Miguel de Icaza has posted his opinions on Passport, and on building a better, alternate system that addresses most of the weaknesses of Passport. As soon as I learned what Passport was, I knew that the only way to fight it would be to build an alternate system that works better, because it’s too useful to fail on its own, unless it’s plagued by outages (which is probable, actually).

New Mexico threw in the towel on the antitrust case against Microsoft. They sold out cheaply, too — Microsoft just paid their attorneys fees. Never mind what I said about Microsoft’s announcement that they wouldn’t smack down OEMs for messing with the browser, New Mexico’s attorney general cited that announcement as one of the reasons that they settled. (I don’t believe that she actually means it, it just gives her some cover to get out of the lawsuit. I imagine Microsoft made the announcement so that parties who wanted to settle could act like they won something and move on.)

Nothing gets my blood flowing like a sordid tale of corporate malfeasance, especially when the corporation gets their comeuppance in the end. Would you believe that Coca-Cola let the copyright lapse on their contour bottle, let it fall into the hands of an independent marketing consultant whose ideas they stole, and then fraudulently re-filed for the copyright later? According to GNN’s story Coca-Karma, that’s exactly what happened. When you factor in the billions of dollars at stake, the fact that the consultant was representing himself in court, and a corrupt federal judge, the story races into “the truth is stranger than fiction” territory …

Kind of odd that I posted yesterday about Andrew Sullivan’s pleas for support given that he’s embroiled in a controversy over accepting sponsorship (read: cash) from the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying group. Sullivan, for his part, is filled with righteous indignation that anyone would dare question his ethics and has been spewing about it for the past day or two.

Have you heard about the guy who’s going to be arrested for installing a Distributed.net client on computers at DeKalb University? I’ve been waiting to post a link on this until I came across a real article about it. There’s really nothing to say about this other than it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. The fact that they’re accusing him of stealing about half a million dollars worth of bandwidth is obviously ridiculous. They’re charging him 59 cents a minute for bandwidth, but even that inflated figure doesn’t explain the charge, since Distributed.net clients only connect long enough to send up finished work and get new work units. Probably the closest parallel to this case is when Craig Neidorf was arrested for stealing an E911 document that Bell South claimed was worth $80,000. As it turned out, you could obtain the document for a trivial charge by calling an 800 number and asking for it.

Judge Patel has completely shut down Napster again. In other news, there are 34 terabytes of files available on the Gnutella network right now according to the client that I just started up.

The good news about Microsoft’s announcement that PC makers can now “remove” access to Internet Explorer from new PCs is that nobody is falling for it. Now that Microsoft has a virtual monopoly on Web browsers and they’ve moved on to other things, like pervasively embedding hooks to Passport into the operating system, they have nothing to lose by making this concession. Besides, since there’s no other browser company out there interested in doing deals with PC makers to be the default browser on new PCs, nobody is going to turn off IE anyway. Duh.

The thing about Windows XP is that it’s amazingly frightening. I feel a total lack of control that I’ve never felt with any other operating system. I think the biggest reason for this is that it’s the first operating system that is really connected to the mothership pervasively. It starts out by asking whether you want to activate Windows over the Internet. I went ahead and did that. It loads Windows Messenger automatically and asks you for your Passport information. Why? I don’t think it just wants me to try instant messaging, but I have no way to be sure, and I have no idea what else it does. Then there’s Windows Update. I used it with Windows 98, but I have to admit that it scares me with Windows XP. What information is it sending when it connects? I feel like I have little to no control over what gets shared between me and Microsoft. Let me put it this way: it feels more like Microsoft owns my PC than that I own their operating system. It’s really quite creepy.

For some reason, the fact that Andrew Sullivan hits his readers up for donations rubs me the wrong way. I’m not sure if it’s because he’s a big name journalist, or the actual verbage on the contribution page that ticks me off.

You may be depressed about the ongoing collapse of the tech industry, but be glad that you’re not a shepherd. Working 90 hours a week for about .25 cents an hour with no human contact, running water, or electricity has to be about as bad as it gets. This is in America, too.