Month: November 2003

FCC Moves to Stifle TV Piracy. The Federal Communications Commission passes a controversial mandate to 'flag' digital TV shows with special code to prevent consumers from sharing the programs over the Internet. Critics say the move will suppress innovation. [Wired News]

Setback for Financial Privacy. The Senate bounces an amendment that would have made California's stringent financial privacy provisions U.S. law. The bill now places limits only on sharing info for marketing purposes. Ryan Singel reports from Washington, D.C. [Wired News]

Forbes: The Pride That Killed Sony. What is true of TVs has become true of many business lines. For years consumers were willing to pay a premium for the Sony name. Recently, however, more and more of them have realized the name is not giving them extra innovative value. [Tomalak's Realm]

Ex-Chief of HealthSouth Is Indicted. In addition to the criminal charges brought against Richard Scrushy, who pleaded not guilty, the government is seeking $278 million in forfeitures from him. By Kenneth N. Gilpin. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

Rememberance Agent. Doug Miller publishes a fascinating discussion of his Commonplace Book, a Tinderbox tool for “keeping track of books, articles, people, Web sites, email messages, and pictures.” [Mark Bernstein]

Personal service-oriented architecture. There's an important lesson here I hope desktop applications will learn, courtesy of the emerging paradigm of SOA (service-oriented architecture). In the realm of SOA, events are represented in an open XML format and flow through a transparent pipeline that's open to inspection and subject to intermediation… Ironically, the graphical desktop popularized… Continue reading Personal service-oriented architecture

A Rogue By Any Other Name Still Stinks. A rogue access point on a company that takes its wireless LAN security seriously still painful to detect: You can see how even with a strong set of policies, it's easy for an employee to subvert them. You might understand now why some companies have strict bag… Continue reading A Rogue By Any Other Name Still Stinks

Salem Selling a Dubious Past. What better place to spend All Hallow's Eve than in Salem, Massachusetts, site of the infamous witch trials of 1692. Or was it? Michelle Delio reports from Salem. [Wired News]

.NET Developer's Journal: Borland Delphi 8 Simplifies Transition to .NET Framework.  [The Scobleizer Weblog]

PHP 4.3.4. After a lengthy QA process, PHP 4.3.4 is finally out! This is a medium size maintenance release, with a fair number of bug fixes. All users are encouraged to upgrade to 4.3.4.  [PHP Everywhere]