http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52274-2001Jun11.html

The Supreme Court ruled today that at least some forms of hi-tech police surveillance require a warrant, as they are subject to fourth amendment protection. As the Post article states, this isn't really a "blockbuster" case, but it is an important protection against Big Brother type technologies. What's most important about this ruling is that it covers surveillance technologies that don't yet exist.

Microsoft wants to own your logon ID.

Only one week after I posted a commentary on Microsoft's recent business practices, Bill & Co. announced HailStorm, the centerpiece of the much-hyped .NET platform, and arguably, the entire reason .NET was developed in the first place. The press release promises not only "Sharing and Collaboration" (web services and applications that all work together) but "Open Access, Privacy, and Security".

A closer look at HailStorm reveals Microsoft's attempt to create (and thus control) the web platform for ecommerce and web services. An article at the O'Reilly OpenP2P site does a good job of explaining the technology, but what about the privacy and economic implications ?

Mail from Mr. Booker:

http://slate.msn.com/moneybox/entries/01-05-17_106248.asp

I wish I made as much as a failed CEO...

Other good jobs; dishonored ex-president, ex-congressman,

With all the news lately about Microsoft including an online registration process in the XP versions of both Office and Windows, I saw a story beginning to take shape. Microsoft clearly has a monoply on the desktop market, with pretty much everyone forced to use Windows as their desktop, and even more users forced into using Office for productivity, Outlook 2000 or Express for mail, and IE for browsing. The defenders of this status quo always point to the benefits of this arrangement; one standard, quality software, integration, etc. People said these things about the Phone Company, too. But now, like the phone company, MS is starting to collect the Monopoly Rents they've worked so hard to build.

After some work this evening, I was able to merge my changes to PHP-Nuke 5.0 beta 3 into 5b4, and moved the site over to the new code.

The only big news is that forums have been dropped from the base install of PHP-Nuke (for now). The reasons given for the removal were that the forums had a "high number of problems" and the code was supplied by Nuke Add-On, not the PHP-Nuke developer, making code updates difficult. Removing Forums didn't really affect us, there wasn't really anything there yet.

The official announcement can be found here, and the source is also available for download.

OpenSSH 2.9 has been released! The most important new enhancement is support for re-keying, (negotiating new encryption keys mid-session) which, IIRC, was the last major feature of the commercial version that wasn't supported. Also important to note is that the default protocol has been switched from SSH v1 to SSH v2. Read More for the full text of the announcement posted to announce@openbsd.org ...

Ahh, yes.

I was having this discussion with a certain unnamed individual the other day, who was saying something to the effect that Apple's hardware costs about 2x as much as it should. Well, obviously, he hasn't taken a look at the latest iBook, announced Tuesday, May 1. The 'Books start at $1299 at Apple's store, and will ship in 3-5 weeks.

Even a typical laptop configuration, (128 MB memory, 10 GB drive, built-in DVD, Ethernet, Modem, RGB out, 2 x USB, and 1 x FireWire) costs only $1499, and you can get a DVD/CD-RW combo drive for only $300 more, and add an Airport card for $100! Looks like a pretty good deal to me. (And they don't even skimp and put in one of those cheesy passive-matrix screens)

MacNN has a short feature on the new laptop as well.

http://www.bmug.org/news/articles/MSvsPF.html

This is pretty good - BMUG (a Macintosh Users' Group) investigates which organization provides better support for MS Access - Microsoft Technical Support or the Psychic Friends Network. I work with MS Technical Support as well, and this pretty much sums up my experiences with their first-level technicians. If you can get to second level support, the quality is much improved, though. Really!

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I found this posted in comments on Slashdot, and though it's probably pretty old, I'm posting it here, since it appeals to my twisted sense of humor.

Customer: What is the command that will tell me the revision code of a program?
UNIX consul: Yes, that's correct.
Customer: No, what is it?
UNIX consul: Yes.
Customer: So, which is the one?
UNIX consul: No. 'which' is used to find the program.
...