Dave Winer launched a new round of discussion over RSS and Atom this morning. So far his proposal to merge Atom and RSS seems to be getting some constructive conversation going without degenerating into the flame wars of the recent rounds of discussion.

In a recent case of deja vu, Slashdot today points to a Microsoft application for a patent on a Virtual desktop manager. It is quite simply amazing. It is also identical in so far as I can tell to the various X-Windows based systems I was using nearly a decade ago. Some have suggested that the use of a key to access the screens may be novel, if so what does that mean for Expose? I have a hard time buying the argument that using a key to access a desktop would be a non-obvious invention.

Cnet has an article about bluesnarfing. Several cell phones, especially Nokia hand sets are susceptible to an attack via a bluetooth hole. The hole makes certain handsets open to allowing someone to get in, copy the address book and phone numbers and leave no evidence of the attack behind.

According to the article Nokia is taking a head-in-sand approach to the problem. They are not planning to release an upgrade because of the "limited" number of handsets impacted. Instead they suggest that people turn off bluetooth all together when in public places or put the phone in invisible mode (though this does not prevent bluesnarfing).

Jeff Beard has some comments on the ongoing debate over RSS vs. Atom as means for providing/consuming syndicated news feeds on the web. He hits the nail on the head with this comment: "Many bloggers, while ahead of the curve, are not going to understand what a namespace is. Put it in terms and context of how it will affect them where they live, and get this out into the mainstream media channels."

This is a problem not only with the RSS vs. Atom debate, but with so much of technology. Technologists LOVE to come up with solutions.