Wired.com: “Privacy advocates assail the secretive nature of database marketers at a Federal Trade Commission workshop. They want massive database gatherers such as Acxiom and Abacus to open up and let the public peer in.”

Anandtech: “A new contender is out on the video card market. Attempting to take some glory away from the aged immediate mode rendering platforms that prevail today, STMicroelectronics has paired up with Hercules/Guillemot to produce the tile based rendering 3D Prophet 4500 based on the Kyro II graphics chip. Could the $149.99 Kyro II card beat the $340 GeForce2 Ultra? Before we stated testing, we didn’t think so either.”

Wired.com: “While the privacy debate continues in Washington, new business models may render it obsolete. Firms have begun to offer anonymous, prepaid credit cards and anonymous, disposable cellular phones.”

ZDNET: “The other day, a friend of mine who uses iBooks in his classroom visited me in my home in San Francisco. He noticed my PowerBook
out on the coffee table and asked if he could check his e-mail. He doesn’t know much about computers. On top of that, he didn’t
know that my computer had OS X running on it, and that everyone is complaining about what a horrible thing OS X is. But as a silent
experiment, I decided to let him check his mail and not mention anything about the new world he would find when he flipped open my
PowerBook’s lid.”

FloridaToday.com: “The boy, whose name was not released because of his age, allegedly broke into NASA systems
at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md., twice in January. Authorities say he also broke into a U.S. Department of Energy
system at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., that same month.”

“Have you been bangin’ your head against the wall trying to figure out
how to twist up the performance of your NVIDIA card just like the
Winblow$ sufferers can? Well peeps, today is your lucky day! NVClock
will save you many a lump on your noggin’ and will have you fraggin’
away at new performance levels in no time.” Read about it at evil3D.net.

MSNBC.com tells us: “Trying to open a picture file may cause any of
the following Microsoft applications to quit
without forewarning: Greetings 2001; Picture
It! Photo 2001; Picture It! Photo Premium
2001; Picture It! Publishing 2001 (Gold, Silver,
and Platinum).”

EE Times reports that “Chemists at Harvard University say that they have found a practical way to assemble nanowires into regular arrays. The breakthrough could form the basis for interconnecting ultrasmall electronic devices on a substrate.”

Linux Weekly News posted an email from Wichert Akkerman reporting a security bug in the ‘mailx’ console email client. The fix is not perfect and won’t be without a rewrite of the code.

LinuxWorld reviews ParaSoft’s Jtest java delopment tool, calling it pricey and nonintuitive, but well-documented and responsive.