December 4, 2003

A 7 year old boy who was disciplined by his public school teacher for telling a classmate that his mother was gay, and for explaining that "gay" is "when a girl likes a girl."  - Deansworld discusses, and even got a copy of the horrible note that the teacher made the 2nd grader write home. 2:35:46 PM

Gwyneth Paltrow is pregnant, Happy mom-to-be announces she is looking forward to "eating for one". 12:51:47 PM

Songwriters eye ISP royalties The Globe and Mail, Canada - Canada's songwriters sought to require that Internet service providers pay for their users' music downloading habits in a case that could generate-millions of dollars in music royalties. What has been working is the tariff model that has been used for the past three years in Canada as a tax on blank cassettes and CDs, ostensibly to compensate for the loss of royalties on home-recorded music. To date the measure has collected $20.5-million.  7:02:41 AM

AVN Online Mimail-L takes sleazy aim at antispam sites Search Security - The latest variant of the Mimail worm, which appeared Tuesday, takes particularly sleazy aim at antispam groups. The worm sometimes travels with a message purporting to be from a woman to her lover. The body text implies that the worm file contains photos of the woman nude. After infecting systems, the worm searches infected systems for e-mail addresses and then mails out copies of itself using its SMTP engine. The worm tries to launch a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the Spamhaus Project and other antispam Web sites. 6:51:42 AM

Hotmail Gets an Anti-Spam Makeover InternetNews.com - Microsoft has quietly rolled out a major Hotmail interface makeover to mirror the Web access features of the new Office 2003 software suite. Users of the free Web-mail service were greeted late Monday with a streamlined interface resembling Office 2003 and the MSN e-mail client built into the company's ISP service. The Hotmail overhaul also includes Microsoft's new 'SmartScreen' anti-spam technology. Developed internally at Microsoft Research, 'SmartScreen' identifies the frequency of words and the types of links used by spammers. 6:47:03 AM

Your Next OS: Windows 2006? PC World - The next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, is still in the early stages of its journey to the retail corral, but our hands-on look at a preview reveals features we'd love to have now--while raising some intriguing questions. 6:44:40 AM