The greedheads at VeriSign have been ordered by a federal judge to stop trying to steal customers from other registrars by sending them bogus renewal notices in the mail. It’s pretty bad when a company that has a government granted monopoly that allows them to rake in cash hand over fist has to resort to stealing from its competitors (who are also required to pay part of their proceeds to VeriSign because they maintain the core domain name registry).

Microsoft has signed a deal with the new company created by two of the originally creators of EverQuest. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler are, by all accounts, sadistic, customer hating freaks. Sounds like a match made in heaven when I think about it.

A blast from the past: on July 26, CBS News reported that John Ashcroft was flying exclusively on chartered jets because his FBI security detail was concerned about his safety on commercial airlines. This is certainly a story that bears further examination.

Two big news items this week seem to confirm what I suspected all along, which is that the 9/11 attacks were not prevented in large part because of information processing problems, rather than a failure of information gathering. Today, it’s been reported that President Bush was briefed in August on a possible attack by terrorists working with Osama bin Laden that involved hijacking planes. Earlier this month, we learned that FBI agents in Arizona were concerned about Arab students at US flight training schools in July, 2001.

I don’t think it’s fair at this point to say that the administration was falling down on the job, and doing so would be pointless anyway. The question is how we can synthesize the information that we have to prevent attacks in the future. Just the two bits of data mentioned above, if used together, could have thwarted the attacks. Knowing that Arab students at US flight schools were suspect and that a potential hijacking scheme was in the works, we could have provided airlines with a list of names gleaned from a list of suspect students at flight schools around the country. Given the fact that some of the hijackers were on lists of suspected terrorists anyway, and that there were other red flags in the travel plans of the hijackers (one way tickets, no luggage, several tickets bought with the same credit card, etc), surely we had enough information to prevent some or all of the hijackings. Tom Ridge ought to be spending 16 hours a day working with people to figure out how to turn all the information we have into something meaningful, and then putting it into the right hands.

The question one would ask of the Bush administration is whether the warning about the upcoming terrorist attack that was received in August was something routine, or something exceptional. If various warnings of terrorist attacks are received every day or every week, I can see how the warning in question could slip through the cracks. If there were something special about it, then it seems like the fact that it did not lead to steps that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks bears further investigation.

Thomas Friedman: Nine Wars Too Many. Friedman does a great job of breaking down the agendas of just about everybody involved in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He ends with a nice flourish as well.

Washington Post: Webcasters Take Royalty Fight To Congress. The proposed royalty structure is going to be fatal for webcasters and bad for the music business overall. Zimran at winterspeak.com has done a good job of evaluating the economics of webcasting, and, for that matter, the economics of all sorts of things.

Salon: Age of Nvidia

One thing I’ve noticed recently is that the maps and driving directions from various mapping sites are not all created equal. Two times recently I’ve tried to get driving directions using Yahoo Maps and either gotten no route at all or a bad route. The same search on MapQuest yielded perfect results. Vicinity’s MapBlast service was also much better than Yahoo Maps, and offers an alternate style map called LineDrive that’s really cool as well. For what it’s worth, Yahoo licenses its maps from NavTech, which doesn’t seem to offer an online service of its own. However, they also provide maps to Microsoft’s mapping service, which kind of sucks as well.

Bruce Sterling has an op-ed on Star Wars in the New York Times, entitled A Very American Movie. Mostly, I’m just amazed to see his byline there. I remember meeting Bruce Sterling in Houston when he was slumming with the hackers at HohoCon about 10 years ago. I certainly never would have thought that he’d be writing in the New York Times someday, or that I would be reading the New York Times someday.

Despite the fact that I feel no pity for RealNames, it turns out that they did provide a useful service. As it turns out, RealNames was the only company that was able to resolve domain names written using multibyte character sets.