The Post Office Strikes Again: After failing in its initial attempts to create "registered email," the USPS came out with a wonderfully clueless advertising campaign over the holidays: "Try Hanging E-mail on your Mantelpiece." Belated Christmas card to the postal service: Try privatizing. z Vive la Stupidit�: The French are acting ridiculously provincial as they fight to enforce print laws on all Web sites emanating from their soil. Though the law of the land states that information and media published in another language must also be translated into French, the webmasters at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which maintains an American student outpost in Paris, were apparently unaware of this rule when they created the English-only Georgia Tech Lorraine homepage (gtl.georgiatech-metz.fr/). So an association called the Future of the French Language is suing Georgia Tech for diluting la langue française. Regardless of whether the site is in English or Chinese, says Marc Bonnaut, the association's administrator, "We are not against English - we are for the French language. We are in France, after all." Hmm. You might just want to check your dictionary for a definition of cyberspace,M. Bonnaut. z Is Gates Human? Is Anyone?: In a recent interview with Time managing editor Walter Isaacson, Ol' Uncle Bill proved himself to be just like we always thought he was: smarter than your average bear - but no Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. After a lifetime of contemplating the meaning of the universe, those two geniuses concluded that there is no Grand Unifying Theory of Everything, at least in this lifetime. But Bill ain't buying it. Asked about religion and whether God exists, Gates replied: "I don't have any evidence on that. I don't have any evidence of that.... Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning." Not a good PR move, Bill. Apparently you've forgotten that in your biggest market, the US, the majority of the population believes in God and attends church services regularly. Many of them have yet to open their wallets to Microsoft, and most of them read Time. Oops! z Got Encryption?: Most citizens who are unhappy with their elected representative simply write a letter or make a phone call to Washington. Not the Sunshine State's John and Alice Martin. Equipped with a standard scanner, the Florida couple overheard a compromising cell phone call between Newt Gingrich and spin doctors about his ethics committee hearings. No fans of Newt, the eavesdroppers passed the recording on to Representative Jim McDermott (D-Washington), who in turn has been accused of leaking it to The New York Times. Now that Newt has experienced electronic privacy hacking firsthand, who wants to bet encryption will be a big issue in Congress this year? z Mirror Hacks: Remember all the news about hacked government sites - from the DOJ to the US Air Force, wily hackers keep forcing the powers that be to take their servers down, often before most folks can see them. Ever wonder what those hacks looked like? An enterprising soul has collected mirror sites of them all. Check out www.skeeve.net/usaf/, www.skeeve.net/doj/, and www.skeeve.net/cia/. Well worth the wait.
ELECTRIC WORD
The Post Office Strikes Again�
