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Courtesy of Due Diligence, this hilarious article in “Scottish News Direct from Scotland” — Whiskey of Mass Destruction (WMD) at the Bruichladdich distillery on Islay.

David Hornik, a contributor over at VentureBlog, put up this entry last night. Interesting article. Briefly, he says he was speaking with someone that “is currently in command of a key piece of (the Internet’s) infrastructure” who said that the spambots had so overwhelmed AOL’s email infrastructure that they issued a call to the “others at the key choke-points around the web” to help them (I assume this means those that control the MAEs and IBXs and such).

All jokes about the AOL email infrastructure aside, if this is true, it could mean a revolution is in the making … not that it hasn’t been building for a long time … I mean who do you know who ISN’T sick of spam? He says it may be the end of the Web as we know it but I think he may mean “email” as opposed to “Web”. Hope he can get some kind of confirmation.

So, you may be aware that Yahoo released a protocol update that locked out 3rd party applications like Trillian, GAIM and Miranda. Well, the Trillian folks were the first to come up with a patch (over the weekend, I believe) and they apparently passed it on to the GAIM folks. The patch, or a semblance of it, made it to libyahoo2 which is a standard yahoo protocol library that you can include in your own software. But, the updates are still in alpha state so they aren’t prominently displayed on that site.

But I digress. The update rendered all the 3rd party IM clients unusable. Miranda (my current favorite) has an alpha version of the protocol module available. The one I use is myYahoo20030928b.zip. It’s been updated recently so the link may no longer work but I haven’t had the need to update (it’s alpha — why should I mess with something that works now? — if/when it’s updated again or I have a problem I’ll update again). If you need a link to a usable protocol update, let me know and I’ll seek out the newest version for you.

Implemented as an ActiveX control but, hey, what the heck. http://www.spaceinvaders.de. And, if you don’t wanna play it “online” you can download clones.

and it’s at http://www.slipstick.com/rssnews/rssnews.aspx. They’ve been around for a LONG time and always have good information about Outlook and Exchange.

The 9/29/2003 Lockergnome Windows Daily has a good section on Windows Tweaks. Things like enabling UDMA66 (I didn’t know it wasn’t enabled, either!), optimizing placement of startup files and a bunch more.

Leo Laporte reports in today’s Moanday News that the security hole in Internet Explorer that was supposedly fixed back in August wasn’t. And some bright folks have come up with ways to exploit the hole to change dial-up settings so that your computer connects to one of those outrageously expensive phone numbers.

Think you’re safe because you’ve got DSL or a cable modem? Think again! It can send you to spammers sites or do just about anything else to your machine without your knowledge.

The recommendation: disable ActiveX until Microsoft fixes the problem (again!).

I’m just a geek. I like programming a firewall. Even my own software-based firewall. And Tiny’s firewall let’s me do just that. Like it so much that I bought it … even with all the free ones out there.

Leo Laporte reported in his Tuesday News Items that Google Labs is testing a new Location Search feature. Not bad but there’re more chinese restaurants around here than the 11 shown on the results.

Now that I’ve got a hard-disk MP3 player, one of the things I do is play it in the car. I’m using a casette adapter right now … plug it in to the line out port and slip it in to the car casette player and I’ve got my tunes. It’s a pain, having that wire hanging out of the deck.

With that in mind, here are some reviews of wireless FM transmitters:

http://www.themindfactory.com/Products/PLL-1_FM/AudiaX/AudiaX_Reviews/audiax_reviews.html – a review by an iPod user.

http://www.ipodlounge.com/forums/archive/topic/5566-1.html – at the bottom of the page there’s a comment by an iPod user favoring the AudiaX

http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/audiax-wireless-fm-linker-review.html – a review of the AudiaX

Doesn’t sound like the iRock performs very well. One item I’m interested in is the Arkon SF121. Haven’t found a worthwhile review comparing it to others yet but the $20 price is right.