Matthew Gifford

It made me very sad to hear this morning that Fred Rogers has passed away. I spent countless hours watching his show when I was a kid. It's almost like losing a family member.

Some hardware commonly used in ATMs has been shown to be crackable. It allows people inside the banking system to determine the PIN number for an account in an average of 24 attempts. Rather than admitting that the hole exists and working on a fix, Citibank is attempting to use legal means to prevent people from finding out about it. They have to know that the people who would use the exploit have already downloaded the instructions. I can only conclude that they don't want their customers to find out that their accounts are not secure.

Anita Ramasastry, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law, has written a sobering overview [via Megnut] of John Ashcroft's Patriot Act II. To sum it up, if this act becomes law, the Justice Department has the right to spy on, profile, detain, or expatriate you for any reason with no accountability. I can't imagine more unpatriotic legislation.

I'm sorry for being such a bad blogger lately. I just haven't been in the mood to write.

Oops. I just did number 7 on Jeremy Zawodny's 10 Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers. [via Kasia Trapszo]

Evan Williams, co-founder of Pyra, the company that makes Blogger, announced Saturday night that his company was bought by Google last week. I'm not sure what Google is trying to do. Regardless, this is a big boost for weblogging.

So this is what Meg Hourihan has been working on. Well, I guess it doesn't say very much. Still, it sounds interesting.

John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project has been severely restricted by Congress. I was starting to think that our Senators and Representatives had forgotten that they have power over the Executive branch.

In response to MSN feeding broken pages to users of Opera's browser, Opera has released the Bork edition. [via Slashdot] People who use this version of the browser will see MSN translated into the language of the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show.

Thuoosunds ooff brunds et oofer 150 stures. Yuoo'll feend it et MSN Shuppeeng.

I'm sure we'll soon find out that Microsoft doesn't have the same sense of humor that Opera does.

Is Google becoming a Big Brother? Maybe. It's certainly worth thinking about. Reliance on any single system is dangerous. Microsoft taught us that. If you don't think a very large portion of the internet's traffic is being guided by Google, take a look at your referrers.