February 29, 2000
Here's a good example of how the rich get richer. Corporations are using tax shelters to save big bucks on taxes. Despite the fact that the economy is growing like mad and companies are making money hand over fist, corporate tax receipts were actually down 2% last year. Comparatively speaking, tax receipts from individuals were up 6%.

I'm linking to this article about email monitoring only because my friend Todd is quoted in it. There's no good reason to use your employer's email system for personal messages these days. Get a free email account and use that. (I use ssh to connect to my Web hosting provider, and read my email there, for what it's worth.) The article doesn't address the real problem plaguing email systems -- Powerpoint presentations sent around as attachments.

Interactive Week has an article about Microsoft's subversion of the Kerberos standard in Windows 2000. Microsoft took an open standard and added some proprietary crap to it so it wouldn't work with existing implementations of the standard, and is now reluctant to document the proprietary crap that they added. You can't teach an old dog new tricks.

February 28, 2000
Jorn Barger has written a useful article on URL hacking. Here's an official rc3.org URL hacking tip: everything after the .html in a CNet URL can be trashed with impunity.

Phil Agre's most recent notes and recommendations are a good read, as always. Most interesting is his capsule history of conservativism and liberalism. You have to skip down about a quarter of the way through the document to get to it. (An until now secret aspiration of mine is to have this site mentioned in an RRE message by Phil Agre. I've never had the guts to send him an email recommending myself though.)

bustpatents.com looks like a pretty useful site covering patent abuse in new fields like e-commerce and bioinformatics.

Tim O'Reilly has real guts. He's taking Amazon.com to task for their use of patents, despite the fact that Amazon.com is a huge O'Reilly customer. I already knew he cares about doing the right thing than just lining his own pockets, but this just raises my esteem for him. I also agree with Tim to such an extent that I don't know if I'll bother writing my own Amazon.com/patents related screed.

Yet another reason to vote against George Bush, Jr.: he doesn't believe in our legal system. Dubya unabashedly opposes the right of individuals to recover damages from companies that commit tortuous acts. He never puts it that way, though. He also says that he wouldn't have brought the anti-trust suit against Microsoft, which is odd, considering the fact that Texas is a participant in the states case against the Redmondians. What's up with that?

Ars Technica has a lengthy review of Mac OS X DP3 that goes over both its technical innards and the new Aqua user interface. The review pans a lot of the new interface features. It seems like Apple is trying too hard to achieve coolness and isn't doing enough to keep things usable.

Here's a link to the actual Amazon.com affiliate program patent. There's a protest site up at nowebpatents.org. I'm still putting my thoughts together on this whole thing ... I've read a lot of interesting stuff from both sides this weekend, and I'm distilling it into a piece that's too long for the front page. I'll add a link to it when I'm finished.

Some security geeks at the San Diego Supercomputer Center did a cool experiment to determine how long an unsecured Red Hat 5.2 machine could survive in the wild without the benefit of patching or a firewall. The answer: not very long. [Found at Genehack]

February 26, 2000
First the PTO gave Amazon.com a patent on one-click ordering, now they've given them an extremely broad patent covering affiliate programs. These patents are a cancer on the Internet industry, as is the practice of patenting "business models" and obvious software solutions. Because Amazon.com is bound and determined to bludgeon everyone else in the electronic space with patents, I'm removing all links to Amazon.com on this site. Naturally, I won't be placing any more orders with Amazon.com either.

February 25, 2000
I knew it all along! Most day traders lose big money (thanks to Q Daily News for spotting this story). Most of the guys managing mutual funds suck at picking stocks, what makes the everyday knucklehead think they'll do any better?

If you haven't been able to connec to Project Cool, A List Apart, or any of a number of other Web development hot spots over the past day or so, it's because Covad is incompetent.

You know what's great about the Web? If you make a name for yourself, people will fall all over themselves trying to give you money. (I think I'm being sarcastic about that being great.)

The Washington Post has a story about Al Gore and Bill Bradley using the Web as the vehicle for negative campaigning. Bill Bradley gets points for offering scans of real letters written by Gore on his site.

Rick Thompson just doesn't get it. The quote: "If supermarkets were designed like Web sites, milk and bread would be at the front of the store." The sort of cynical mistreatment of customers that works well in traditional retail isn't going to fly on the Web. If you make it harder for people to find the things they need on your Web site, people will shop somewhere else.

February 24, 2000
CeBIT, the huge German computer trade show, has banned online journalists, or at least refused them media access. Only print journalists are welcome. Where do they think most computer enthusiasts get their information these days? Tom's Hardware or PC Magazine ...

Internet researcher extraordinaire Tara Calishain pointed me to Issues2000, which pins the tail on the candidates on all sorts of issues, including the death penalty. In answer to my question, all four major candidates favor the death penalty. That's what I love about this country ... so many choices!

Spurred on by Al Gore's discussion of his (in my opinion, reprehensible) views on the death penalty, I decided to try to figure out what the views of all the candidates are on capital punishment. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any information at the Bill Bradley or John McCain sites (we already know that Dubya is perfectly OK with the DP), nor was I able to find information on the presidential candidates on any number of anti-death penalty sites. Oh well.

Salon has finally published its story on Eazel. They plan on making money by offering a subscription service that allows users to easily find software they need and keep their software up to date.