Link and excerpt from Ditherati:

Freedom of the Press Belongs to the Guy With The T-3 Connection

"Sure I want to be the biggest telecom company in the world, but it's just a commodity. I want to be able to form opinion. By controlling the pipe, you can eventually get control of the content."

    -- IDT chairman Howard Jonas, on his plan to be Rupert Murdoch without the subtlety

For IDT, the Big Flameouts Light Its Fire

What to do when an employers asks what you've been doing for the last 6 months.

For unemployed dot commers

"So what? Would people behave any differently if they knew a term paper on drug legalization would surface when they're 45 years old?
Yeah, lots of people probably would. It causes people to start acting the way politicians act, trying to hide their tracks...We've seen what's happened to presidential candidates in the past 40 years: They've gotten vanilla. You don't see the extreme people anymore because they're afraid.
I was a child of the late '60s and '70s. I could live lifestyles that I couldn't live now because the consequences weren't very bad. There weren't any records or diseases you could get. But if I were growing up today, and everything I did left a record...well, I probably wouldn't live differently, but I'm on the fringe. Most people probably would do things differently. "

Tech News - CNET.com

Meanwhile, the creators of Trillian plan to keep up the tit-for-tat efforts. Since AOL first started blocking the software Tuesday, they have released one workaround and at least two more full downloads of Trillian. "

AOL blocks instant messaging start-up - Tech News - CNET.com

$50 Palm pilot attachment analyses blood samples for Anthrax.

An Anthrax Test In Your Palm

"An effort in the Senate to revive that plan and include it in the anti-terrorism bill that was signed into law October 26 received little support and was withdrawn, and on much the same grounds%u2014that however powerful an intelligence tool code breaking was during its golden age, in World War II and the Cold War, the technical reality is that those days are gone. Code breaking simply cannot work the magic it once did. "

The Atlantic | February 2002 | Losing the Code War | Budiansky

So he did what an increasing number of senior managers uncertain of their job prospects are doing: He set himself up at his own company." ...

Hard Times Prompt an Entrepreneurial Itch

": I have often heard it said in the private equity business that people are very important. I have come to the conclusion after 30 years in this business that management talent is a necessary but not sufficient reason to succeed. Management can never be overvalued, but it can be overestimated. Warren Buffett once said, show me a bad business and a good management and the bad business will prevail every time. So the lesson I have learned from the recent mania is that you may have capital and a talented management team, but if you are fundamentally in a lousy business, you won't get the kind of results you would in a good business. All businesses aren't created equal."

VC moves from one unreality to another

As expected, self-described "longtime security expert" Bruce Schneier has responded to the recently published Microsoft internal memo outlining Bill Gates' new-found motivation for security.

I think some of what he asks for is over the top, but it provides something to gauge their actual efforts against.

"Making security Microsoft's first priority will require a basic redesign of the way the company produces and markets software. It will involve a difficult cultural transition inside Microsoft. It will involve Microsoft setting aside short-term gains in order to achieve long-term goals."

SecurityFocus home news: Results, Not Resolutions

This is a book about "Bohemian society" as it was in 1889. The entire book is available in both inline web page images and as PDF page images. It begins:

"In a country house near the city of B---- lived a lady of cultivated mind and manners, "a noble woman nobly planned." Well read and familiar with such writers as Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer and other scientists, and being rather cosmopolitan in tastes, liked to gather about her, people who had -- as she termed it -- ideas. At times there was a strange medley of artists, authors, religious enthusiasts, spiritualists, philanthropists and even philosophers. On the evening of which I write there was the usual peculiar gathering, and each one is expressing his or her views freely and unrestrainedly.

The visionary and dreamer said: 'Let me describe a modern Utopia of which I have often dreamed and thought.'" ...

(Bohemian society; Leavitt) : Early Canadiana Online