You probably haven't heard about this yet, but if it goes through...you will. This is MAJOR news and I'm surprised the press hasn't caught onto the story yet.

The ensuing spam will be painful. The whois system has been poorly managed from the beginning and they have not done enough to protect domain name registrants from spam, hijacking etc.

Denis Horgan has been shut down by the editor of The Hartford Courant. Blogs, journalists and the media are still working out some kinks in their relationships together...

Update, here's an article about the story:

Hartford Paper Tells Employee to Kill Blog.

StarWars.com announces that Chewbaca will return for Episode III of Star Wars.

I just ran into Snazzykat's site...yet another just-married blogger. Wedding was January 19, 2003. Congratulations!

BTW, our readers need to see pictures of the ring ;)

Sorry, but I couldn't find it...

The Ask Yahoo question of the day is: Do surgical masks really help prevent the spread of SARS?

Click on the link to get the long answer. The short answer is no.

A federal judge handed a win to file swapping tools.

Although I do understand the concern of the recording and entertainment industry, there are legitimate uses for file swapping and it's a shame to kill a technology because they haven't yet found a solution to the illegal use of said technology.

The University of Chicago has put up a website cataloging the Lost Treasures From Iraq.

Google is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA:

Joi Ito has posted his first audio blog entry. Cool!

Always On has an interview with Eric Schmidt.

I was saddened to learn today that Edgar Codd, the father of relational databases, has died. He was a brilliant man. After he proposed the relational database model, people thought he was crazy and that it would make data retrieval far slower. Instead, he revolutionized the computer industry. May he rest in peace.

A reporter for the Boston Globe was caught with looted "souvenirs" from Iraq. The saddest part is the comment made by the reporter to a customs official:

''He didn't think it was a big deal,'' the official said of Crittenden. ''He said all the embedded reporters were doing it.''

The Smoking Gun explains why the music industry might want to take a different approach in combatting the problem of Kazaa. Well, at least Madonna may be happy to get some more press.

Looks like Joi Ito's company is investing in Moveable Type. Good move.

With the upcoming release of TypePad, this will be an interesting little competition for Google-owned Blogger. I would tend to think Google plans to improve blogger, so there may be some interesting wars ahead.

In case no one noticed, the one gaping hole in the field is a php-based MT-level blogging app. When the right player steps in with it, which is inevitable, expect things to be taken to a higher level.

Kudos to Mitch!

Looks like some TV execs weren't thrilled with Adbusters campaign to turn off your tv for a week.

kuro5hin.org discusses the World's largest oil reserve, Canada!!

Everyone is talking about how Ask Jeeves has really improved with this latest release, but I think it's way too little, way too late. The search results are ok, but far from enough to take traffic from Google.

Space Ship One is really cool!

Wired has an interesting story on Google.

Jon Udell discusses The Semantic Blog. There is so much promise in all these protocols, I hope one day we see major use made of them. But as Jon indicates, it has to be as transparent as possible to the end user creating the data.

2 million sold??? I'm speechless.

This is the coolest ad ever. Apparently inspired by The Way Things Go, a film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

The NY Times has a 2 page obituary on Dr. Atkins. Page 2 is quite interesting...

Dr. Robert Atkins has died at 72 years of age, following injuries he sustained in a fall on an icy NY sidewalk on April 8th 2003.

They went to a lot of trouble to explain the SnapBack feature of Mac's new Safari Browser, but I'm afraid it didn't make much sense to me. Is the idea that you select a temporary "Snap Back" page so you can browse around a shopping cart a bit and then "Snap Back" to the same page?

Mesopotamia is a nice site by The British Museum.

Do you know your elements? Because if you don't, you may want to learn this cool song.

I was surfing some more and ran into this news: Update on Dr. Atkins. It seems he fell on the sidewalk in front of his Atkins Center. He had a major blow to his head and after surgery to remove a clot from his brain, he has not yet recovered...

I surfed onto Lying Media Bastards where I read about this link...The Scotsman.com reports that the US gives Israel 3 years to quit occupied Arab land. If this is true, I think it is pretty big news.

Reading Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day, I found out about The Digital Journalist. Looks very promising!

This Back In Iraq 2.0 blog is very impressive so far. You really get to learn a lot more about what is going on in Iraq. I wish I had found it sooner...

OK, now I'm really confused. For my last entry, I checked out BLOGGER (a.k.a. Pyra), recently bought by Google. They have a section on the left, "BLOGS OF NOTE". On top of the list is HGHExperiment followed by Where is Raed. HGH looked interesting, so I clicked on it. I got a "not found" page.

So I tried to see if Google had any cache on it or some pages within that domain. They didn't have a cache, but they did have an archive index page. So I went there and it was kind of jumbled up, with a few links on it. Like a corrupt page. But I clicked on one of the links that pointed to a December 2002 archive page and it worked.

I was shocked to find a url that appeared to have the HGH Experiment front page content on it but it pointed to http://hghexperiment.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_dear_raed_archive.html, which looks like the url that an archive of Mr. Salam Pax would have, except it's on the HGH Experiment page. Weird.

A few minutes later, I tried the homepage of HGH Experiment again and this time it worked. It showed the same page as I had seen on that December archive page. So then I clicked on the december 2002 archive page again, and instead of the HGH Experiment front page, it showed the actual December archive of Salam Pax and still does.

Another thing, going back to that archive index page, it NOW shows the proper archive for HGH Experiment, instead of the link to http://hghexperiment.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_dear_raed_archive.html, aka Salam Pax page, which is what it showed before...

My guess is that there is some technical glitch and that during a server move or backup someone mistakenly moved some files into the wrong directory...but I am kind of wondering...

I guess some google employees are having fun with blogs and the google purchase of Pyra. The official chef of Google has posted the Google Daily Menus. Lunch on Friday was a "PASTA CON VODKA mixed al dente rotelle pasta & raditore Served w/ a Tomato Vodka Sauce & Roasted organic vegetables".

Sounds pretty good to me!

I found out about Friendster from reading the latest entry on Joi Ito's Weblog. It looks like a good idea. Increase your group of friends by hooking your own friends and their friends' friends into a network. Hmm, may be worth a try. What's nice is that you can limit the people who are allowed to view profile info.

Even though they lost Game 1, the Dallas Stars are my pick to go all the way this year. Marty Turco only gave up 2 goals in the loss and if he stays hot, he can carry Dallas all the way. He's only 28 years old. He has a great career ahead of him.

Yahoo! News: Officer's Star Searches Raise Liability Worries

Excerpt:

For six years, Officer Kelly Chrisman used Los Angeles Police Department computers to look up confidential law enforcement records on celebrities and other high-profile people, including Sharon Stone, Courteney Cox Arquette, Sean Penn and Halle Berry.

Chrisman says he was just carrying out orders from superiors, but a lawsuit recently settled by the city for nearly $400,000 alleged that the officer had accessed the records to sell the information to tabloids.

This murder case is amazing. That family must have gone through a lot...the relief they must feel after losing hope of seeing their daughter again and then have her show up out of the blue alive and well must be indescribable.

Paypal was the only really successful Internet payment system out of the many startups who promised to revolutionize the way money was transferred between people. Now there's a new one being talked up. It seems like a great idea, you simply need to hook into the system with a 19 digit security code and the cash value and the "money" is yours. I wonder if this system is secure enough....

Jeremy Zawodny has found some cool Yahoo! shortcuts. Here's the full list.

Wired news reported this story about a blogger who was simply copying stories from Stratfor. Amazing that it took so long for him to get caught. Also amazing how much traffic the technique got him.

Yahoo! News - Journalists Killed, Abducted in Iraq...

SARS has now cost over 100 lives. The Department of Health has created a FAQ page for people who have questions about Atypical Pneumonia.