Okay, so I was wrong. No, not about Y2K. As you'll read later on, some of the most surprising people are beginning to agree with my level-headed view of that problem. Where I was wrong was in my declaration three weeks ago that even if Russians were trooping through web sites at the Pentagon as the FBI was claiming it really didn't matter. I saw this as whining on the part of a group of Federal intelligence and law enforcement officials trying to increase their own power. And it may have been all that, but it also turns out to be a lot more.

My error was in basing that column on logic and not paying enough attention to human nature. The syllogism I constructed was simple: Even if programmers from the Russian Academy of Sciences were attacking Pentagon web sites, those web sites were there specifically to be attacked. The rules at the Department of Defense say that only non-classified information can be held on servers available to the public, so the DoD must simply accept the Russian invasion as fair use. Federal officials complaining about the loss of "sensitive information" had no right to complain, it seemed to me. What the Russians were doing was no more or less than what spider programs at Excite or Google are doing every day to servers all over the world.

My mistake, if turns out, was in not looking further into those words "sensitive information," and in failing to remember how we tend to compromise our own systems for ease of administration.

This column is apparently read in higher places than I ever expected. As a result, some significant new information has dropped into my lap. Here is what I have learned since that first column appeared. While computer systems with classified information are not supposed to be connected to the public Internet, such systems WERE connected. Pentagon webmasters gave themselves administrative access to some classified machines through unclassified machines. It wasn't malicious, just stupid, but the result was that the clever folks at the Russian Academy of Sciences (apparently they were the culprits, after all) gained root level access to a number of servers. Soon they were messing where they shouldn't have been a-messing.

It's not exactly clear how much information was lost, but it could have been a lot given the fact that the "sensitive information" referred to by the FBI was a wealth of login passwords for several hundred thousand individual users at the Department of Defense. The FBI was apparently finnessing the language since passwords, which are by definition secret, aren't actually considered officially"secret." Sheesh!

Once the breach was noticed, they cut the links between the secret and non-secret machines and told a few hundred thousand people to change their passwords. End of problem ... they hope. This has to be a wakeup call, though, to any organization that has information it wants to keep to itself. There are probably such administrative worm holes in most systems composed of dozens or hundreds of servers and the right kind of spider program will find them all.

Well, this is the week when Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson presents his finding of facts in the Microsoft anti-trust case. It hits the fan on Friday, and apparently, officials of Microsoft and the Department of Justice have been in almost continuous negotiations trying to head off the whole thing. They are trying to come up with a consent decree that will be, in effect, an out of court settlement of case. Microsoft doesn't want to be damned by the judge, and the DoJ wants to use this to push a restructuring at the software giant. But I have to tell you, I just don't buy the idea that Bill Gates is going to agree to anything that fundamentally hurts his company. Expect no breakthrough unless it involves major government concessions.

The reason I don't expect an out of court settlement is because the DoJ won't accept a cosmetic consent decree (remember this whole case came about because Microsoft was accused of violating the last consent decree), and Microsoft won't accept any agreement that has real teeth. Both sides have been molding their cases for months on the assumption that Judge Penfield Jackson will rule against Redmond on Friday. Gates already expects to be dragged through the mud and just hopes to see it all reversed by the more conservative appeals court.

Remember this finding of fact is not the penalty phase of the case. That's still months away, if ever. And Microsoft has many legal weapons it can use to stall real change for years. As I have long said, the day Microsoft is broken in pieces will be the day when Bill Gates decides several little Microsofts are worth more than one big Microsoft. No matter what the judge says this week, the real power is still in Bill's hands.

Finally back to Y2K. Now that Rev. Jerry Falwell has revised his alarmist and highly profitable views on Y2K, I think we can expect similar shifts on the part of other Y2K zealots. Some folks have even hinted to me that Gary North, the original Y2K extremist, would be shifting shortly. While I see no indication of that yet, I do take some comfort in knowing that Dr. North has enough confidence in the idea that maybe — just maybe — the world information infrastructure will remain intact enough after January 1 to allow him to continue offering TWO YEAR subscriptions to his newsletter.

If anyone is going to make money from Y2K, I want it to be my favorite Marilyn Monroe imitator, Cybele, who has just released the last disco classic of the century, a little ditty called Y2Kymca.com. Download the MP3 and learn why gentlemen prefer blondes, especially blondes with accordions.