HateDell. If you own any Dell computers, or have ever had the misfortune to need Dell customer service then you owe it to yourself to take a stroll over to I Hate Dell which is a site run for disgruntled current & former Dell employees.  It makes for fascinating, if depressing, reading.[Curiouser and curiouser!]

The dossier of private information is the badge of the totalitarian state. ID cards to use 'key database' of personal info. Blunkett blanket trawl By John Lettice . [The Register] This whole “biometic-ID cards will save our asses” stuff thing is a lot of old hooey. Organized criminals will, as they always have, use their [...]

LibraryInstruction.com. Marylaine Block highlighted this site in her Neat New Stuff list. LibraryInstruction.com has “library instruction lesson plans, articles about library instruction, a large library instruction bibliography, and links to library instruction resources.” Nice place to start for user education resources…. [LibrarianInBlack]

Under Reconstruction. A few months ago, I quietly took over responsibility for the Microsoft Research web site. I've never been one to march in and immediately start making sweeping changes, so since then I've been learning about the site and the team, and learning as much as I can about what we have and what [...]

XP Users Cop a Feel of OS X. What's better than a nice new Mac running OS X? For some people, it's a cheap Windows XP box hacked and tweaked to look just like an OS X machine. For a lot of XP users, converting PCs into faux Macs is a consuming pastime. By Leander [...]

Extrusion: Insider theft of digital assets — best (and not so best) practices. ComputerWorld has an interesting article discussing the unauthorized transfer of a company's essential digital assets… commonly called extrusion. Extrusion has a strange nature that stems from unexpected actions by trusted insiders in an environment assumed to be secure. For this reason, extrusion [...]

E.U. Expands From 15 to 25 Member Nations. PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) — The European Union expanded at midnight Friday to take in a region isolated during the Cold War, creating a 25-nation economic giant with the potential to rival the United States. Church bells rang and fireworks exploded over eastern Europe in celebration. By [...]

California Bars a Firm's Voting Machines in November Election. California will prohibit the use of 15,000 of voting machines from Diebold Inc. in the November election because of security and reliability concerns. By John Schwartz. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

Ole Eichorn found a new reason to love the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. [Scripting News]

Knowledge Management for Law Firms. Managing Partner Magazine recently released an entire issue devoted to Knowledge Management. [LawLibTech]