A hardware fault in outdated Palm devices is now forcing PalmOne to pay. An enormous number of people are entitled for a replacement. The wording in Slashdot:

After years of denying the problem with bad backup capacitors, Palm is settling a class action suit. If you have a dead Palm m100, m105, or m125, fill out the paperwork, and send it in, Palm will replace it with a new unit…

You can get all the necessary papers as PDF‘s from this site. Does that open to doors to similar exchange policies? Ones involving other Palm models with other known defects?

Have you ever carefully thought about your Google cookie? It can perpetually keep information about:

• Your address/es
• When you are logged on if you Google frequently enough
• What you search the Web for
• Which sites you enter (from SERP‘s)

That is an excess of information, so where has privacy gone? I used to block the Google Cookie, but it resulted in inconveniences when using AdSense. The blocking was matter of principle; there was nothing particular to disguise.

Google co-founder was once asked about the information bound to each cookie identifier. The answer is still unknown. Microsoft are doing something evil by sharing the information listed above across their empire (see related item).

eer-to-peer (P2P) and the World Wide Web (which we most commonly perceive as hypertext — HTTP) are separate. When one uses an Internet connection to directly communicate with a remote machine, then traffic is uncensored, often not monitored, and there are no restrictions imposed on the exchanged material. This justifies the potential illegality of P2P networking.

There are less controversial ways of obtaining media. When it resides on the World Wide Web and hosted by a trusted source, it is then subjected to copyright laws. For this particular reason, it is safer to download MP3 files from trusted Web sites, many of which distribute music for free in interests of self-promotion. Downloads are also far faster because data is delivered by a Web server. An older item explains how to automatically (READ: recursively) download music from the Web.

I have just discovered an inexhaustible source of music, which is also delivered as an RSS feed. That source is the MP3Blogs Aggregator. You must read this entry on the subject in order for everything to make sense. The gist: infinite amount of freely-distributed music reaching your hard-drive on a daily basis.

Scientists from Spain have published influential work on tumour cells growth. The study is backed by a successful trial on humans and it appears as if mathematics will show the way to preventing and curing cancer one day. Also see a less technical dissection of this study.

In a previous paper, these researchers reported that tumor growth, rather than being exponential as commonly believed, is a much slower “linear” process similar to the growth of certain crystals and other natural phenomena.

Our family, like many others, has had a painful loss to cancer.

For the past day or two, a small item of graphics (30 x 100 pixels) was snatched from my site. To make things worse, it was HotLinked and appeared at the front page permanently. This means that my site was exploited for traffic. Webmasters would definitely be familiar with the nuisance. To cut this story short, below are the results of my intervention:

An explanation: The large PNG image with the yellow glow comes from my domain. The site shown is in no way related to schestowitz.com; it displays graphics it does not own by forming a link, placed at the right-hand-side bar. I simply changed the image, which some would say was a harsh move.

To spammers, one of the greatest sources for victims are archives of newsgroups. Many archiving systems which process mailing lists and forums omit E-mail addresses from message headers. However, some E-mail software quotes explicit addresses in the body of messages, thereby exposing these addresses to spam-bots.

Likewise, information that is entered in Web forms will rarely be kept confidential. Privacy is not always honoured and E-mail addresses can find their way into so-called affiliate companies.

Whenever possible, avoid disclosure of E-mail addresses. Spam protection is still immature and can rarely be trusted.

Taking this point slightly further, it is important to be assigned different passwords in different sites. Always. Only days ago, Wikipedia inadvertently leaked passwords.

Open Source software might slowly conquer the market according to this item from IT Manager’s Journal:

Is the enterprise software business dying? Is anybody out there buying new licenses? Based on news from the past few weeks, it seems that there are very few buyers. The collapse of new licensing revenue isn’t news — it started five years ago — but the latest news makes it look like a permanent and accelerating fact of life for software vendors.

Regarding operating systems and the take on computers in general, Clayton Hallmark from Argentina predicts that low cost computers from Asia will bring Microsoft to its end.

MOBILIS apparently goes for only $220 in India