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What do women, thongs and search engines have in common? It’s the perennial question. Ok, maybe it isn’t, but it’s a darned good question. Do you know what women, thongs and search engines have in common? Is it that nobody understands any of them (certainly not women or search engines)?…

Do you remember when Aunty told you about Daniel Quinlan, in the context of SpamAssassin being picked the top anti-spam product? Or, in addition to his work with SpamAssassin, you may remember Quinlan as a Vice-President, Apache Software Foundation, which was in the news a few months ago for their…

Happy Birthday to Yahoo, which is celebrating its 10th birthday with not only a big Yahoo, but a “netrospective”. “What the yahoo is a netrospective?”, you may ask. Apparently it’s a cute play on words – a retrospective with respect to the Internet. In this case Yahoo’s netrospective is a…

Dear Gentle Readers, For those of you who have been listening at home (and those of you who haven’t, you should be!), our regular weekly date with the extremely funny, bright, and erudite David Lawrence, of Online Tonight with David Lawrence, has been moved from Wednesday evenings to Thursday evenings,…

This week the Internet Patrol is helping our friends over at the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy with their 2nd annual national “Spam and the Law” conference, and so we may not be quite so wordy as she usually is. Fear not, though, we will be back in…

…please click here. (Aunty is just trying to get a sense as to how many folks are using the RSS feed.) Here’s the link again. Thank you! Kissy kissy, Aunty

There’s an old saying that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. Well, it’s not nice to fool us, either. But that’s just what Alek Komarnitsky did with his Christmas lights which you could turn on and off with your web browser. Or, rather, which you couldn’t.

Yes, it’s that time of year again, when grocery stores are selling Christmas decorations and toys, drug stores are selling Christmas trees (hey, nobody actually buys food or medicine, do they?), and Starbucks is playing Jingle Bell Muzak on infinite loop. And, oh yes, the Komarnitsky family is once again…

Air to breathe. Water to drink. Access to the Internet. These are all things which we have come to take for granted as being available to us any time, anywhere, so long as we have the requisite pulmonary system, digestive system, or computer system, respectively. But George Tenet, the recently-resigned…

Anurag Jain has a radical idea to clear your inbox of spam: unplug your mail server for several days. According to Jain’s blogspot blog, the institute of which he is part, the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, had to upgrade their Microsoft Exchange server. As a result, the mail server…

Microsoft has taken the unusual step of foreshadowing the release of an upcoming Windows security bulletins. On Thursday, December 9th, Microsoft announced on its TechNet site that it would announce on the following Tuesday, December 14th, “5 Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows”. Microsoft also announced that “The greatest maximum…

Have you ever fallen for an Internet hoax, urban legend, or doctored data? Well, you’re not alone. Even Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, has fallen for at least one. Giving the keynote address at the annual Oracle OpenWorld show this week, at Moscone Centre in San Francisco, McNealy spoke…

As reported by Aunty a few weeks ago, here, failed dot.com Commerce One had filed bankruptcy and on the bankruptcy auction block, among other things, were nearly 40 patents for various web services, many of which are in widespread use across the Internet, and incorporated into the web software protocol…

Blood Diagonostics, a South Carolina biopharmaceutical firm, has sued Health Coalition Inc. (“HCI”), claiming that HCI has used Blood Diagonostic’s name in meta tags on the HCI website. Blood Diagnostics claims that the use was a calculated act on the part of HCI intended to harm Blood Diagnostic’s business. According…