In top news, Bill Gates has stepped down as CEO of Microsoft. He's staying on as Chairman and taking a new title –Chief Software Architect– to focus on development on Windows 2000. CNN and MSNBC have longer articles. What makes this more interesting is that coverage this morning in the Wallstreet Journal and on NPR indicated that the settlement talks between DOJ and Microsoft appear to have failed and that the DOJ is going to seek a break-up of Microsoft into three companies: operating systems, applications and consumer/commerce. Perhaps Bill Gates is positioning himself to lead the Baby Bill that is closest to what Microsoft was originally.

The Usenet death penalty was declared against @Home Network earlier in the week. You can read the full notice here. @Home is blaming their users for not installing software correctly on their machines. They claim this allows crackers to abuse News groups via the user's machine. They’ve announced plans to deal with the problem. No announcement yet on whether the death penalty will be revoked. If you use @Home and like news groups, hope this is enough to satisfy the gurus of Usenet. You've got to wonder about a company that blames its problems on its customers, though.

A bunch of states have been selling Driver License information and thumbing their collective noses at a federal law that prohibited that sale. Let me get this straight, the states were selling something and the buyer could be in another state or country. And they wanted to claim this wasn’t interstate commerce. I got stuff, you got a buck, but it’s not a trade. Surprise, surprise the Supreme Court called a duck a duck and in a rare unanimous decision, ruled that information is a comodity covered under the interstate commerce clause of the constitution. More coverage: Wired.

And in a follow-up… MOSR recently took FileMaker Inc to task for having no plans to bring out a Mac OS X version of their database product despite having a huge number of Mac OS users and the traditional Mac OS no longer being shipped after January 2001. This after many developers had been raising the same question for months. Well, after the MOSR article, FileMaker has indicated to developers that they (now mysteriously) have plans of some kind. What kind hasn’t been stated.

Always wondered what the standard internet ad sizes are? Well, go to the source: the IAB

Have you ever wondered about Gang Dynamics? What about the meaning of grafitti?