Amazon.com’s one-click service. This, of course, leads me to a new poll question: Would you use the Amazon Honor System to tip the people who maintain Web sites that you like?

I’ve been puzzled for weeks about the advertising blitz for Cingular Wireless. I knew they were the hellspawn of some universally despised behemoth telcos, I just didn’t know which ones. I finally got off my butt and did the 5 seconds of research it took to discover that they are the product of a joint venture between BellSouth and SBC. (A reader sent along a note that Pac Bell Wireless is also part of Cingular. Blech.)

It seems terrorists are using the Internet in interesting ways. Apparently it’s becoming common for them to conceal encrypted messages within ordinary-looking image files, and then share them using freely available services. Think about it, the next time you’re looking at celebrity pictures on some site at Geocities, you could be unwittingly looking at secret terrorist messages. Of course, the downside of all this is that the government wants to use this as an excuse to limit our freedom.

Joe Conason explains why lots of people have big problems with Ted Olson’s nomination as solicitor general.

Microsoft’s Product Activation copy protection scheme seems like it will put a real damper on Windows XP andf Office XP upgrades. Microsoft introduced it quite some time ago in regions of the world with lots of software piracy (Asia), and they’re going global with it for their new products. I think it sucks.