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This months issue of XML.com focuses on how portals use XML. The fisherman who was holding Elian Gonzalez in the now infamous picture everyone has already seen is suing everybody he can think of for violating his constitutional rights. Give me a break. Guess who’s providing legal representation? None other than Judicial Watch, one of the groups that was part of the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” to impeach Clinton. Microsoft really seems to be grasping at straws in their ongoing quest not to get broken up by the government. Wired News reports that they will soon argue that they shouldn’t be broken up because the government said they shouldn’t be broken up in 1995. Umm, OK. (For the record, I’m against breaking up Microsoft.) ...

Not all security products are really secure. A warning for people using BlackICE Defender.

Boo.com died. While their “cutting edge” design is often cited as the reason for their failure, the real question one must ask is how they blew through 120 million bucks in 6 months, and what they needed 300 employees for. Clearly it wasn’t to fulfill orders. Lawrence Lessig spoke on the threat posed by AT&T; and the MPAA at the WWW9 conference in Amsterdam. Lessig is a useful tonic for the optimistic/naive people who believe that if we on the Internet are “left alone” by the government, problems will sort themselves out. The big corporations have a strong agenda designed to make sure that they keep turning a profit, and they won’t let the Internet get in the way of that. ...

Standards bodies guys carping at industry guys for implementing things without waiting for a standard to be written is always good for a laugh. Salon has a fascinating story on Bill and Lynne Jolitz, the creators of 386BSD, the original Unixlike operating system for PCs. Lycos merger with Terra creates global blah blah blah. Lycos in top 5 in terms of media reach but falling behind AOL, MSN, and Yahoo blah blah blah. Previously discussed merger with USA Networks scrapped because blah blah blah. I can’t believe people care about this stuff unless they have some skin in the game. ...

Does anyone else think that news sites that allow people to enter comments after news stories are just wasting drive space? I never read anything interesting in the comments after stories in MacWeek, or at ZDNet, or at Slate. I guess I have clicked on comments occasionally, hoping to be surprised, so in that sense these sites are doing their job, given that their job is to sell ad impressions. ...

Danny O’Brien provides a brief but piercing analysis of Bill Gates’ Time magazine essay defending Microsoft in the May 12 edition of NTK. Stratfor covers the greater implications of the “I Love You” worm in today’s Global Intelligence Update. The conclusion: personal computers were not designed for a networked world. It’s true. Flash is a Web-hostile technology, regardless of what the nitwit Flash addicts in this article say. If you want to put spinning widgets on your home page, Flash is as good as anything. If you want to build a Web application, stick with HTML. ...

There’s just nothing scarier than Congressional hearing. Lawmakers held a hearing to discuss the LoveLetter virus, and blamed the industry for not figuring out how to stop the virus before it started. The industry representatives aren’t any better; they blamed the problem on liberal judges who aren’t willing to treat computer crimes as seriously as violent crimes. Then one of the Congressmen talked about passing a bill that would prevent companies from hiring convicted “hackers.” Oh yeah, that’ll help. Idiots everywhere I look. ...

Yahoo is expanding to offer domain registration and web hosting. They offer servers running Red Hat Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows NT. They don’t offer bulk hosting (a la pair.com), just dedicated servers. Microsoft’s proposed remedies in the anti-trust case are pretty cheeky. Of course, if you don’t think you did anything wrong, why would you punish yourself harshly? The Butte, Montana Copper Kings (a minor league baseball team) have declared July 7 as Rocker Awareness Day, and are offering free admission to the game on that day to people from groups John Rocker insulted, as well as residents of Rocker, Montana. ...

The guys at DigitalCreations have discovered a Web security hole that allows malicious people to use redirects to cause users to unknowingly perform actions on sites that they have access to. I need to look into this hole more deeply before I understand it, but it sounds like it would be fairly difficult to exploit. Rael Dornfest explains how Meerkat (the open wire service) works. I wish all Web applications were so well documented. ...

The Standard has a tale of dot com greed and woe that will surely be repeated many times in years to come. startupfailures.com is an online support community for people who were involved in failed startups. It’s actually a for-profit company, doomed to failure itself most likely. At least they have a ready and growing market, which is more than you can say for many of the other dot com dead men walking. ...