Caution: These Words Could End a Perfectly Good Scrabble Game. A selection of words obscure and fanciful from “A Word a Day: A Romp Through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English” (John Wiley & Sons):. [New York Times: Technology]

MPEG-4 licences go live. Like it and lump it [The Register]

This Modern World. A rainy day “War on Terror” fun game! [Salon.com]

what fire looks like in freefall [jwz]

engineering pornography [jwz]

File swap nets will win, DRM and lawyers lose, say MS researchers. No, we are not making this up… [The Register]

MS paper touts Unix in Hotmail’s Win2k switch. But concludes ‘we should eat our own dog food’ [The Register]

Kerberos bug bites. Authentication system in stack buffer overflow risk [The Register]

Interoperability is long-term goal – IM vendors. Don’t hold your breath [The Register]

Apple ‘It’ Girl Breaks Silence. Ellen Feiss talks to a college newspaper about her surprising fame after being featured in an Apple ad. Among the revelations: she was on drugs, the infamous advert was a lucky accident and Hollywood is keen to make her a star. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]