Author Archives: Dan Gillmor

I spent the morning in San Jose at the Silicon Valley Technology and Homeland Security Summit & Expo (the Mercury News is one of the sponsors), where I moderated a panel on corporate network security. Good speakers, fine material for … Continue reading →

J.D. Lasica wonders if the murderous Osama bin Laden will be Time’s “Person of the Year” and predicts there will be hell to pay if he is. My prediction: It’ll be bin Laden and George W. Bush together. Comments

I’m tuning into CSPAN’s coverage of a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’shearing on Microsoft and the antitrust settlement. One senator quoted a survey showing that 70 percent of Americans want the case settled. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee chairman, … Continue reading →

A tip of the hat to the folks at Google, who’ve posted Usenet messages dating back 20 years. It’s a little weird, as some people have noted, to have your every public online utterance available for inspection, but there are … Continue reading →

As Molly Ivins so accurately notes, the Enron debacle is a national scandal. It’s not just a story of arrogance, however. Enron’s collapse reflects a system that protects the kind of opaque business dealings that reward insiders while leaving the … Continue reading →

Sorry for the reduced number of postings lately. I’ve been swamped with other things, and spent the better part of of yesterday afternoon in a dentist’s chair. I’ll be back at it soon. Comments

I’ve gotten my router set up at home, and it’s working well. Today I had three computers — Windows 2000, Mac (OS 9.2. and X) and Linux (Mandrake) — running like a charm off my DSL connection. DHCP is a … Continue reading →

I installed the BugTraq NoHTML v1.2.0.0 Outlook add-in, which is supposed to convert HTML e-mail to harmless formats. Some problems cropped up. First, it left at least several HTML messages intact in Outlook 2000 — in other words, for those … Continue reading →

Washington Post: The Ashcroft Smear. It is not disloyal — in fact, it is a form of patriotism — to ask whether government is getting the powers most appropriate to the task, whether it is using them wisely, whether it … Continue reading →

Washington Post: On Hill, Ashcroft Defends Anti-Terror Tactics. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft today defiantly faced congressional critics, defending the Justice Department’s aggressive tactics in prosecuting terrorism and suggesting that people who oppose the government’s plans are aiding the terrorists. … Continue reading →