Posts

More bad news on the scumbags at VeriSign and ICANN. VeriSign, as a reward for their sheer greed and incompetence, gets permanent hold of .com and long term hold on .net. More importantly (for this site), there’s talk of reimposing the old restrictions on .org domains so that they are only issued to real non-profit organizations. That would be fine with me if the idiots had accepted any of a huge number of proposals to expand the namespace beyond the pitiful number of TLDs that are currently available. I’m not in love with .org, but I’m certainly not a .net or a .com. ...

Interesting goings on at the Microsoft appeal yesterday. Dahlia Lithwick summarizes for Slate. Declan McCullagh provides the libertarian spin for Wired. Joe Conason has been on a roll lately. In his latest column for Salon, he looks back at some of the pardons granted by the elder Bush. Included in his pardons along with the members of the Iran-Contra scandal were a Pakistani heroin smuggler, a Cuban terrorist, and suspected Commie sympathizer Armand Hammer. The Hammer pardon is interesting because he was brought up frequently in the previous election cycle in order to tar Al Gore. Hammer in fact donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican causes and obtained his pardon from the first President Bush. ...

Anyone using JDOM on a real live project? I bought the Brett McLaughlin’s book Java and XML, and note that he devotes quite a bit of space to this new API. I checked out the JDOM site today and see that they still haven’t released an official 1.0 version. Is it like the Perl DBI – not released but being used by everybody anyway? Where does free speech stop and the DMCA start? Let’s find out. Is it legal to express the DeCSS algorithm in haiku? And you have to love Dr. David Touretzky’s request for more detail from the MPA when they asked him to remove a “circumvention device” from his Web site. ...

Tog has real problems with the Dock in Mac OS X. It’s pretty amazing how far the state of UI design at Apple has fallen. (And what’s up with those new, crazy looking iMacs?) Ars Technica has a reasonable editorial theorizing on why record labels aren’t going for the Napster settlement offer. Of course, Occam’s Razor dictates that we simply assume that the RIAA isn’t going for it because they either don’t believe that Napster isn’t good for the money, or that they know a billion dollars over five years isn’t enough money to make them happy. I think that they see Napster as complicating their world unnecessarily, and just want it dead. ...

How embarrassing is the collision of the USS Greeneville and Ehime Maru going to end up being? The latest reports are that the submarine detected the fishing vessel in the area an hour before rising to the surface and sending the Japanese boat down to Davey Jones’ locker, and that the sub’s sonar officer admits to not finishing his sonar plots because one of the 16 civilians packed into the sub distracted him. ...

Clinton explained his reasons for the Marc Rich pardon in a New York Times op-ed over the weekend. The question that remains for me is why, if Rich’s case for innocence was so strong, did he flee the country? He could have hired a legal dream team and gone before a jury like most other innocent people do. Needless to say, critics of the pardon are having their say today. Check out [www.whithouse.org](http://www.whithouse.org/), a bizarre site obviously run by enraged Cubans living in America. [www.whitehouse.org](http://www.whitehouse.org) is a spoof of the real White House web site. ...

Microsoft is really turning up the anti-Linux rhetoric, which must mean that they’re legitimately worried about the threat Linux poses. Their latest PR gaffe involves Jim Allchin describing Linux as, of all things, un-American. I wish that he just meant that it was created by a Swedish Finn, but he’s actually using the term in the “truth, justice, and the American way” sense.

You’d think people would have given up on the Y2K thing by now, but they haven’t. Reuters is reporting on Saint Isadore’s nomination as patron saint of the Internet two years behind the times. Happy Valentine’s Day.

I got a new computer at work today. There’s nothing more fun than reinstalling all of the applications you use every day and getting them working again. I actually was responsible enough to make a list of everything I use before they took my old computer away, and it’s still taking a lot of time to get everything straightened out. Is Dick Cheney taking over the country? I was reading this Wired article about Microsoft’s copy protection system for audio files that’s built into newer versions of Windows and I’m a bit confused. Basically, it refuses to play audio files correctly through any sound card that doesn’t use special, approved drivers (which prevent unauthorized copying, one assumes). What I’m confused about is whether this system only works with Windows Media-specific files, or whether it imposes its copy protection system on any audio file. ...

Over on the Well, there’s an interactive interview with Steve Levy, the author of Hackers , and more recently Crypto. FreeBSD keeps its documentation in DocBook format. That’s really cool. I imagine that most open source projects will start maintaining their documentation in portable formats rather than HTML, or man, or whatever. I don’t know how I missed the news that Google purchased Deja.com’s Usenet archive, but I did. This is fantastic news. Watching Deja.com go from focusing on Usenet to basically hiding it was disheartening. Hopefully Google will be able to turn all of their goodwill into a profitable business. I’d pay $5 a month to use Google. ...