Reader Jonathan points us to a story that's also made the rounds on Boing Boing. Basically a blogger who apparently is somewhat well connected in the comic book/superhero world decided to get a bunch of artists he knew together to create comic character-based artwork to auction on eBay with the proceeds being sent to a children's charity who had helped out his own family at one point.

A bunch of folks have been submitting various news reports claiming the "news" that Cox is traffic shaping just like Comcast is -- but that's hardly news. We had a story about that last November.

The latest in a long line of patent lawsuits in every patent hoarders favorite district of East Texas involves the game controllers used by Nintendo. A company holds a patent on a 3D controller and sued Nintendo (and Microsoft) for supposedly violating the patent. Not surprisingly, the jury found in favor of the patent holder.

Last month, we pointed out that the market for stolen credit card data was so saturated that prices were falling. Of course, that just inspired scammers to go looking for other types of data that was a bit harder to find: VoIP accounts. According to the BBC, scammers selling VoIP account info are now able to get higher prices than those selling credit card data. Of course, it's not at all clear how widespread this really is.

I'm currently attending a workshop on "The Future of News" at Princeton's Center for IT Policy. One of the most interesting things about the conference is that it has proven to be a kind of "meeting of the minds" between the "old media" (the Wall Street Journal and the San Diego Union-Tribune are represented) and practitioners of Internet journalism. One of the frequent complaints we've heard from some of the newspaper folks is that they're losing business to aggregators like Google News.

Three years ago, reporter Tom Foremski tossed out his idea for how Microsoft could kill Google in an underhanded way: offer $100 million to whoever clicked on a random Google ad. The trick would be that no one (other than the person administering the prize at Microsoft) would know what the ad is. Foremski's theory was that this would lead to massive clickfraud and anger from Google advertisers.

Well, well, well. The RIAA is not having a particularly good week. In the Tanya Andersen case (where the RIAA sued an innocent person), the court has awarded Andersen $108,000 in legal fees from the RIAA. You may recall that the RIAA had protested having to pay legal fees, which the judge smacked down.

Last month we wrote about how New York was changing a law to try to force Amazon to collect and pay sales tax in New York by defining any affiliate in the state as being an Amazon point of presence. This is a clear perversion of the intention of the law that only requires collecting sales tax if the company has a physical presence in the state. While Amazon is now fighting this law in court, others are taking more drastic measures.

It's an ongoing theme around here, but ideas are everywhere. The real trick to making something great often has extremely little to do with the idea, and much more to do with the execution. That's where the real innovation occurs -- in taking an idea and trying to figure out how to make it useful. It's that process that's important, much more than the original idea.

While the Patent Troll Tracker remains darkened, the world at large is definitely missing out on some of the more useful information he provided on his blog, shedding all sorts of light on some of the sneakier practices of various patent hoarding companies, who were often shell companies to hide the real identity of who was behind the lawsuits. Without much information to fight back against these shell companies demanding millions and millions of dollars, various large tech companies seem to have seen an opportunity to team up to fight back.