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Tech: The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > In the Virtual Stacks, Pirated Books Find Eager Thumbs: “While the music industry’s effort to quash the trading of pirated songs over the Internet has attracted far more headlines, the unauthorized sharing of digitized books is proliferating in news groups, over peer-to-peer networks and in chat rooms.” And there goes my writing career…

Tech: The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Facing the World With Egos Exposed: “‘Some people set themselves up for failure by sending in photos that aren’t flattering,’ said Abraham Tesser, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia who studies human self-concept. ‘Then if they fail - if they get rated down - it was because of the photo, not because of who they really are.’ ”

Tech: The New York Times: Whose Data Is It, Anyway?: “While no case law exists in this area, several lawyers who are experts on estate planning and probate matters generally agreed that anything stored on a computer is considered ‘intangible’ property, meaning that like a stock certificate or a rare baseball card, it is probably worth more than the piece of tangible property it occupies, in this case, disk space on a computer. As a result, they say, the manuscript would not automatically become the property of the friend who received the computer. The manuscript itself would have had to have been bequeathed to the friend.

To avoid such a predicament, executors should go though the computer files of the deceased, print out important documents and then delete everything else, said Dennis I. Belcher, a lawyer with McGuireWoods, a firm in Richmond, Va. ‘In the end, the executor needs to make sure the computer is completely clean before giving it up.’ ”

Tech: Yahoo! News - REVIEW: Google’s E-Mail Service Flexible. A nice, balanced review without the doom-and-gloom privacy angle. Gmail has worked fine for me so far. And the “related links” are often hilariously inappropriate. Perhaps advertisers will pay for not appearing in Gmail.

Space: Yahoo! News - First private-sector space flight set for June 21: “The world’s first private-sector space flight is tentatively planned for June 21 from the United States, and aims to reach an altitude of 100 kilometers (60 miles), the flight’s promoter, Scaled Composites, said. ”