As a kid there was nothing like dragging your finger across the dirty back window of your mom's minivan. Imagine lifting your finger to find you've created a Mona Lisa on the rear glass. Scott Wade of San Marcos, TX is perhaps the only person who could say he's done this.

'Wash Me' taken to a new level - the Dust Art of Scott Wade

THE HOME Office wants powers to ban people it suspects of being hackers from the World Wide Wibble.
...
The big idea is contained in a Home Office green paper called "New Powers Against Organised and Financial Crime". By dealing with the matter in a civil, rather than a criminal court, the standard of proof is much lower. In fact hearsay is admissible evidence, so what a friend heard about you from another person could result in a guilty finding.
...
While few would cry out that hackers or spammers need to be protected, others are slightly worried about civil liberties, because it means that people can have their lives ruined without the police having to prove anything to a court.

UK: Suspected hackers to be banned from web

QuirksMode.org is the personal and professional site of Peter-Paul Koch, freelance web developer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It contains more than 150 pages with CSS and JavaScript tips and tricks, and is one of the best sources on the WWW for studying and defeating browser incompatibilities.
It is free of charge and ads, and largely free of copyrights.

I've been living on this site today, trying to write some complex cross-browser event handlers for javascript.

QuirksMode - for all your browser quirks

Simply put, SIRA fundamentally redefines copyright and fair use in the digital world. It would require all incidental copies of music to be licensed separately from the originating copy. Even copies of songs that are cached in your computer's memory or buffered over a network would need yet another license. Once again, Big Copyright is looking for a way to double-dip into your wallet, extracting payment for the same content at multiple levels.

The link is to the post and discussion on ipaction.org.

Section 115 Reform Act of 2006 (SIRA) - Redefining Copyright

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I'm working with some very messy HTML output, produced by JSP from some messy data that I can't change. This program has proved invaluable for helping me work out what's actually going on in the generated HTML.

HTML Code Export - HTML Tidy for Windows

For more than a decade, amateur and professional cryptographers have been trying to decipher an encrypted sculpture that sits on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Three-fourths of the sculpture has already been solved.

But now Jim Sanborn, the artist who created the Kryptos sculpture, says he made a mistake and a previously solved part of the puzzle that sleuths assumed for years was correct isn't.

Big big news: Everybody who thought they knew the answer to K2, check again. Instead of ending "...seconds west. ID by rows", the correct plaintext is "...seconds west. X Layer Two".

More details at our Kryptos Group announcement.

Heading back to watch the webcounter spin,

Elonka :)

Wired News: Kryptos Part 2 Was Wrong

After shooting, a heart attack

The 78-year-old lawyer shot by Vice President Dick Cheney in a hunting accident is back in intensive care after monitors showed that he suffered a mild heart attack, his doctors said yesterday.

This poor guy just gets worse and worse it seems. Here's hoping he pulls through with no more problems.

RE: Cheney Accidentally Shoots a Fellow Hunter

At a time of intense debate about the prospect of a two-tier internet, America Online and Yahoo say they intend to introduce a system that would guarantee speedier delivery to companies that pay between 0.25 and one US cent (0.15p to 0.5p) for each message. The internet service providers would still accept email from senders who do not pay for preferential treatment, but the paid messages would bypass spam filters and other barriers which strip off pictures and other images to land more quickly in in-boxes.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this sounds like they are planning a service where the big spam companies pay money so that their spam emails do not get filtered any more. Just what the customer has always wanted...

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Internet giants announce plans to charge for speedier emails

Microsoft rolled out a test version of its upgraded Internet Explorer browser Tuesday, marking the biggest change to IE in more than half a decade and sending a message to competitors that the software giant isn’t ignoring the browser market.

In the latest version, the Redmond giant built in a search box, enhanced the browser’s security, and introduced new features like tabbed browsing, which allows users to better manage simultaneous surfing of a number of web sites.

From reading this and various other bits on the new IE7 browser, it sounds like it's finally catching up with what I would consider standard features in a web browser. It is still missing the one "hook" that would make me want to convert to it away from my current browser though - all the features in it are mainstream in almost all browsers these days so it would feel like a downgrade to move from my current browser to IE7.

It is certainly a huge leap forwards for Internet Explorer, but I'm not convinced it's enough of a leap to slow people down from converting away from it.

RED HERRING | Microsoft Releases IE Preview

StopBadware.org is a "Neighborhood Watch" campaign aimed at fighting badware. We will seek to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and to become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.

StopBadware.org