eCompany Now – Can Your Employer Snoop Around Your E-mail? Yes. And a recent case brought against Nationwide Mutual Insurance proves the point. [Privacy Digest]

Reuters: VeriSign keeps dot-com rights in ICANN deal. The Internet's top naming authority on Monday proposed extending VeriSign Inc.'s control over the popular “.com'' destination in exchange for surrendering control earlier over the “.org'' suffix. Translation: Verisign gives up nothing of value, and keeps everything of value. This would be a scandal if anyone had… Continue reading VeriSign keeps dot-com rights in ICANN deal

On March 24, Joel Spolsky posted this amusing rant attacking Earthlink for a piece of direct marketing that he considered dishonest. I asked Earthlink for a comment. Yesterday I spoke with Claudia Caplan, vice president for brand marketing, who gave her company's side. What Earthlink is shooting for in marketing like this, she said, is… Continue reading this amusing rant

EBay Alters Privacy Policy. Continuing what some analysts say is an industry-wide trend, eBay is changing a provision in its privacy policy in which it may share user information with a new company if it's sold. By Jeffrey Benner. [Wired News]

Save My Whiteboard:. Save My Whiteboard: “I find that students having difficulty understanding the lecture are faced with a perplexing decision. They can either take notes like crazy, trying to write down everything the professor says, and hope to decipher them sometime after class, or they can put down their pencils and concentrate completely on… Continue reading Save My Whiteboard:

Network World: Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers. Nobody knows how big or how active the routing table can get before the Internet's core routers start crashing. But current projections show that if the growth goes unchecked, the Internet could face a router processing-power crunch in as soon as 18 months. [Tomalak's Realm]

My copy of Radio Userland, which is what I use to manage this weblog, is misbehaving today. But using the “Start Over” command seems to have fixed things. I wonder what the real problem was. Maybe one of the object databases got corrupted.

Dan Bricklin: The “Computer as Assistant” Fallacy. This type of thinking strikes me as strange. We don't ask for our automobiles to be more natural and intelligent, nor do we call for the next generation of cars to be like chauffeurs. With cars, we talk about responsiveness, comfort, power, cargo size, and safety. [Tomalak's Realm]

Oh, did you see this in the Register? S+++! Microsoft's Passport license says “All your data belong to us.” [scobleizer]

PeterCoffee: Microsoft's cheerful desperation “Microsoft wants the next generation of personal computers to be more usable. Who could disagree? But PC buyers may be more than a little surprised, and not entirely pleased, to learn the full extent and direction of Microsoft's influence over the capabilities and design details of the next generation of business… Continue reading Microsoft's cheerful desperation