President Gerald Ford dead at the age of 93

Wired News: 2006 Foot In Mouth Awards
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material." -- Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) deconstructs the frustrations of (we think) file sharing, during a speech opposing net neutrality before the Senate Commerce Committee.

It's okay to be a little confused about Internet terminology and function - but this was the guy in charge of the committee which oversees regulation of the Internet. That's almost as bad as giving Mark Foley the chairmanship of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.

Kerneltrap: Linux Kernel 2.4.34 Released
I finally managed to update my release scripts to safely produce a final release, so I have released a 2.4.34 identical to -rc4, which added just a security fix to -rc3. Complete changelog appended. I've also released 2.4.33.7 with the same fix for those still tracking 2.4.33.x.

This new Linux kernel supports int_Paranoia() which now makes your computer smart enough to start actively plotting against you. (Critics will point out that FreeBSD has had that functionality since 2004.)

TechDirt: Trying to Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic will Backfire, Badly
As we've already discussed, the more ISPs try to snoop on or "shape" your internet usage, the more that's going to be a great selling point for encryption. People are going to increasingly encrypt all of their internet usage, from regular surfing, to file sharing to VoIP -- as it makes it that much more difficult to figure out what kind of traffic is what and to do anything with it.

While this commentary focuses on public Internet connections, this is also a consideration for those in the enterprise as well.

Militant Geek: Geek vs. Nerd vs. Dork:
For the record Geeks are those that have technical aptitude, nerds are bright but socially awkward, and dorks are just inept excuses for protoplasm. To prevent such future travesties of verboten wonders the retired circus-monkey crew at Militant Geek has prepared this handy comparison chart:

Network Performance Daily: Written by geeks, read by nerds, edited by a dork.

Symantec Advanced Threat Research: Windows Vista Network Attack Surface Analysis: A Broad Overview [PDF]
The Windows Vista network stack is particularly interesting because many of its components are new. The TCP/IP network stack itself has been rewritten and is one of Vistas largest departures from previous versions of Windows. The new stack was written to allow easier maintenance, important new performance enhancements, and improved stability [30]. It integrates support for IPv6 and IPv4 into a single network stack and provides IPv6 support in the default configuration for the first time in the history of Windows. Many other new protocols are implemented and supported in Vista, either as part of the network stack or as separate components of the Windows operating system. These new protocols support features such as topology discovery, server-less name resolution, and NAT traversal.

Also, Vista's TCP/IP stack can be used as both a dessert topping and a floor wax.