Joshua Micah Marshall says that Dick Armey is a big, fat liar, but we already knew that, right? The cool thing is that Armey might actually be the one to torpedo Bush’s big plans for the tax cut because he insists on asking for a larger tax cut than Bush himself wants. If the Republicans start blowing out the tax cut to pay off their corporate patrons, it could all be over in a flash.

Ars Technica: The Great Hack Attack. The guys at Ars provide the technical lowdown on the mass exploit of Windows NT servers by Eastern European crooks.

The New Republic has an interesting article in favor of national missile defense by Lawrence F. Kaplan. He criticizes the preprogrammed Democratic and Republican positions on NMD and makes a pretty compelling argument in favor of a shipboard system designed to address states with few ballistic missiles. I think that his position is more strategically sound than most, but I don’t agree with his strategy on many points, and don’t share his optimism on the technical feasability of the system. For his strategy to be implemented optimally, not only must the system work very reliably, but all of the states with missile capability must be sure that it works very reliably.

Declan has also written up the story of his subpoena for Wired News.

Microsoft’s Hailstorm is something that would be very interesting to me if it were offered by someone other than Microsoft.

Declan McCullagh has been subpoenaed to testify in the criminal trial of David Bell, the cypherpunk who came up with the “assassination politics” scheme whereby people would anonymously post bounties to have politicians (or others) assasinated.

It’s scary when the crackers turn pro. A group of Eastern European hackers has leveraged some known Windows NT exploits to rewt over 40 Web sites and steal over a million credit card numbers. I wonder if this is going to turn out like one of those serial killer stories where the actual number of victims turns out to be a lot higher than the initial total. The important point here is that they simply tried out known exploits. Had the system administrators at those sites bothered to patch their systems, none of these attacks would have succeeded.

Microsoft Office XP just went gold. At home I use Office 97, and at work, I use Office 2000. To be more specific, at home I use Word 97, and at work I use Word 2000 (occasionaly), and Outlook 2000, because IT makes me. I honestly can’t see myself upgrading Office, ever. Getting to use Office 2000 at my current job cemented this opinion. Word 2000 offers me nothing over Word 97, at least as far as I can tell. I wonder how many other people feel the same way? I’m usually a pretty faithful software upgrader, but as far as I can tell, office suites are finished. Maybe I’m wrong.

I certainly hope things aren’t as grave as this email makes them out to be … but I’m afraid they are.

Dan Hartung encouraged me to look a bit more deeply into the “encryption” Aimster plans on using to thwart the RIAA, and even sent along a helpful link. As it turns out, it’s not encryption at all, it’s encoding. And the encoding is even simpler than pig Latin. I figured they wouldn’t be doing anything complicated, but this system is obviously designed to exploit the comedic stupidity of the DMCA.