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From the “not really news” department comes the report that Janet Reno and the FBI are begging Congress not to lighten up on crypto restrictions. It seems to me that they’re all just buying time until the courts clear up this mess. Dell is opening an auction site. Sometimes the “me too” behavior in this industry is more vile than I can even imagine. SunWorld has a security column that covers the time honored practice of social engineering. The true secret to successfully compromising other people’s computers is knowing that it’s a lot easier to break in by calling someone and getting their password than it is to defeat their security with technology. ...

The saga of QNX and Amiga continues. Just in time to coincide with the release of Office 2000, is the Cult of the Dead Cow’s Back Orifice 2000. There’s a Web site at www.bo2k.com, but it appears to be down, probably due to excess traffic. InfoWorld also has a Back Orifice article that describes its capabilities, and includes some gratuitous whining from a Microsoft employee. The latest version of Back Orifice is released under the GPL, so you can use it as a foundation for your own Windows “administration tools.” ...

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has published a special issue of its journal, The Information Society, focused on anonymous communication on the Internet. Fascinating stuff. Micron is providing “free computers” for $1,087. The money is for three years of Internet service, a three year warranty, and one year of classes at Micron University. Can you say “marketing gimmick?” Scott Rosenberg’s column at Salon today attacks the argument for pulling the plug on racist sites (and in a larger sense, any socially unacceptable sites) on the Web. As usual, he hits the nail right on the head. Trying to rid the world of these sites will never work, and I tend to agree that they aren’t very effective anyway. ...

The Apache Group has founded the Apache Software Foundation, which will manage the development of Apache and its attendant projects, like Jakarta (the new servlet engine initiative). Basically, it sounds like this is a way to shield the volunteers who work on Apache from legal action if some idiot sues them because the server they didn’t even have to pay for malfunctions. The Ad Critic is a whole site dedicated to tracking television advertising. They have Quicktime movies of most of the major ads that show up on television, so if your friends at work are talking about some funny new ad they saw on TV last night, you can probably check it out there. Despite the name, there aren’t any scathing but hilarious critiques of the ads, which is unfortunate. ...

OH MY GOD. AOL and Sun are considering teaming up to completely screw up the Mozilla project. Please, Lord, deliver us from morons. They’re considering modeling it after the Java Community Process, which is really a ridiculous half-assed idea that is designed to sell Sun’s closed manner of developing Java as though it’s open to public comment and involvement. While I’m gone, read Cameron Barrett’s rant about user-centered design, I couldn’t have said it better myself. ...

Wired News has a great interview with Rob Malda of Slashdot. I love the goofy conversation about money, and the way Rob tries to avoid talking about it. InfoWorld is reporting that Windows 98 Service Pack 1 is available to people who don’t want to waste their money on the “Special Edition” of the bug fixes. Unfortunately, you can only download it using Windows Update. So much for downloading it at work and bringing it home. What’s wrong with a regular file distribution site? ...

Andover.net has acquired Slashdot. Congratulations to them! rc3.org is available for a very reasonable price if anyone is interested. Yahoo is asserting broad rights over all of the home pages hosted by GeoCities. Get those 5 buck accounts from pair.com while you can. The Red Herring has an interesting interview about IPOs. The guy hits the nail on the head, IPOs aren’t about economics, they’re about exuberance. Are there some U.S. government documents that aren’t available online but that you’d like to see? If so, check out the Center for Democracy and Technology’s 10 Most Wanted Government Documents campaign. Cast your vote for the documents you’d most like to see published on the Web, and bring some pressure on the government to get off its collective butt and utilize the medium. ...

In a speech last week, Microsoft bean counter Greg Maffei managed to insult not only the temps that are suing the company, but also the federal judges who ruled against them. Truly the arrogance permeating Microsoft’s corporate culture is without limit. Tomorrow, I’m going to try out the GPLed remote console software VNC on some computers at work. It works with Windows, X Windows, and the Mac, and you can control computers through a browser. It has to be better than PC Anywhere. ...

Web Review has a good article about the future of CSS. They don’t talk about the best future use of Cascading Style Sheets, though, which is to provide style and layout information for structured XML documents. Applying CSS to HTML to make prettier pages is useful, but applying CSS to XML to completely separate document structure from document presentation is just going to be awesome. (By the way, the support for XML + CSS in Mozilla is already very good.) ...

Microsoft made a very interesting argument in court in their Java case with Sun today. It seems like one, that if accepted by the court, could really blow up in their face as the biggest seller of software in the world. Their attorney argued that just because the source code to software can be protected by copyright law, that doesn’t mean that the actual compiled code is also protected by copyright. For one thing, that doesn’t make any sense … you can’t create the same object code as someone else without compiling the same source code. If you have the same object code, at some point you violated their copyright. If there is some bizarre scenario where this isn’t the case, does that mean that I can create the same object code as Windows 2000 and distribute it without violating Microsoft’s copyright? ...