Irish lad writes superfast browser

Intriguing Wired story by Karlin Lillington about an Irish teenager who appears to have come up with an elegant and efficient browser. It includes a search facility involving 120 search engines. And to think that up to this moment I was content with having Google on my Safari menu-bar. Sigh.

The reality of war: something about which Bush and Blair know zilch

Wonderful piece by Robert Fisk, one of the few journalists one can believe when it comes to the Middle East. His book on Lebanon is a scarifying masterpiece. Thanks to Gerard de Vries for the link.

How low can you go?
Andrew Sullivan is outraged at how personal the vitriol against President Bush can be:

Those of us with memories that stretch back to the 1990s will remember that we first descended into the trenches of “coarseness” and “personal demonization” when Bill Clinton took office. Here at Salon we took years of unbelievably “coarse” and vicious e-mails from Clinton-haters: They dreamed up elaborate fates for us, the president and most particularly his wife, deranged fantasies of four-letter-word-driven vitriol, detailing sexually explicit and bloody scenarios that would make a drill sergeant blanch. The anti-Clintonites took the politics of “personal demonization” to incredible new lows in American life, and, fueled by the rise of the Net and right-wing media, made it the norm.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and I’m sure that the fringe of the opposition to Bush uses rhetoric and imagery that goes overboard in unpleasant and unjustifiable ways. But it was the Clinton-haters — outraged first at a supposed financial scandal that never amounted to anything and then at a sex scandal involving consenting adults — who rolled us into this gutter. The people who are mad at Bush, by contrast are upset about, first, an election that was arguably stolen, and now a likely war that has yet to be justified. There may be no excuse for “personal demonization,” and I won’t defend it, but at least there’s some substance behind what Bush-haters are mad about. [Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment]

Kodak runs into trouble, lays off workers

According to the NYT , Kodak is feeling the pinch of digital technology.

Guess who didn’t install the Microsoft security patch to combat SQL Slammer?

NYT story reads, in part: The frantic message came from the corporation’s information technology workers: “HELP NEEDED: If you have servers that are nonessential, please shut down.”

The computer system was under attack by a rogue program called SQL Slammer, which affected servers running Microsoft software that had not been updated with a patch — issued months ago — to fix the vulnerability. The worm hindered the operations of hundreds of thousands of computers, slowed Internet traffic and even disrupted thousands of A.T.M. terminals.

But this wasn’t happening at just any company. It was occurring at Microsoft itself. Some internal servers were affected, and service to users of the Microsoft Network was significantly slowed.

The disruption was particularly embarrassing for Microsoft, which has been preaching the gospel of secure computing. On Jan. 23, the company’s chairman, Bill Gates, sent a memo to customers describing progress in improving its products since he announced a “trustworthy computing” initiative a year ago.

“While we’ve accomplished a lot in the past year, there is still more to do,” he wrote. He cited the hundreds of millions spent to shore up Microsoft’s products, and its plans to deliver more secure products in the future. He also listed “things customers can do to help.” The first item was “stay up to date on patches.”

More on Slammer — Wired story.