The ironic thing is, I spent three weeks in Tunisia earlier this year, and I encountered Tunisian guys offering to Bluetooth amateur porn from their mobile phone to mine. Sneakernet always wins.

Anyone who thinks that interactive books can't be a force for good needs to go read Neal Stephenson.

You are absolutely correct -- I was a victim of this attack despite using stock Wordpress, with all the latest updates applied. I would have never discovered it, either, if it weren't for Duke University's IT department (the blog was on their subdomain) being incredibly on-the-ball with security checks. Wordpress has unfixed security holes that are being exploited; people need to know!

Had I mod points, you would get them. It's all about the information, Marty!

T-Mobile is basically the only US carrier that seems friendly towards folks with unlocked phones just looking for a SIM card. There's also been some rumblings that they might start offering the first prepaid data service in the US; how likely that is, I don't know. I do know that they used to let iPhone users use their prepaid data plan for Sidekicks, but that is no longer possible. They only blocked port 80, though, so you can still check your mail via IMAP, or SSH to a remote sever somewhere! I've even used Opera before, by passing my traffic through an Opera proxy server. Also, you can get $100 of prepaid credit for $70 by utilizing Bing.com cash back (YMMV) -- and that credit is good for a year. Not bad if you don't do a lot of talking or need port 80.

It's quite easy to set up, using the Ubuntu alternate install cd.

I think Microsoft might be making another push to get Windows on more netbooks. There was a poorly-written piece in the Wall Street Journal today warning consumers not to buy netbooks with Linux. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124346723960760371.html Once, just once, I would like to see a column from them warning consumers that their Windows netbooks will not work out-of-the-box with Office documents -- which is true (what netbook comes with an Office license?).

Firefox 3.0's self-signed certificate system is much better than the old one because it allows you to store security exceptions, much like in, say, SSH. That way, you will get a warning that the cert has changed in the future, indicating a potential eavesdropper. It eliminates a number of vulnerabilities (although, of course, not MITM attacks on the initial certificate exchange). I don't understand all the hate for it.