It looks like Genuity Inc is going down the tubes after they posted massive losses and Verizon declined an option to reabsorb the company, which it was required to spin off when it acquired GTE. I find this interesting only because of the heritage of the company. Genuity Inc used to be BBN Planet which started out as Bolt Beranek and Newman, or BB & N. Bob Kahn was an employee of BB & N back in 1969 when he participated in the initial experiments that led to the creation of what is now the Internet, and was on the distribution list for RFC 3, which was written by Steve Crocker. It’s kind of amazing to think that BBN went from a high tech consulting firm that was asked to design a packet switched network for the defense department to a major bandwith provider to yet another bit of telecom industry road kill.

I saw a link somewhere to the Doonesbury strip last Sunday, in which the gag involves freeloading on somebody’s 802.11b hub. The strip is funny, but what surprised me is that something so geeky is now mainstream. Is Doonesbury a more geeky strip than I had thought, or is this wireless stuff now firmly entrenched in popular culture?

Did you know that rc3.org is #74 on this list: The World’s 100 Best Real People Websites? Me neither. A friend sent that link to me.

I’m kind of wondering today how pervasive kickbacks are in the world of business. I remember working for a Web design firm where it was pretty much an open secret that we maintained a relationship with a certain large client because we paid a kickback to the contracter at this client who was in charge of bringing in the Web help. Are kickbacks like this just a regular part of day to day business? Do they explain why I’ve been forced to work with outside contractors that are seemingly incompetent? Just wondering out loud …

Cg, the new graphics programming language from nVidia, looks interesting.

Linux Weekly News is going away after next week’s issue. I hope they keep the daily edition — it can’t be that much trouble to maintain, and it’s highly useful. Producing something like the weekly edition, which has real articles, seems like a lot more work.

Salon is having a banner week. First they unveil a weblog hosting service, and now they run their first column by Keith Olbermann, their latest columnist. (By the way, here’s a free suggestion for blogs.salon.com: give your readers URLs that people can remember.)

Last week we learned that the idea that AOL had acquired Time Warner was a myth. This week, we learn that AOL’s pretensions toward IM interoperability were a myth. No person who has used Trillian (or one of the many other generic IM clients out there) can buy the idea that interoperability is too difficult to achieve.

Christopher Caldwell takes a look at the roots of President Bush’s personal fortune. Just something to keep around for the next time somebody challenges me when dispute the fact that President Bush’s sole marketable commodity in life is being politically connected. (Via Talking Points Memo.)

The House has written into its corporate reform bill a provision stating that attempting to break a federal law is a crime. In order to give you a sense of how crazy this is, it’s an attempt to generalize all laws so that they work like drug laws. That can’t be good. The real bonus here is that violating the new “attempting” laws would carry the same penalties as successfully violating the laws. It sure seems to me that the creation of “attempting” laws should occur on a case by case (or rather, statute by statute) basis. (Via the estimable Bashman.)