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Brenda Laurel and Tog have joined the Nielsen-Norman group, giving them a stable of four computer industry rock stars to hire out for user interface design. I like Tog as a pundit much better than Nielsen, whose grating style drives me nuts. Brenda Laurel is famous mostly for starting a company that produced games for girls. It was purchased by Mattel. The Industry Standard has an article on precedents for the disruption currently being caused by Napster. Examples include the player piano and the VCR. ...

Brown Orifice HTTPD exploits a nasty hole in the Java security model and the JVM in Netscape Communicator. It’s an applet that runs a Web server on your local machine when the browser executes it, and sends arbitrary files to people who request them. You can now feel free to turn off Java in your browser. Al Gore will select Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate, according to MSNBC. Lieberman is a very courageous choice, and quite possibly, a brilliant one. Lieberman is an orthodox Jew, and is well known for taking strong moral stands. One of Gore’s biggest problems thusfar has been his association with Bill Clinton. Choosing Lieberman as a running mate clearly distances him from Clinton in a big way. ...

If you have the implementation overview documents for Microsoft Passport, could you email them to me? I’d like to look them over without registering at the Passport site. OK, cr.yp.to is the best domain name I’ve ever seen.

IBM developerWorks has an article on XML transport protocols. The FTC has issued its report on online profiling. The FTC praises the industry’s attempts at self-regulation through the Network Advertising Initiative -- the principles seem OK, but like almost all attempts at industry self-regulation, the NAI has no teeth.

Anti-Perl propaganda that I haven’t yet bothered to read: What’s wrong with Perl. People are jerks. Jason Levine rebuts the now widely distributed Joel Spolsky article on Microsoft Passport. He’s right to point out that many sites are putting all of their subsites in one network in order to share cookies between them, but misses the point that Microsoft is trying to get third parties to join the Microsoft Passport network as well. Passport isn’t just an MSN phenomenon, it’s used at all of these sites as well. Perhaps this is discussed in the responses to Jason’s article, I don’t know because I haven’t read them yet. ...

The traffic at the Gnutella site has quadrupled since the Napster ruling. I doubt this surprises anyone. Cofax is an open source content management system developed by Knight-Ridder for use by the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers to publish content on the Web. It’s built using Java and XML.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is a cool organization that raises money to protect free speech in comics. One of their money-raising projects is auctioning off stuff donated by comic artists and writers on eBay. There are two interesting things to read over at Joel’s site: the first is an anonymous response from a Microsoft employee to his article blasting .NET as a non-entity, and the second is a deeper look at Microsoft’s Passport service. While Passport does offer some level of convenience for its users, it’s also a very, very scary thing. The thought that it will someday be built into the Web browser and operating system is downright chilling. (See why we need competition?) ...

Unsurprisingly, the judge in the RIAA’s case against Napster has issued a preliminary injunction that will shut down Napster. Quick! Everyone over to Gnutella! It seems impossible to me that the RIAA doesn’t understand that by killing Napster, they only make the music piracy community stronger. Napster is the largest “music sharing” service by far today. Their weakness is that they’re a real company with venture capital, centralized servers, and lots of full-time employees. If they die, everyone will flock to decentralized services based on open source software, and then there will be absolutely nothing that the RIAA can do to stop piracy. If the RIAA keeps Napster around, at least they have some hope of getting a handle on this thing, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. ...

This O’Reilly Net article on Unix tools is a good introduction to the design philosophy behind Unix for novices. If you haven’t used Unix, or you have but you don’t really get what’s going on there, check out the article. Duncan Campbell has the inside scoop on Echelon, the spy system that listens in on electronic communications all over the world.

More Eazel hype: Andrew Leonard gets a demo of Nautilus from CEO Mike Boich. Of course, since this is the open source world, you can get your own sneak preview at nautilus.eazel.com. Unfortunately, the screenshots are rather dated, and mere mortals probably won’t be downloading and building the latest CVS snapshot. The recent G7 meeting that President Clinton attended for about half a day cost 750 million bucks to put on. As the author of the article points out, you could end famine in some parts of the world with that kind of money. What a joke. ...