Some security geeks at the San Diego Supercomputer Center did a cool experiment to determine how long an unsecured Red Hat 5.2 machine could survive in the wild without the benefit of patching or a firewall. The answer: not very long.

Here’s a link to the actual Amazon.com affiliate program patent. There’s a protest site up at nowebpatents.org. I’m still putting my thoughts together on this whole thing … I’ve read a lot of interesting stuff from both sides this weekend, and I’m distilling it into a piece that’s too long for the front page. I’ll add a link to it when I’m finished.

Ars Technica has a lengthy review of Mac OS X DP3 that goes over both its technical innards and the new Aqua user interface. The review pans a lot of the new interface features. It seems like Apple is trying too hard to achieve coolness and isn’t doing enough to keep things usable.

Yet another reason to vote against George Bush, Jr.: he doesn’t believe in our legal system. Dubya unabashedly opposes the right of individuals to recover damages from companies that commit tortuous acts. He never puts it that way, though. He also says that he wouldn’t have brought the anti-trust suit against Microsoft, which is odd, considering the fact that Texas is a participant in the states case against the Redmondians. What’s up with that?

Tim O’Reilly has real guts. He’s taking Amazon.com to task for their use of patents, despite the fact that Amazon.com is a huge O’Reilly customer. I already knew he cares about doing the right thing than just lining his own pockets, but this just raises my esteem for him. I also agree with Tim to such an extent that I don’t know if I’ll bother writing my own Amazon.com/patents related screed.

bustpatents.com looks like a pretty useful site covering patent abuse in new fields like e-commerce and bioinformatics.

Phil Agre’s most recent notes and recommendations are a good read, as always. Most interesting is his capsule history of conservativism and liberalism. You have to skip down about a quarter of the way through the document to get to it. (An until now secret aspiration of mine is to have this site mentioned in an RRE message by Phil Agre. I’ve never had the guts to send him an email recommending myself though.)

Jorn Barger has written a useful article on URL hacking. Here’s an official rc3.org URL hacking tip: everything after the .html in a CNet URL can be trashed with impunity.