Sunday, May 04, 2003

Stranger than truth MSN UK is creating what Microsoft calls the world's first Internet outhouse, or iLoo, complete with flat-screen plasma display, wireless keyboard and broadband access. MSN UK spokesman Matthew Whittingham described the portable toilet as the first "WWWC" referring to the term water closet. "This is another demonstration of Microsoft moving into new product areas to expand its revenue base," said IDC analyst Roger Kay.  MSN UK is negotiating with toilet paper manufacturers for special rolls with URLs printed on them.  (Source - CNetnews.com) 11:49:16 PM     Objets trouves Returning from an out-of-town trip, I waded through over 325 messages from Dave Farber's Interesting People mailing list, and some of the interesting nuggets found were: Mike Hartmann in Germany has written a very interesting report about the data that Microsoft extracts from your computer after you activate the "Automatic Windows Update" option. The data is sent to Microsoft through an encrypted channel, but Hartmann figured out how to find and read the data before it is encrypted. Doubleclick privacy officer chosen for Department of Homeland Security privacy czar. (LitiGator note - This is an ironic mirror to the debacle of Cuba being named to the UN's Human Rights Commission.  In a hilarious twist, an April 17 Washington Post article describes Kelly as a "privacy watchdog".) The London Times, hardly a leftist rag, ran an article depicting a sharply different view of the "Saving Private Lynch" story. A short piece from an "Islam-Arabia" mailing list referenced an article from a newspaper called Al-Madina entitled "How Baghdad Gave Up", suggesting that Saddam Hussein was given asylum in Russia with the active involvement of Condaleeza Rice and other American officials.   (I have not been able to find any other suggestion of this elsewhere.) Name Your Own Price:  Re-Code.com offers a do-it-yourself product repricing service. Wal-Mart is not amused. The Web site Re-Code.com parodies the design and chipper lingo of Priceline.com's "name your own price" shopping site. It invites shoppers to "recode your own price," by making their own barcodes using the site's barcode generator. This mailing list, kept going by the sheer gravitas of its sponsor, and using nothing but e-mail as its engine of communication, continues to be a fertile source of information on a wide number of topics.  Its archive is found at http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ 11:50:32 AM

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