The Economist’s obituary for Katharine Graham is particularly nice.

What is AOL getting for their $100 million donation to the “Save the Amazon” fund? None of the stories I’ve seen provide the answer to that question with any clarity.

Adobe has asked that the federal government release Dmitry Sklyarov, the programmer who published an application that cracks Adobe e-books and was arrested for violating the DMCA. Unfortunately, it’s up to the federal government to drop the charges, not Adobe. Besides, the real problem (from my standpoint, not Dmitry’s) is that the DMCA exists in the first place. The fact that one can be taken to jail for selling software that enables someone to circumvent copy protection is moronic, as rc3.org readers already know.

Quick question: isn’t it the case that the only JVM that Microsoft currently ships with Windows is the one in Internet Explorer that enables you to run applets? As far as I know, you have to download the JRE (which allows you to run Java applications) yourself, or get it bundled with another software package, like Limewire or Opera. If you know the definitive answer to this, please send email.

I’m only still catching up on the 500+ emails I received while I was out of town. One of the big tech news events I missed was the onslaught of the Code Red worms, which managed to nail thousands of sites, including Microsoft’s own Windows Update site. Bruce Schneier’s take on Code Red is clearly written and informative, as usual.

I don’t usually link to stuff I find at Slashdot (under the assumption that everyone but me reads it regularly), but I couldn’t pass up this interview with Dave Lebling, one of the founders of Infocom. What amazed me most was the platform limitations they ran into with their early games. It’s a no brainer to think of the massive 3D stuff we have in modern games taxing the platforms on which they run, but it stuns me to think back on the time when something like Zork had to coded with performance in mind.

A reader sent in some details on the death of the protester at the G8 summit in Genoa. It was definitely a situation that had gotten out of hand, and the vandals who were attacking the police vehicle were as much to blame for the fatality as the person who did the shooting. I would say the same thing to “anarchists” that I would to the authorities — violence isn’t the answer.

dotemacs is the site I’ve been looking for forever.

Clay Shirky beseeches OEMs to pre-install the JVM on their computers, since Microsoft is dropping the JVM from Windows XP. Contrast this move with Apple’s pervasively hooking Mac OS X in with the JVM, and providing a Java interface for their OS calls. Java, for good or ill, has achieved pretty massive popularity since it was introduced. It’s obvious that Microsoft’s refusal to embrace Java is nothing more than an anti-competitive move. (Sun is partly to blame here as well, since they’ve made it tough for Microsoft to embrace Java as well, and generally crowed about being at war with Microsoft for years now.)

Richard Mellon-Scaife’s personal outlet for conservative bile took Katharine Graham’s death as one last opportunity for a few low blows. Apparently they reached into their extremely shallow bag of tricks and decided that the Vince Foster gambit was appropriate, as they imply (none too subtly) that Graham shot her husband, who committed suicide in 1963.