ShadowRAM: April 24, 2006

Last week, Reporters Without Borders accused Yahoo of providing evidence to Chinese authorities that helped them convict and imprison a “cyberdissident” who wrote online, pro-democracy articles. Yahoo denied knowing about the case but has been accused twice before of helping China crack down on citizens who speak out against the government.

In the past, Reporters Without Borders has accused other companies, including Cisco, Google and even Microsoft, of helping China censor free expression or limit content accessible to Chinese population.

Late last week, rumors started bubbling to the surface that Scott McNealy would get the boot as Sun Microsystems’ CEO, with the company under pressure to make serious job cuts. Sun was set to announce its quarterly earnings on Monday, when more tea leaf reading will undoubtedly occur.

There are three certainties in life: Death, taxes and the New York Jets screwing up the NFL draft. (Think taking Ken O’Brien over Dan Marino.) So we’re not expecting the team to pick someone of the caliber of Texas Longhorns QB Vince Young, who threw and ran for a billion yards against USC earlier this year to win a national championship. But maybe Young is inclined toward Texas anyway: He recently stopped by system builder Agama Systems in Houston to visit with Agama CEO David Chang, who used to employ Young’s uncle.

An outdoor cocktail reception at SonicWall’s partner conference at the Wynn Las Vegas was moved indoors after high winds blew in a window on one of the hotel’s upper floors. “We figured it probably wouldn’t be a good idea for us to risk showering 400 of our top partners with chards of glass,” said John DiLullo, SonicWall’s global sales VP, in his Tuesday keynote.

The father of Java, James Gosling, long ago began boring us with his schtick of tossing T-shirts into audiences at conferences. But Gosling gets mad props for hiring special-effects house M5 Industries, responsible for the Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters” program, to provide entertainment at the JavaOne Conference next month. Gosling wrote in his blog: “The tragedy is that most of the cool things [M5 does] for their show could never be done in a crowded room without doing some serious harm to the audience. The fire marshall gets pretty cranky about that sort of thing.”

Anything to break the tedious T-shirt tossing.