EFF won't appeal a recent loss in the case brought by Professor Edward Felten against the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The government promised in court documents that "scientists attempting to study access control technologies" are not subject to the DMCA. Felten and EFF decided to take them at their word.

The Pope recently praised the Internet as a great invention and called on church members to take advantage of it. But he warned: "The Internet offers extensive knowledge, but it does not teach values and when values are disregarded, our very humanity is demeaned. ... Understanding and wisdom are the fruit of a contemplative eye upon the world, and do not come from a mere accumulation of facts, no matter how interesting."

The O'Reilly P2P and Web Services Conference has been rescheduled with new dates and a new location. The conference will be held Nov. 5-8, 2001, at the Westin Grand Hotel in downtown Washington. You will need to make new reservations at the Westin. Information is here

Microsoft announced today that it is converting its Passport authentication system to Kerberos 5.0. The switch should allow Hailstorm web services (now christened .Net My Services), to accept authentication from any number of Kerberos-compliant authentication vendors.

Eric Raymond's missive on the attacks is simply repulsive. The writing is a case of taking a good meme to bad extremes.

The O'Reilly Conferences group just issued this statement:

We are shaken, with the rest of the nation, by today's tragic events. We are currently assessing the effect on our upcoming Peer-to-Peer and Web Services Conference in Washington, DC.

Dmitry Slkyarov, the Russian coder who has been sitting in a Vegas jail for three weeks, was just released on $50,000 bail, Wired reports. He has to remain in Northern California until the trial. Used to be Russians who got to visit the U.S. made a beeline to apply for asylum. Now the U.S. seems like the asylum and Russia the land of the free.

The new IBM T23 features built-in support for 802.11b. With an embedded security subsystem and VPN support, the new model is said to offer more secure wireless connectivity.

I received the following email from Aaron Blosser today, after he saw the article about David McOwen's legal difficulties. Seems Blosser faced similar problems three years ago -- installing software on his employers' machines in an attempt to solve a scientific problem.

We received this strong rebuke from Windows 2000 Mag news editor Paul Therrott to Kurt Cagle's perspective on Hailstorm. A good read.