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It seems odd to me that at a time when usage of instant messaging is growing at an incredible pace, and when more and more businesses are relying on instant messaging for business critical communications, that AOL would alter its terms of service in the most user-unfriendly way possible. Here’s the meat of the problem: Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses. Needless to say, that kills AIM for any kind of important business use. Yahoo’s terms of service are clearly written, and in terms of claiming rights to your submissions, are not draconian: ...

Here’s a weblog that documents the procedure for viewing the status of a business school application at ApplyYourself.com. (Following these instructions is what got the students at Harvard Business School and others declined as punishment.)

Ed Felten also has an opinion on several professional schools rejecting applicants who viewed their application status before they had permission. The thing that bugs me most about this case is that it’s hard for me to imagine any rational person not peeking. If someone told me that a company had already made a decision about whether to hire me or not, and that I could find out what it was by editing a URL on the site where I submitted my application, the odds that I wouldn’t check approach zero. Professor Felten asks the salient question – who was harmed? ...

A reader sent me another link about the Health Affairs article stating that half of the people filing for bankruptcy did so due to health care expenses, this one from Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy. His basic point is that the numbers in the survey result from changing how the causes of bankruptcy are measured rather than a change in the types of people who are filing for bankruptcy. In any case, his critique seems better argued than the one I linked to yesterday. The chart listing the causes (from the original article) can be found here. ...

Did Microsoft really buy a whole company just to get one guy? I’ve been using Groove’s product for awhile now, and it uses more resources than a Java IDE, which is to say, a lot. Update: Michael Sippy speculates that Groove’s underlying peer-to-peer encrypted data sharing capabilities could become a Windows component. That would be incredibly powerful and useful.

Remember when I posted the other day about release day? Every business day since then has been release day due to bugs that have been found and bugs introduced with other bug fixes. I thought that release day marked the beginning of a new era when we’d only be pushing up releases once a month or so with new features. If there’s one thing the software business teaches you, it’s humility. ...

About a month ago, I mentioned in passing a study purporting to show that half of all personal bankruptcies are the result of medical bills. HedgeFundGuy casts some doubt on that study, due to its methodology. Via Marginal Revolution. Update: more information here.

A bunch of business schools are in a tizzy because prospective students found out their admission status early by exploiting a hole in a Web application used to process the admissions. Phil Greenspun has an explanation of how this exploit (and I hesitate to call it that) worked, along with some pithy commentary. What these schools need to do is fire the vendor that supplied them with some truly horrible software. Given the trivial nature of the exploit involved (all you had to do was modify a URL a bit), I can’t imagine anyone not checking their admission status early. ...

Timothy Noah coins a new term, flakt, for a fact that is measurably and demonstrably true but that most people refuse to acknowledge. He then goes on to explain how the efficacy of socialized medical care is a flakt. Worth reading.

Tim Bray: 10 reasons blogging is good for your career. Sam Ruby offers an amendment.