The past 24 hours of outage here have been courtesy of my ISP and telco, who don’t seem to be all that frazzled when one of their T1 lines goes down. The only reason I’m back up is that one of the techs at my telco decided to come and see if he could get a parallel circuit up and running; the original T1 is still down. Bleah.

I cannot tell you how much I hate that RealNetworks is involved in so many big deals with content providers to be the exclusive distribution method for their music. RealPlayer is such a piece of garbage, from the insidious installer that spams the hell out of your computer’s bookmarks, menus and startup groups to the app itself which stays in resident memory even after you quit it (“to make things faster,” as I was once told by a support rep). If the company truly is able to make their app the exclusive mechanism for me to obtain content online, then I’m quickly going to migrate back to my CDs and stereo.

Remember back when Toysmart.com went bankrupt, and a huge uproar developed over their attempt to sell their customer data? Well, the same thing is apparently happening over at eToys, but for some reason, this time nobody’s complaining. Why?

Stepmother Forces Boy To Stitch Up Mouth. I can’t really say anything that that headline doesn’t already say.

Is it just me, or does it appear that Damien has recently been defamed and/or slandered by someone who has appropriated his identity? (April 3, 2001 entry, damn that lack of permanent links…)

Following a trend from the weekend, Matthew Schwartz has an article about honeypots, this time specifically those honeypots put up on corporate networks to detract hacker’s attention away from systems that really matter. A cool-sounding product mentioned in the article is ManTrap, a real Sun system with multiple security mechanisms to keep hackers interested and well-logged; seems like it would be fun to play with.

The Microsoft DHTML Dude has a great column this week on Internet Explorer 6.0 and standards. (I created a new VMware Windows 2000 installation this week, and installed the IE6 beta into it; I’ll report more after I play with it a bit. Update: It appears that the Manila HTML tag editing tool doesn’t show up in IE6. Bummer.)

One in four major banks are now implementing ATM card rental fees — annual surcharges that customers pay for the ability to use an ATM card to withdraw money. I was always under the impression that banks pushed ATMs because they were a way to phase out live tellers who earned salaries; now, it’s clear that they also see them as limitless buckets of income.