ZDNet reports that Yahoo is once again blocking connections from Trillian (the alternative multi-protocol client). Yahoo tried this a few times last year and it looks like they're trying again. Cerulean, maker of Trillian, employs some excellent protocol engineers, who I have no doubt will quickly figure out Yahoo's latest obfuscation and release a patch.
A quick fix discovered late this evening: Change your Y!IM host from scs.msg.yahoo.com to scs.yahoo.com, port 5050, and it should work. This is on Trillian 0.74H, not Pro.

C|Net News.com reports that spammers are using the enticement of free porn to defeat CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Test to tell Humans and Computers Apart) to enable automatic creation of Yahoo and Hotmail email accounts.

First, the spammers open and advertise a Web site containing pornography. Visitors to the porn site are asked to enter the word contained in a Captcha graphic before they are granted access. In the background, spammers have already used scripts to automate the Web mail accounts opening process to the point where they need a human to "read" the Captcha graphics. The Captcha graphics from the Web mail site are transferred to the porn site, where the porn consumers interpret the Captcha words. As soon as they enter the correct word, the script can complete its application process and the visitors are rewarded with free porn.

Ingenious.

Toymaker/propmaker/artist/voice actor Shawn Crosby has created a photostory showing a holiday visit with a jolly fat guy at a mall. It's not the one you're thinking of, though.

C|Net News.com is running an opinion piece by Verisign senior VP Mark McLaughlin, wherein he claims that ICANN caved to a "vocal minority" of "technological purists" in ordering SiteFinder shut down.

ICANN appears to have bought into claims that the Internet has broken or will break. Anyone who has used it in the last three weeks knows that claim to be false. More likely, ICANN caved under the pressure from some in the Internet community for whom this is a technology-religion issue about whether the Internet should be used for these purposes. For this vocal minority, resentment lingers at the very fact that the Internet is used for commercial purpose, which ignores the fact that it's a critical part of our economy.

Newsflash: the Web is not all there is to the Internet.

C|Net News.com's Newsmakers section interviews California State Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach).

The Redondo Beach state senator thinks Microsoft has a bad attitude when it comes to spam. As a California legislator for the past 10 years, Bowen has drafted and introduced bills intended to tie spammers' hands and better protect consumers' privacy. But more recently, she has criticized Microsoft for lobbying against certain spam bills, including one she championed. Bowen has gone so far as to say "trusting Microsoft to protect computer users from spam is like putting telemarketers in charge of the do-not-call list."

She's also a fan of science fiction writers William Gibson and Neal Stephenson: Both gentlemen have spent a lot of time thinking about where technology might go and what kind of a society we might see as a result of changes in technology. Their works have been very influential to me, as I start really speaking about what's likely to happen. Over the course of the time that I've worked on technology issues and read Stephenson and Gibson and other such writers, some things I read as science fiction in 1994 are now reality.

SFGate.com's Matthew Yi writes about how some small businesses (delis, independant coffeehouses, etc.) are providing free Wi-Fi access to their customers. "We're not charging anyone. All we're asking is to support us. If you're sitting here more than an hour, buy an extra latte or a sandwich for a friend," said Anthony Azzollini, the owner of Caffe Roma in North Beach, who installed his Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, access point in May. On the flip side, Starbucks has taken the pay-for-service route. Starbucks has joined with T-Mobile to outfit more than 2,300 stores with Wi-Fi networks in the past year. "Starbucks isn't paying squat," said Keith Waryas, an analyst at the industry research firm IDC. "It's got the mother of all deals. T-Mobile is coming in and paying for all this." At least two major DSL service providers in the Bay Area say sharing broadband is not specifically prohibited as long as the connection is not being resold and the sharing doesn't go beyond the boundaries of that property. But Comcast has a firm policy that says customers are not allowed to distribute their connections to anyone, whether it be a neighbor or a coffee shop customer, said spokesman Andrew Johnson.

C|Net News.com is reporting that IBM has sold a broad collection of servers to Danish toy maker The Lego Group, displacing rival Hewlett-Packard. As part of a multiyear agreement, Lego will replace more than 220 HP servers with 34 IBM server and storage systems, products Big Blue said will let Lego respond to spikes in demand around the holiday season. An HP representative confirmed the loss of the Lego server relationship. Lego has had ProLiant servers using the Alpha processor and the Tru64 flavor of the Unix operating system, the representative said. HP has gradually been phasing out those products and encouraging customers to move to products running the HP-UX version of Unix. The Lego server deal is "one of a handful of losses in (the) product migration from Tru64 to HP-UX," the representative said.