Stories by: Paul McNamara

It all started when Adam Savage of MythBusters fame told a convention audience that legal bullies from the credit card industry had cowed Discovery Channel into scotching an episode of the show that was to have taken on RFID.

That's the uncomfortable verdict for PCMall and PCConnection rendered last week by the "ForeSee Results Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index." Not only did those two outlets bring up the rear among computer and electronics sites, they brought up the rear, period.

Microsoft and Novell announced Monday that they are intensifying their joint effort to persuade Chinese IT executives to pay for their software, specifically through the much maligned marketing relationship that finds Redmond beating its deafening drum for the SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution controlled by its onetime bitter, now compliant rival.

Somewhere on the planet last Thursday, someone skipped over pages of fine print they will later regret not reading in order to sign a mobile services contract that brought the worldwide number of such accounts to 3.3 billion, a figure roughly equal to half the Earth's population.

It's no secret that spammers have informal communications channels and freely share tricks of the trade on the Internet. But what happened in August is enough to make you suspect they have an organized trade union -- or even a government -- that allows what would otherwise be a scattered collection of freelance vermin to operate in surprising unison.

Kill off any one of 230 root certificates available under the default configuration of Windows XP Service Pack 2 and the operating system will "silently" revive it and restore the certificate to the trusted status that the user intended to be revoked. And in Windows Vista you just can't kill them, period.

The Internet Home Alliance, having already needlessly networked our laundry rooms, will soon unveil its grand vision for "the ideal digital kitchen."

Sixty-eight companies at Network World's DEMO 07 conference last week managed to bring attention to their new products and services without shutting down a single highway, bridge or river. Not a bomb-sniffing dog in sight. No one hauled off in handcuffs.