the Forty-Second Parallel

Computerworld: The number of Americans who fell victim to identity theft in 2002 grew 81% over the year before. And incidents reported so far in 2003 suggest a major rise over last year ...

Scary stuff.

Has been released. Maybe one day I'll do something useful with it ...

O'Reilly: An implementation of Rendezvous for Java, called jRendezvous, now allows Java programs running anywhere (not just Mac OS X) to participate in Rendezvous networks. With jRendezvous, Java programs can listen for, and advertise, services on the network with ease.

Moving forward in the browser, despite IE's stagnation: 1. Design for IE6 2. Then tweak your design and add extra functionality for Mozilla/Opera/Safari, taking advantage of CSS2 and CSS3 features not supported by IE.

On the tail end of last week's news that Amazon has begun supporting RSS feeds comes the Amazon RSS feed builder from Onfocus.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/xs/syndicate.html

A nifty workaround for creating CSS dotted borders in IE.

Ryan Lowe: With BlackConnect, Java programs can be written to the Mozilla platform ...

Russell Beattie: Python Needs a Corporate Angel. Amen.

Every time I think about doing something in Python, I quickly change my mind - mostly because it's more difficult than it should be to find any sort of in depth, reliable documentation on certain aspects of the language. And this is from a language whose biggest claim to fame is that "there's only one way to do it."

New York Times: "Does anyone else think it would be a good idea if we all had IM available to us during these lectures?" asked Sinan Aral, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management ...

Many times, students are already doing it; but, the response from instructors is mixed.

This just isn't Microsoft's best day for security issues - they issued a warning about a "critical" flaw affecting most Windows PCs: The most serious of the flaws involves DirectX, a library of graphics and multimedia programming instructions used by most PC games, and could allow malicious users to run code of their choice on a vulnerable PC.

Wired has a cool RSS "application" - when you search for a term on Wired, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your search results. So, anytime Wired adds an article that contains your search term, it'll show up in that RSS feed. [ hat tip to Dave Winer ]

CNET: Swiss researchers released a paper on Tuesday outlining a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds, from 1 minute 41 seconds.

This is just the coolest thing - an open-source .NET class library for RSS feeds.

SCO is making some more noise - trying to convince companies using Linux to purchase a UnixWare license. Dumb.