Thursday, March 18, 2004

StarOffice reaches German milestone. Sun Microsystems has announced that its main German distributor has sold more than a million copies of the StarOffice productivity software. [CNET News.com] 9:42:29 PM    comment []

Rick Klau reviews Mark Cuban's weblog. [Scripting News] 6:20:08 AM    comment []

TiVo expands Tribune listing deal. The longtime partners will expand their deal to enable more frequent show time updates. [CNET News.com] 6:16:22 AM    comment []

Censorship of Iranian manuscripts interferes with scholarship, science. The U.S. Treasury Department has sent out letters warning publishers of possible criminal implications of editing manuscripts from Iran. The letters warn against the editing or translation of any literature from Iran, from fiction and poetry to scientific and historical writings, without a government license. [The Journal] 6:16:16 AM    comment []

Junk E-Mail Is Unabated Despite Law, Survey Says. THREE months after Congress approved legislation intended to curb spam, unsolicited e-mail is a persistent, if not worsening, problem, according to a survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Roughly 75 percent of the Internet users surveyed reported no change or an increase in the amount of junk e-mail they receive, and nearly one-third of them said they were using e-mail less because of it. By David Bernstein. [New York Times: Technology] 6:14:00 AM    comment []

Snow and Sleet Are No Match for a Hot Spot. For those who can't bear to stray far from an Internet connection, the advent of wireless broadband technology has been a godsend. The latest gift from the ether can turn the great outdoors into a wireless hot spot. By Chris Larson. [New York Times: Technology] 6:13:37 AM    comment []

Chances of Microsoft Accord in Europe Dim. Demands for further concessions from Microsoft have hurt the chances for a settlement between the software giant and European antitrust regulators. By Paul Meller. [New York Times: Business] 6:12:19 AM    comment []

Story on the Congressional/GAO investigation spurred by the outing of Laura Callahan, CIO of Homeland Security, as having gained academic credentials from diploma mills. (Also, the only report I've seen following up on the Callahan story after it first broke.) No Third Degree for Diploma Mills. As a parade of busted government officials shows, websites offering bogus credentials are proliferating. The feds say they are looking at the problem, but not much has been done to shut down the sites. By Ryan Singel, Wired News. Callahan, who is still on paid leave, is not the only government employee to have her credentials questioned recently. Charles Abell, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, came under fire last year for holding a master's from Columbus University of New Orleans, which is a distance-learning school accredited by a private organization not recognized by the federal government. In another recent example, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced March 1 that he had appointed Jack Corrie to a high-level information technology position in the state's Department of Motor Vehicles. But Corrie's credentials include a bachelor's and a master's from the University of Palmers Green, which is a fake university, according to John Bear, an expert on online learning and diploma mills. Bear estimates that the hundreds of diploma mills that sell fake diplomas from fake schools, or fake diplomas from real schools, rake in hundreds of millions of dollars each year. 6:02:51 AM    comment []

For all those goth, punk, and metalhead babies. ...there's Ramones, Metallica, and goth-themed baby clothes here. And for those babies who want to kick it old-school, you can get your Anarchy in the Pre-K rompers here. [Learning the Lessons of Nixon] 5:57:06 AM    comment []