The battle between ElcomSoft and Adobe just turned extremely nasty — Dmitry Sklyarov, a programmer for ElcomSoft, was arrested yesterday in Las Vegas by the FBI (he was there to give a talk on e-book security at Defcon) for violating the DMCA. This law must go.

DNA Lounge (Jamie Zawinski’s labor of love) has officially reopened. Quoth Zawinksi: “As delayed and over-budget as this project was, it still shipped before Mozilla.”

ElcomSoft has garnered lots of negative attention from Adobe for doing them the favor of figuring out how easy it is to crack Adobe’s eBook software and publishing an explanation of they did it on their Web site.

I’ve always wondered what the server architecture for EverQuest is. There’s some information in this article at HostingTech. EverQuest currently runs on about 1,000 servers.

Lawyers from enterprise software company J.D. Edwards have bullied the maintainer of JDE (the Java Development Environment for Emacs) into changing its name, because they have the acronym JDE trademarked. Lame. (Actually, the name change is not final — the maintainer, Paul Kinnucan, is considering his options.)

From Simon Cozens’ weblog: Why Michael Schwern is not a Java programmer. I agree with some of his reasons, and disagree with others. If you’re writing code just for yourself, and you really grok all of the cool features in Perl, then his article makes sense. When you’re working on a team, and the people on the team all have different levels of understanding when it comes to the language that’s being used, then Perl can be and usually is an utter and complete train wreck. You can divide Perl programmers into two camps, those that can read the source code to CGI.pm and tell you how it works, and those that can’t. About 98% of the people who are Perl programmers can’t. These people are the ones who would be better off with a language that enforces a more disciplined approach, like Java.

Dan Gillmor is going to try to live without Microsoft so as to express his opposition to Microsoft’s business tactics. If I remember correctly, he’s not the first tech columnist to do so. Was it Dan Shafer or Jon Katz who went down this road awhile back? Maybe they both did. In any case, dumping Microsoft is, if nothing else, a veritable gold mine of material for the average tech columnist. I expect, “Where can I find a decent word processor?” and “Why can’t I connect to my ISP?” columns real soon now, because I assume he’ll try to use Linux. Dan should just grab an iBook and go on with life, he probably wouldn’t miss Microsoft at all.

As we round up the Slobodan Milosevics of the world and haul them off to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes, it’s helpful to reflect on our own past misdeeds as a nation (I’m speaking to Americans here, my foreign friends). I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try current war criminals for their crimes against humanity, but I am saying that in the future, we ought to consider what we’ve had other people arrested for when planning our own foreign policy. Perhaps I’m naive, but I think that our current, media-saturated culture would prevent our government from blowing up millions of people in Southeast Asia and keeping Americans in the dark about it today.

LimeWire 1.6 is out if you’re into that sort of thing. The new version seems to have some screen repainting problems under Windows XP, but hopefully it will crash less often than it did.

Quote of the day: “We want to establish a system in Afghanistan through which we can control all those things that are wrong, obscene, immoral and against Islam.” — Taliban Foreign Minister Maulvi Wakil Ahmad Muttawaki, on the Taliban’s decision to ban the Internet. Good luck, buddy.