Joe Peichel

Supreme Court rejects Microsoft appeal -- "Microsoft had hoped it could avoid facing a definitive remedy judgment as the case enters its final phase in the U.S. District Court of Appeals. Interactive Week reported that the Supreme Court made no comment in rejecting the appeal, which hinged on unprofessional conduct by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who was the original trial judge." I'd like to believe that any court-imposed remedy would result in true behaviour changes within Microsoft, but I have as much faith in that as I do in the tooth fairy. Microsoft has been here before (remember 1995 ?) and exhibits a strong tendency to exploit every possible loophole or interpretation of court orders, generally disregarding the spirit of such orders (of course, anything open to such broad interpretation is perhaps poorly crafted language deserving of such exploitation).

Larry Ellison on digital IDs & terrorism "Do we need one national ID card? No. But the IDs that the government issues -- such as Social Security cards -- should use modern credit card technology. Do we need more databases? No, just the opposite. The biggest problem today is that we have too many. The single thing we could do to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was integrated into a single national file." I'm struggling with whether to applaud Larry or beat him with a clue-bat. Today's "security by obscurity" (which results from exactly the chaos Larry advocates eliminating) is a double-edged sword. Its complexity makes identity theft slightly more difficult than if everything were in a "single national file" which, if successfully hacked, would reveal all necessary information to enable such theft. It's quite similar to the "single sign-on" debate r...