File this one under bad hacks: Microsoft Outlook 2000 now informs me when a program tries to access my address book and asks me whether I want to let it. This is their solution to email viruses reading all the names in your address book and sending email to each of them. (My solution is to just not use Outlook to read my email.) Unfortunately, their stupid security measure prevents TrueSync from synchronizing my Outlook address book with my Yahoo address book and the address book on my Palm. I’m having all sorts of weird problems trying to get things to sync with my Palm since I got a computer running Windows 2000. What a pain. (For what it’s worth, Microsoft should use a certificate-based security system to control access to the address book. Then again, Microsoft has been having problems with certificates lately as well.)
Stratfor has the best writeup I’ve seen on the plane collision over the South China Sea. I’m really curious about our capabilities when it comes to deleting information and destroying equipment on planes like this when they go down. There seems to be a lot of speculation about whether the crew were able to destroy any of it, and I wonder how the systems work, myself. It seems like a system could be designed that would burn out all the electronic gear on the plane very rapidly, but I imagine that would be hazardous to the crew. Anyone have any idea how this stuff works?