Back in London for a weekend, what joy. An amusing link comparing Microsoft Tech Support and the Psychic Friends Network, sensibly concluding that neither of them are any help but that Psychic Friends are cheaper, more friendly, and respond faster :-) Also, IBM thinks self-policing networks would be a great idea: essentially AI programs which detect and manage problems on the network, malicious or otherwise. Slashdotters think it sounds more useful than it can practically be. Some very keen people are building computers with transparent cases. They look kinda cool, but would do better if more of the internal parts were also transparent.

More amusingly, people from the state of Maryland are legally barred from using Microsoft's infamous Passport service (the same one that was in trouble recently for Terms of Service which essentially said Microsoft owned everything people posted to the services which used Passport, like, say, Hotmail). This is apparently because Maryland's version of an evil anti-consumer software law currently becoming popular in the US is less than favourable to software producers (the original version makes them exceedingly powerful). The UCITA (the law in question) is a profoundly depressing document.

I also liked an article about 1 terabyte of data stored in a glass cube, and a nifty keyboard with no keys -- it uses two "dome" things instead. Also, the gesture-based interface in Black and White has been getting a lot of press. It's clearly cool.