There’s been a few version updates to the Manila DeepLeap plug-in; the current version is 1.0b4. (There are change notes for each version iteration; the two big changes to know about are the closing of a minor security hole and the addition of standard Frontier subscription support, so you can update the plug-in painlessly from within Frontier.)

Holy shit: in order to accomodate the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, Australia has completely changed the dates of observing daylight savings time in some regions of the continent. Microsoft has issued a technote and a patch to help IT people deal with the change on their operating systems; of course, only computers that are going to be hanging out in the affected regions need to have the patches applied.

Russ Cooper, moderator and overall deity of NTBugTraq, has revised his position on the dreaded DVWSSR.DLL security issue — he now says that there is a security problem with the DLL, but it’s a potential buffer overflow issue that can lead to the denial of service of the webserver (and he cannot reproduce it). Microsoft has also revised their security bulletin, but the remedy remains the same (delete the DLL).

Oh, that’s funny (but not in the “Ha ha!” sense) — Oprah Winfrey, the woman who trumpeted the value and sanctity of free speech when she defeated a lawsuit by Texas cattlemen designed to silence her views on their industry, makes every one of her production company’s employees sign agreements that they won’t talk about the internal affairs of the company for the rest of their lives. I guess fundamental rights are fundamental rights, but business is business.

“Elian Gonzalez is now in a state of imminent danger to his physical and emotional well-being in a home that I consider to be psychologically abusive.” (I know, we’re all sick to death of this issue, but the pediatrician in me couldn’t help linking to an article that expresses the same worries that I have about the way that that child is being manipulated and turned into a cause, rather than treated like the six-year-old that he is.)

Well, it’s now official — all of the three-letter .COM domain names are gone.

Awesome — the American Secular Holidays Calendar. (I’m filling out vacation requests for my residency next year, and needed to know when the holidays fell. You can put in any year, and this page will compute the dates of all the biggies.)