Monday, December 09, 2002

The phone rings: tech support: "hello computer tech support " customer: "hello my computer was making a strange hissing noise last night and this morning when I turned it on there was a crackling noise and some smoke then nothing, if I bring it in can you fix it?" [#uiuc] 2:27:16 PM

FAST FORWARD: Like It or Not, Microsoft Has a Vision [Fortune] 1:47:12 PM

Not such a super power after all A new US poll shows that the world is falling out of love with America [The Guardian] "But maybe the most chilling question of the lot was reserved for Muslim respondents only. Did they approve of suicide bombing in defence of Islam? Seventy-three per cent in Lebanon said yes. Well, they would, wouldn't they? But what about the 43% in Jordan, the 44% in Bangladesh, the 47% in Nigeria, the 33% in Pakistan? And in Indonesia (including Bali)? Twenty-seven per cent said yes. Those are hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people with a totally different take on what constitutes terror. This is alienation on the grandest scale." 1:41:57 PM

Pictures of Palestinians including activists defending olive growers from settlers (plus a bunch of other photos). [Google Top Stories] Isreal needs to do a lot better then this... 1:35:59 PM

Bush shakes up economic team. O'Neill and Lindsey are out. But critics of White House policy might not like what comes next. [Salon.com] 11:14:50 AM

BetaNews: "AOL has disbanded the Magic Carpet product team and refocused limited resources on its core subscription and advertising businesses. This leaves the Internet giant with no viable alternative to Microsoft's Passport authentication service in implementation, which currently boasts 200 million accounts." [Scripting News] 10:47:34 AM

The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq. Why is the Vietnam generation not marching against Iraq? The answer has something to do with Bosnia. By George Packer. [New York Times: Politics] 10:13:17 AM

Trustworthy Computing does Moon Walk (but not yet). One small step for man, one giant leap for Windows XP [The Register] The thing about "Trustworthy Computing" is that it's not about just Microsoft fining buffer overflows, it's about making computing itself more secure. I suspect that it'll be less about inventing new protocols, as getting world wide deployment on some of the stuff we already have. 9:50:17 AM