] You're an Ashcroft! No, you're the Ashcroft!
]
] Imagine hearing that exchange in a movie - you'd
] think that Hollywood had come up with a crazy new insult.
] Well, it turns out that some airline passengers watching
] the Oscar-nominated film "Sideways" on foreign flights
] are, in fact, hearing "Ashcroft" as a substitute for a
] certain seven-letter epithet commonly used to denote a
] human orifice.

Ashcroft's name substitutes for obscenity in movie

] The next step is to build a real detector and then, if
] that works, to convince the authorities to support
] widespread deployment. A system that scanned every lorry
] coming into the United States would, the researchers
] estimate, cost about $1 billion. That is a lot of money
] in most contexts, but not all that much in the context of
] nuclear defence. The existing missile-defence programme
] has already cost over $130 billion, and is scheduled to
] spend at least another $50 billion in the next five
] years. And unlike missile interceptors, which on February
] 13th spectacularly failed their second test in two
] months, detectors at America's borders should actually
] work. Madness, it seems, may give way to science.

Economist.com | Finding nukes

] Making long URLs useable! More than 4.5 million of them.
]
] Welcome to TinyURL!
]
] Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it
] break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and
] paste it back together? Then you've come to the right
] place. ... we
] will create a tiny URL that will not break in email
] postings and never expires.

TinyURL.com - where tiny is better!

] He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to
] perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew
] those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to
] war when it is one of the options but when it is the only
] option; you go not because you want to but because you
] have to.
]
] Yet this president knew it would be difficult for
] Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign
] dictator. He knew that much. This president and his
] supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing
] -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that
] power for the sake of themselves and their friends.
]
] by E.L. Doctorow

The Unfeeling President

] A visual history of spam (and virus) email
]
] I have kept every single piece of spam and virus email
] since mid-1997. Occasionally ... I use it to
] build a chart of spam and virus email.
]
] The following chart plots every single piece of spam and
] virus email that arrived at my work email address since
] April 1997. Blue dots are spam and red dots are email
] viruses. The horizontal axis is time, and the vertical
] axis is size of mail (on a logarithmic scale). Darker
] dots represent more messages.

A visual history of spam (and virus) email

] June 29, 2004
] US-CERT: Beware of IE
] By Ryan Naraine
]
] The U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team
] (US-CERT) is warning Web surfers to stop using
] Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser.

US-CERT: Beware of IE

] July 1, 2004
] Hungry Bot Behind Microsoft's New Search
]
] Webmasters across the Internet have been tracking a surge
] in spider activity coming from Microsoft's MSNbot over
] the past few months and sleuthing over what kind of new
] search offerings the software giant is cooking up.
]
] MSNbot ... appears to be aggressively
] crawling the Web as part of the algorithmic search effort
] to be included at a future point in its newly revised MSN
] Search portal.
]
] In a sample of ... Website traffic logs ..., we saw a substantial
] increase in activity by its MSNbot crawler in May. In
] most cases, the number of visits more than doubled. The
] activity increased in June though by a smaller
] percentage.

Hungry Bot Behind Microsoft's New Search

] The Witty worm: A new chapter in malware
]
] Opinion by Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Internet Security
] Inc.
]
] JUNE 02, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - If press coverage is any
] guide, then the Witty worm wasn't all that successful.
]
] But Witty was a big deal. It represented some
] scary malware firsts and is likely a harbinger of worms
] to come. IT professionals need to understand Witty and
] what it did.
]
] Witty was the first worm to target a particular set of
] security products -- in this case Internet Security
] System's BlackICE and RealSecure. It infected and
] destroyed only computers that had particular versions of
] this software running.
]
] Witty was wildly successful. Twelve thousand machines was
] the entire vulnerable and exposed population, and Witty
] infected them all -- worldwide -- in 45 minutes.

The Witty worm: A new chapter in malware - Computerworld

] Opera gets US$12.75 million settlement from Microsoft
]
] Last week Opera Software (makers of the Opera browser for
] Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X) announced they had entered
] into a settlement with a large company, but did not name
] the company provide details on what the settlement
] covered. Now, sources are reporting that Microsoft is the
] party behind the payout. Opera had threatened Microsoft
] with a lawsuit over incompatibilities between Opera 7 and
] Microsoft's MSN.
] The incompatibilities were allegedly due to a
] browser-specific style-sheet sent to surfers browsing the
] MSN website with Opera, which then caused MSN to render
] improperly on Opera 7. If Opera identified as a
] Mozilla-based browser, the pages would render just fine.
]
] Microsoft in 2003 admitted that it had taken steps to
] detect different types of browsers accessing MSN and sent
] different Web page layouts to different products. But the
] company said its efforts were aimed at promoting
] standards compliance rather than at hurting products that
] compete with its dominant Internet Explorer browser.
] Microsoft said it has since stopped the practice.

Opera (web browser) gets US$12.75 million settlement from Microsoft

] by Kurt Vonnegut
]
] Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it
] possible that we could become the humane and reasonable
] America so many members of my generation used to dream
] of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great
] Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought
] and often died for that dream during the Second World
] War, when there was no peace.
]
] But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of
] America%u2019s becoming humane and reasonable. Because
] power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts
] absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy
] drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are
] power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the
] morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle
] East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot
] to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like
] toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Cold Turkey