Tuesday's Traumatizer

Smile! It's news time. The first recorded use of OK occurred on this day in 1839 in the Boston Morning Post. Believe it or not it stands for "all correct." The Wright Brothers patented the airplane in 1903. The Dixie Cup was invented in 1913. The first telephone in the White House was installed in 1929.

1. A Florida man is pushing for a new domain extension to add to dot-com and dot-net: dot-triple-x. The .XXX top level domain name (TLD) would be for adult sites where anything goes (except child porn). Creating such a domain would, he says, make it easer to avoid adult sites. The .XXX domain has been suggested, and rejected, before on the grounds that it would create an Internet red light district. Other new TLDs that might have a better chance of making it: .mobi and/or .tel for mobile phones, .mail for legitimate mail servers, and .cat for Cat Schwartz fan sites. All the newly proposed sites are sponsored - companies proposing the domains paid $45,000 apiece to get the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to consider them. ICANN will take comments from the public, then study the names internally before deciding by the end of the year.
2. Real Networks is dropping its three-year $20 million deal with Major League Baseball. Real says it's hard to make a profit re-selling baseball broadcasts. MLB is moving to MSN Premium, Microsoft's $9.95/month premium service. AOL is expected to also offer streaming baseball broadcasts for free to AOL for Broadband customers.
3. The New Zealand government is poised to protect CD ripping and other audio format shifting. Sony New Zealand says that's "taking away people's rights to earn a living, and that's horrendous."
4. The RIAA's web site has been down since late last week thanks to attacks generated by the MyDoom virus. Strange. I didn't notice. Microsoft.com, another target of the worm, has so far avoided being DDoSed to death.
5. One in three hairdressers loves their job, but only one in seven IT specialists feels the same. IT workers rank 9th on the British City and Guilds Happiness Index. Meanwhile media professionals rank 19th in job satisfaction, only one step from the bottom: real estate agents.
6. Do you have to show ID when police ask for it? The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the case of a Nevada cattle rancher who refused police requests for ID and was subsequently arrested.
7. DotComGuy® is selling his trademark. Mitch Maddox, who achieved 15 minutes of fame four years ago by staying inside his house for a year and only using the net to interact with the outside world, is married and his wife wants him to drop the moniker. Want it? Place a bid at dotcomguy.com.