Here’s an explanation of the methodology used for the survey of most used stuff on the Internet I posted a link to yesterday. (Sorry not to be more specific, but the study glommed together everything from Web sites to Napster to email, so I’m not exactly sure what to refer to it as.) Anyway, JMM apparently solicits people to participate in their study, and then installs some tracking application that reports everything they do online. I can’t imagine that they get too many savvy Internet users to participate in that. Then again, what percentage of Internet users these days I would consider to be savvy?

Optimistic people like myself believed that the great thing about the Web was lower barriers to entry and the even playing field that it provided for audience eyeballs. According to a recent Jupiter Media Metrix study, Internet traffic is rapidly glomming onto a small number of sites. The study seems pretty flawed, since it counts in things like instant messaging, email, and Napster with Web usage. It also doesn’t take into account the fact that many of the larger sites publish content produced by third parties. AOL leads the pack thanks to their huge user base and the fact that they’ve acquired a huge number of popular sites.

Linus Torvalds on Fresh Air. (By the way, I noticed that Adaptive Path consulted on the newly redesigned npr.org. Congratulations, guys!)

Coming soon to a cybercafe near you: offline PKing.

A reader sent me more information on the $43 million we gave to Afghanistan. According to this ABC News article, the $43 million was separate from some unmentioned amount of drug money we’ve provided to Afghanistan, and was earmarked for drought relief. There’s also a press release from the Feminist Majority Foundation praising the government for the aid dollars provided to Afghanistan. This leaves unanswered the question of how much money we’re giving Afghanistan to fight their version of the drug war.

Enjoy it while it lasts: Tomalak’s Realm is going to cease publication after this week. I just wanted to post a little note saying that I really appreciate the hard work that Lawrence Lee has done in culling all the stories that he does from the Web. If you don’t think it’s a lot of work, take a look at the cross referencing he does. I’ve always wondered whether he has an amazing memory or he is just extremely meticulous.

I love it when things happen to Steve Gibson, because he always documents them copiously, and then generally writes some software that addresses the problem. Because he’s an old school hacker, he writes the software in assembly language. Anyway, he was recently the victim of a distributed denial of service attack, and has written up the incident in detail.

Currently, I’m rereading The Lord of the Rings, which I hadn’t read since I was a kid. (I’m currently wondering whether I really finished it back then, because I don’t remember anything from the second half of The Two Towers on very well at all.) Anyway, what surprised me is that these are really great books. I think my opinion of them had been diminished by all the other fantasy dreck I’ve read since then. Anyway, as I’ve read the books, I’ve of course become obsessed with all things Tolkein … I even bought an atlas of Middle Earth. I’ve also been wondering how Tolkein’s world view shaped the overall mood of the novels. Andrew O’Hehir’s essay briefly discusses Tolkein’s upbringing and life, and reading it, my suspicions are confirmed.

A server belonging to the Apache Software Foundation which housed all of the Apache source code was compromised. Thanks to good security, though, the intruder was detected almost immediately and things were cleaned up very nicely. It’s almost impossible never to get hacked, it’s what you do once that happens that counts.

Steve Ballmer: “Linux is a cancer.” Other disinformation included.