Wednesday's Wingding

Rally round the news, boys. Jacques Garnerin makes the first parachute jump from a balloon in 1797. That's brave. Ferdinand Porsche conceived the Volkswagen on this day in 1934. Hitler called it the "strength through joy" car. Not exactly Fährfugnugen. The first commercial air service from Hawaii to the mainland was inaugurated on this day in 1936, to my knowledge no one jumped out.

1. Ballmer tells ITXpo that Windows is more secure than Linux. "In the first 150 days after the release of Windows 2000, there were 17 critical vulnerabilities. For Windows Server 2003 there were four. For Red Hat 6, they were five to ten times higher."
2. A Maryland middle school boy is rousted by the FBI for email questions to the Maryland Transportation Authority about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. "In today's environment," says Baltimore FBI spokesman Barry Maddox, "we take all leads very seriously. We had to make sure this was a legitimate school project. The kinds of questions he was asking about the bridge, we have to have a sense of caution."
3. End of line. Apple sneaks the G4 into the iBook, eliminating the G3 from its entire line.
4. According to Slashdot, AT&T corporate is planning to block all incoming email unless you're on their whitelist. This must be the most extreme response to spam problems ever attempted by a corporation.
5. California cell phone activists filed two law suits yesterday. The first accuses Nextel of dropping itemized billing then sending all California customers four text messages at 15¢ a pop. "They're nickeling and diming consumers out of what could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in overcharges and they're making it impossible for people to discover they've been ripped off," said Harvey Rosenfield, president of The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. The group also filed suit against Cingular for providing inadequate service for new customers.
6. Amazon made money last quarter! Its first non-holiday quarter profit.