A few months ago, Crowe says, the three well-acquainted men -- Crowe, Scott and Buffett -- met to talk about opportunities in telecom. They figured there must be opportunities now that things are so bad that entire telecom companies will probably be sold on eBay."

A great article on the political intrigue behind Buffet's purchase of Level 3 stock.

Yahoo! News - Friends-turned-foes complicate Buffett's foray into telecom

"Our main objective is to create value for copyright owners and distributors by stopping piracy on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks, in turn helping them generate maximum value for music and visual content now being freely distributed."

All those bogus tracks come from these guys...

OverPeer, the anti P2P Company

Some innovative projects at Microsoft are described here amid an annoying, starry eyed discussion of Big Bill.

Big Bad Bill

The purpose of this website is to provide information related to the ongoing work of the U.S. House of Representatives in relation to the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Under the direction of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and the House Committee on Administration, the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House have worked together with the Library of Congress and the Government Printing Office to create Document Type Definition files (DTDs) for use in the creation of legislative documents using XML. As this is an ongoing project, it is important to note that the DTDs presented here have not been finalized, and may change over time. Any documents or programs created with these DTDs should be treated as beta material and not used in a production capacity.

United States Congress XML and Legislative Documents

Tag's Trance Trip, operated by one of AOL's Nullsoft employees, went off the air just hours after the rates' release. Florida-based Good Time Oldies signed off June 30. "

Anger? Yes. Anger. The RIAA had an opportunity to make a great deal of money off of small webcasters, but that wasn't good enough for them. So through their actions they have undermined the rule of law for an entire generation.

Do you miss crime? Do you wish you could set the internet clock back to 1991? Well, here is your chance. These fuckers can have my MP3s when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers. And this time its not just a hand full of hackers who will be shaped by the experience. When organized crime becomes this widespread what you will have is genuine threat to the future of credible democratic government.

What I find most astonishing is this comment:

"Certainly the technology is there, so it's possible," said Ryan Jones, an Internet media analyst with The Yankee Group research firm. "But before there is a drag-and-drop (technology), I can't see who would really want to go through the effort to create a station that doesn't generate revenue."

How long can ignorance like that go on?! When are these people going to realise just how baddly they have fucked things up??

Net radio raises a pirate flag - Tech News - CNET.com

I used to think much better of you than this, Vint. You can see that even now I'm grasping at straws rather than believe that YOU are one of the megalomaniacs. But the evidence continues to pile up, and I'm afraid it's true. I don't want to be the friend of such a person. I'll see you from the other side of the courtroom."

Flame John Gillmore sent Vint Cerf, which Cerf has publish in an attempt to discredit Gillmore. Certainly entertaining reading if nothing else...

Email from Gillmore to Vint Cerf

"Benevolent dictatorship by Jon Postel would have gotten us there, but Jon was unwilling to stand up to pressure from the White House. Ira Magaziner threatened him ("You'll never work on the Internet again") and he didn't have the spine to tell Ira to take a flying leap."

WOW... Apparently ICANN drama is about 1000 times worse then you thought. If you run things, you can get rich, as long as you don't make people so angry that they overthrow you. Of course by the time these people ever succeed at making ICANN the organization it should have been ICANN won't matter anymore because we'll be paying more attention to how google associates words with things then how DNS works.

Salon.com Technology | It's time for ICANN to go

"An anonymous donor, whose identity is known to the Xbox Linux project leaders, has announced to award at total of US$ 200,000 for the completion of various tasks on the Xbox Linux Project until December 31st 2002."

Contribute to the X-box hacking effort, get paid.

Reward offered for Xbox work

"We introduce the notion of a Spoofing Set as a way of describing a generalized attack methodology. We also discuss a method of constructing Spoofing Sets that is based on Phase Space Analysis and the presence of function attractors. We review the major network operating systems relative to this attack."

This is a fun paper. How random IS your PRNG?

Strange Attractors and TCP/IP Sequence Number Analysis

In Spring 2001, Virginia Tech professor Naren Ramakrishnan taught an entire course on the topic of recommender systems. Here you can browse the syllabus, review slides from the lectures, and review the reading list.

Course overview: CS 6604 concentrates on algorithms, methodologies, systems, and larger-scope issues (economic, commercial etc.) pertaining to reducing information overload. The unique aspect of this course will be how it integrates ideas from diverse areas: numerical analysis (strange but true), information systems, human-computer interaction, and algorithmics. Over the past three years, a large body of literature on recommender systems, filtering, and personalization technologies has been developed. Even though the field is driven by commercial trends and industrial developments, many of the ideas are nearing a stage of stabilization when their use is becoming common place (textbook material). CS 6604 will help illustrate the interplay between these different areas and demonstrate how ideas from diverse backgrounds can be combined in novel and sophisticated ways.

CS 6604: Recommender Systems (Spring 2001)