Friday, November 12, 2004

The Daily Show, with news that Attorney General of the United States John Ashcroft is leaving government service to spend more time rounding up and questioning his family. ( video) Also coverage of the fighting in Fallujah. Lisa noted in posting this: This is from the November 9, 2004 program. Quote from Jon to Richard Armitage: Dick. Dick. Dick. You won the election... You don't have to lie anymore! (Stewart also had interesting speculation on replacements for Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Evans.) 9:47:08 PM    comment []

From BNA News: MICROSOFT DEMANDS COMPANY DROP EXCEL FROM NAME Microsoft is demanding that a small company named Savvysoft Inc. change the name of a computer program because it contains the word "Excel". Savvysoft said the company researched the name before selecting TurboExcel for its add-on program for Microsoft Excel. He said the search turned up no evidence that Microsoft had registered Excel as a trademark. Microsoft filed the trademark application for Excel in April. http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5449348.html http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/ 10155028.htm PHISHING MOB SUSPECT ARRESTED A suspected Russian gangster and phishing scam operator, caught with $200,000 in stolen goods and $15,000 cash, has been charged on several counts of identity fraud and credit card fraud. The accused was allegedly found to have the personal details of more than 100 victims, who police believe were scammed through phishing e-mails. http://news.com.com/2100-7349_3-5448712.html 12:45:22 PM    comment []

End of the Road Is Nowhere: The trek down the Great River Road ends in an anticlimax of old shacks and weathered boats, but that doesn't mean the trip is disappointing. Michelle Delio reports from Venice, Louisiana, in Wired News. 8:43:45 AM    comment []

Seoul to block Internet course in North's ideology (Joongang Daily). Kim Il Sung Open University ended 42 years of educational radio broadcasts this week and replaced them with a Web site. The university began to offer courses Monday on North Korean leaders and the country's founding juche, self-reliance, ideology through a site located in Japan, where North Korea also has several other Web sites. The government reviewed the matter and made an urgent request to the Ministry of Information and Communication to block the site from domestic Internet users, an official said yesterday. He said the action was being taken under the National Security Law, even though that the law now faces a legal challenge in the National Assembly. 6:43:42 AM    comment []

Inspirational thought: The cyberworld never sleeps. My summer of war driving, by Demetrios Lazarikos, in ComputerWorld. For most people, summer is about taking a vacation with family or heading to a secluded place to get away. Earlier this year, I read an article about the number of wireless hacks that were increasing globally. What I found interesting was that the hacks were pretty basic and that most of the information on how to break into default systems, how to look for Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) being enabled and other wireless steps could be found in a Google search. I had decided at the beginning of the summer that I wasn't going to take any downtime or a vacation per se. Instead, I would validate through "war driving" in five cities that wireless networking isn't ready for prime time. My itinerary involved Omaha; Chicago; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Denver and Atlanta. War driving is driving around an area with a laptop computer and an 802.11 network card to identify the presence of wireless networks. One common thread through this mission was that the cities involved had some aspect of high-tech or higher education with an emphasis on IT security. Another common thread was that I had friends and family in these cities, so I had a place to stay. 6:43:37 AM    comment []

From ongoing: Post-and-Poll The arrival and insanely-fast growth of syndication/RSS technology brings a New Thing to the Internet. Until recently, there was only one messaging architecture known to work at Internet scale. That was store-and-forward, as in how email works: I send my message to a computer near me, which stores it and sends it to another computer near you (with retries and so on as appropriate), which stores it, and you retrieve it from that computer. Syndication has proven that a different model, post-and-poll, scales up too. It works like this: I post some data which contains either messages or message pointers to a public place, and you poll periodically to see what’s new. The difference is that store-and-forward supports anybody-to-anybody message traffic, while post-and-poll assumes separate communities of senders and receivers. People who are designing message interchange frameworks that might need to become Internet-scale should consider this, and be careful of architectures that don’t fall into one of these two baskets, because nothing else has yet been shown to work. [Update: Somehow I forgot to credit Mark Hapner of Sun who pointed all this out to me, presenting it as something obvious, not a discovery; but then I realized that it hadn’t been obvious till he did so.] 6:43:26 AM    comment []

Boiling the Ocean: What this bit of management buzz-speak would really entail, courtesy of our Consultant Debunking Unit. By Martin Kihn, Fast Company. 5:43:25 AM    comment []

Animal rights injunction: Oxford University is granted an injunction against protesters over its new animal lab. By Stephen Pincock, The Scientist. 5:43:16 AM    comment []