Rough Drafts

A startup spam-filtering company is using haiku in email headers as a way of stopping spam. The idea is that you can set up your email program to reject all email that doesn’t contain this haiku in the header… but if spammers try to use the haiku, they can be sued for copyright and trademark […]

The Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry is a large collection of obscure contemporary poetry rescued from small-run printings, tiny journals, and other sources.

John Udell reviews a handful of RSS aggregators.

An excellent profile of Bruce Schneier in the September Atlantic , by Charles C. Mann, explains why the current administration’s approach to increasing national security is misguided. Some quotes: Encrypting transactions on the Internet, the Purdue computer scientist Eugene Spafford has remarked, “i

Dan Bricklin on small business blogging.

Business blogs: Phillip Windley, CIO for the state of Utah, offers weblogging software to state employees.

File traders swapped 5.16 billion music files last year on networks like KaZaA and Morpheus, according to this recent Yankee Group study. Here’s another story on the same study.

Books with sneaky shrinkwrap licenses? You know the kind — by opening this package, you agree to blah blah blah. Software packages have long had this kind of language slapped all over them, in an effort to keep you from doing certain things (copying, reselling, reverse engineering). Now, it seems, b

From O’Reilly’s Open Source convention, Lawrence Lessig delivers a clear, engaging, passionate primer on copyright politics.

They hang the man and flog the woman That steal the goose from off the common, But let the greater villain loose That steals the common from the goose. The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own, But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who take things that are […]

1st annual duh awards. courtesy of Dave Farber

We are tiny. We are hip. We are the Cork Dolls.