ShadowRAM

Either it was a stupid PR stunt or the largest gathering of weenie hackers ever.

WebSec2000, an Internet security conference held in San Francisco, attracted a band of eight young protesters claiming to be hackers rallying against Biodata's new firewall, Sphinx. They marched in front of the conference hotel, holding signs that read, "Power to the Hackers, Down with Sphinx," and "Hacking 4ever, Sphinx Never." They also handed out flyers describing Sphinx as "a catastrophe for the hacker."

Sniff, sniff. Yep, smells like a lame stunt.

Representatives from Biodata's office in Berkeley, Calif., said the protest took them by surprise and they knew nothing about it. Biodata's headquarters in Germany didn't answer our e-mails.

Nice work if you can get it.

I'm talking about the job of being a former CEO. And financially, it doesn't seem to make any difference if you choose to walk or you get the boot.

Current VP candidate and former Halliburton CEO Richard Cheney will walk away from the company with stock options of 1.16 million shares, and Halliburton says it will incur $8.5 million in expenses related to Cheney's severance package during its fiscal third quarter. But at least Cheney left the company intact.

The same can't be said for Rick Thoman, former Xerox CEO. During his one-year tenure, Thoman fumbled a reorganization, failed to turn the company around and watched its stock price fall off a cliff. But, hey, no matter. Even those gaffes didn't stop the company from paying Thoman, who was forced out in May, $13 million last month. He'll also receive $375,000 in July 2001 and an $800,000-a-year retirement benefit for the rest of his life. Top that off with Thoman's ability to retain options to buy 2.2 million Xerox shares.

By the way, when Thoman's old boss at IBM, Lou Gerstner, becomes a former CEO, he's entitled to free use of the company jet and many of the same perks he gets now, in addition to a few years of "consulting" fees built right into his retirement package.

With payments like these from old-economy companies, how can anyone possibly quibble with riches showered on Internet millionaires? At least there's some risk involved in the money they make.

For years, Entex Information Services CEO John McKenna worked diligently in hopes of taking the company public. But McKenna, who held a 76 percent stake in Entex, decided to sell out to Siemens in March. The deal is worth about $105 million.

The net for Entex employees? About 75 cents per share, according to a letter they received this week.

One lucky shareholder tells us, "At least our shares are worth more than the shares of Inacom."

Speaking of Inacom, that name has been on the mouths of some employees at IBM Global Services, who have been stuck with several large PC rollouts that were left when Inacom went belly-up. IBM Global Services is quickly learning that project rollout logistics are actually (gasp!) pretty sophisticated.

Linus Torvalds isn't one of the top-paid executives at chip company Transmeta (according to its recently filed IPO papers), but he still gets a key place in its prospectus.

"We have recruited a talented engineering staff," so says the Transmeta prospectus. "For example, we employ Linus Torvalds, the originator of the Linux operating system, to work on a variety of software projects within the Crusoe solution."

Interesting, too, is Transmeta's dependence on IBM, which makes and tests all Crusoe chips. Transmeta says if IBM ever backs out, it could "significantly harm our business."

Torvalds might want to make sure all the new Linux code gets over to IBM with as few bugs as possible.

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