] Russell Beattie points out that Google has changed
] their terms of service to require that you not publicly
] discuss AdSense. Jason Kottke points out this "seems
] to fly in the face of Sergey Brin's Google rule #1:
] /'Don't be evil'." Cory Doctorow agrees saying "Google
] shouldn't ask all its users to submit to an unreasonable
] restriction on their speech in order to contain the spread
] of negative information about its service."
]
] Meanwhile, other annoying provisions are that you can't:
] have multiple accounts (which is useful when you want to
] keep separate statistics for separate sites), talk to
] advertisers about their ads, disclose any results, get
] paid for anything Google considers "fradulent clicks",
] find out why they're considered "fraudulent clicks", pass
] on payments to anyone. And Google can cancel you whenever
] without a reason.

Shut Up and Serve Ads (Google Weblog)

The wildcard is actually gone now..

] Security experts are blaming known but unpatched
] vulnerabilities in Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer
] for the theft and distribution of the source code for a
] much anticipated new video game.
]
] The source code for Valve Corp.'s Half Life 2, a sequel
] to the popular shoot-'em-up game that was due out by
] December, was posted on the Internet on Thursday,
] according to a statement from Valve Managing Director
] Gabe Newell.

] "This is what happens when you have 31 publicly
] known unpatched vulnerabilities in IE," wrote Thor
] Larholm, senior security researcher for PivX Solutions
] LLC, in a posting to the NTBugTraq mailing list. "I have
] seen screenshots of successfully compiled HL2
] installations, with WorldCraft and Model Viewer running
] atop a listing of directories such as hl2, tf2 and cstrike."

IE Gets Blame for Theft of Half Life 2 Code

] After Sept. 11, when all the newspapers were recording
] who, what, when, where -- there was a big question of
] why. Why did this happen? What's going to happen in the
] future? A lot of people were spending a lot of time
] looking for news, and I was one of them. All the servers
] were slow and it took a long time to find the content.
] Fundamentally, I wanted to build a tool that would
] automate this: Here's a new development, let's find all
] the articles that talk about this development.

OJR article: Interview with Google News Creator

Now professional journalists have to survive not only competition among themselves, but also from that with ordinary netizens. The only way to compete now is through the quality of their articles. That means that the age of competing through the name card "I am a New York Times reporter" has gone. When a New York Times reporter writes an article and an ordinary citizen -- whether he is a professor or a neighbor -- writes an article criticizing it splendidly, then the citizen becomes the winner.

Good interview with the creator of OhmyNews

Japan Media Review -- OhmyNews Makes Every Citizen a Reporter

] Seriously, though, I'm interested in figuring out how we
] can build a Net that is a lot less prone to viruses and
] spam, and not just by putting in filters and setting up
] caches to test things before they get into your computer.
] That doesn't really solve anything. We need an
] evolutionary step of some sort, or we need to look at the
] problem in a different way.
]
] I'm not convinced there's not something modest we can do
] that would make a big difference. You have to find a way
] to structure your systems in a safer way. Writing
] everything in Java [a programming language created by
] Sun] will help, because stuff written in antique
] programming languages like C [a widely used language
] created by Bell Labs in the early 1970s] is full of
] holes. Those languages weren't designed for writing
] distributed programs to be used over a network. Yet
] that's what Microsoft still uses. But even Java doesn't
] prevent people from making stupid mistakes.

Juicy intervew with Bill Joy

] VeriSign Inc., the firm that operates a key piece of the
] Internet's address system, said it would temporarily shut
] down a new service that makes money off the typos of Web
] users after the Internet's oversight body threatened to
] take legal action against the company.

Thats great!

However, at the time I blogged this, the gtld's were still sending me to sitefinder..

VeriSign Freezes Search Service (TechNews.com)

] In addition, our review of the .com and .net registry
] agreements between ICANN and VeriSign leads us to the
] conclusion that VeriSign%u2019s unilateral and
] unannounced changes to the operation of the .com and .net
] Top Level Domains are not consistent with material
] provisions of both agreements. These inconsistencies
] include violation of the Code of Conduct and equal access
] provisions, failure to comply with the obligation to act
] as a neutral registry service provider, failure to comply
] with the Registry Registrar Protocol, failure to comply
] with domain registration provisions, and provision of an
] unauthorized Registry Service. These inconsistencies
] with VeriSign's obligations under the .com and .net
] registry agreements are additional reasons why the
] changes in question must be suspended pending further
] evaluation and discussion between ICANN and VeriSign.

If you look closely, you can actually see ICANN growing a spine.

] Given these conclusions, please consider this a formal
] demand to return the operation of the .com and .net
] domains to their state before the 15 September changes,
] pending further technical, operational and legal
] evaluation. A failure to comply with this demand will
] require ICANN to take the steps necessary under those
] agreements to compel compliance with them.

There is an October 4th deadline. That's tomorrow.

ICANN | Letter from Paul Twomey to Russell Lewis | 3 October 2003 | 'Stop or else...'

] Anecdotal evidence suggests that a two-year decline in
] congestion is starting to reverse itself, with San
] Francisco Bay Area commuters finding that it's taking
] longer to get to work. While the cause could be any
] number of things, some tech-industry veterans say it may
] be a sign that the economy is picking up.

Upturn may be driving Silicon Valley traffic | CNET News.com

This is a very interesting article on using editing techniques to speed up the WPM of audio recordings without loosing tonality. Its like speed reading a lecture. I wish NPR preprocessed all their audio programming this way.

If PVR's like MythTV had this capability, it could make channels like c-span a little less mind-numbing.

Now Hear This, Quickly