another nice blurb about Peekabooty (yes, the one my friends Joey and Paul are working on), this time from the New Scientist. (via MacInTouch)

yesterday, i blogged a story about the tangled web of interrelated deals among the Friends of Gary (Winnick). funnily enough the Washington Post carried a story that featured a lot of the same names. apparently, the SEC's taking a close look at whether Global Crossing deliberately inflated revenue reports while its executives sold $480 million in stock. David Lee and Barry Porter (who have figured in a subsequent Gary Winnick deal involving PrimeCo Wireless) managed to unburden themselves of around $40 million-worth each.

granted, this is chicken-feed compared to Gary himself, who netted $280 million in the same period. (via GMSV)

my friend Joey has a fun-to-read rant cum response ("rantsponse"?) to the NARAS's most recent yaddayadda about file sharing. by the way, did anyone notice that the NARAS/GRAMMY(TM) site is hosted by AOL? that wouldn't be the AOL that's a unit of AOL Time Warner, sister company to the Warner Bros. record label and TV and movie studios, would it?

AOL's corporate parent is a part-owner of the MusicNet joint venture, a label-owned competitor to Napster and other digital music distribution services. AOL's corporate siblings are some of MusicNet's most critical content providers, and that AOL is one of MusicNet's key licensees. that makes NARAS look kind of like a shill, doesn't it?

anyway, that's not what i'm writing about. at the end of his piece, i get thrown into Joey's recommended reading list, which is nice. then Joey asks (in a "Memo to George") that i capitalize the starts of my sentences because, as he says, " The e.e. cummings / archy-and-mehithabel (sic) thing is pretty old."

memo to Joey: suck it.

however, it did give rise to an interesting thought, though: can CSS and/or JavaScript be employed to give readers the site they want, right down to capitalized sentences? i won't be capitalizing anything except proper nouns any time soon, but i don't want to keep on confusing Joey. help me help him. (via AccordionGuy)

here's an update on my quest for an RSS client for Mac OS X, a topic that's been kicked around on another blog to which i contribute called Forwarding Address: OSX.

the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation is holding hearings on digital content copyright protection (as well as broadband roll-out and the transition to digital television). the scheduled panellists include Disney's CEO Michael Eisner, News Corp COO Peter Chernin, Intel's Leslie Vadasz, Andy Bechtolsheim (ex-of Sun, now at Cisco), James Meyer (former COO of Thomson Multimedia), and Robert Perry of Mitsubishi Digital.

so. the government, two gigantic content distributors, two consumer electronics manufacturers (one of whom owns a substantial MPEG/MP3 patent portfolio), a router company, and a chip company are getting together to debate your rights as a content consumer. sounds like a job for the EFF. (via c|net)

update: the Register has its version of the hearings. call me biased, but it sounds about right: consumers and citizens should be treated like crooks, and unfathomably wealthy copyright merchants are victims who need government-mandated tools to audit your personal use of intellectual property.

...and because O'Reilly understands that balance is important in the universe, you might find this overview of web services from a .NET perspective instructive. for a little more depth, check out these .NET web services examples by Brian Jepson. (via O'Reilly Network)

(as you can see, i'm catching up on some stuff i've been meaning to post. i guess that's a blogjam)

O'Reilly On Java has an article that walks you through the steps of deploying a simple SOAP web service with Apache and Tomcat. web services, easy as pie! (via O'Reilly Network)

the Tauzin-Dingell telecommunications bill (actually The Internet Freedom and Broadband Deployment Act) US House of Representatives by a vote of 273 to 157. it still faces a grim future in the Senate, however.

three of the the bill's most important provisions essentially allow the Baby Bells to offer long distance services without first opening their local markets to competition (a key provision of the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act), frees them of the legal obligation to lease parts of their fiber networks to competitors, and allows them to set prices for wholesale data services to rivals while exempting DSL from state utility commission oversight.

in other words, they can offer more complete phone and data packages than their competitors while legally pricing their broadband competition (like Covad or your local ISP) out of business. all this looks like the final nail in the coffin of competitive DSL, so expect to see the Baby Bells buying the hard-won (and expensive) assets of their broadband competitors for pennies on the dollar. (via SiliconValley.com)