Some companies / websites I had good experiences with.

Some companies / websites I oder others had bad experiences with are also mentioned with a ~~strike-through~~.

Internet

Security / Privacy

Verbraucherschutz im Internet (in German): High-level introduction
Electronic Frontier Foundation: Tries to protect fundamental civil liberties in the area of computers and the Internet. E.g. The Blue Ribbon Campaign for Online Free Speech or The Privacy Now! Campaign for Private Communications Online.

Best Viewed With Any Browser: Campaign to keep the web open for all browsers, not just the big two

Knipp: Allows you to register .com, .org, .net (via CORE) and .de domains. Good, helpful, personal customer support.
Gandi: Official com/org/net registrar. Cheap and has fair legal terms.
EasyDNS: Allows you to register domains (via Tucows) and offers advanced DNS services.
~~Network Solutions~~: Practically no responses to customers. They use whatever strange reason they can find to disallow you to leave them. Expensive.
If you are registered with them, switch now. Do not wait until near the end of the registration period, or they will use that as reason to deny the switch. Some of the other registrars accept your remaining NetSol registration period, so you do not lose money by switching now.

Google: Search engine yielding very well-ranked, unbiased (unpaid) results. No-crap website.
dmoz: Directory (Yahoo!-like yellow pages) managed by volunteers, owned by Netscape.
Also try Google's ranked version.

Yahoo!: While the yellow pages (their original business) are useless by now, Yahoo! has many other useful services, like a Reuters newsfeed, maps and a currency calculator.
Web.de (German): They offer e.g. freemail with POP or IMAP (both optionally over SSL) access.
~~Hotmail~~: Should be obvious: Owned by the evil empire. Do not trust Microsoft with data as private as emails and contacts.

MP3.com: Vast collection of music (which you usually can't get in stores), well-sorted after genre.
After the mandatory registration, standard m3u playlists and 128k mp3s. Hint: try wget -nh -nc -i yourplaylist.m3u *g*. If you do that, please pay them for their bandwidth (but I don't know, what they do with our data).
Unfortunately, MP3.com is now owned by Vivendi Universal, one of the big, evil labels. So, it's only a matter of time until they go south :-(.
Fairtunes: Allows you to compensate arbitary artists.
If you like an artist's music, send him/her/them a few dollars. Here, much more money will end up at the artist than by buying a CD.
The Fairtunes guys do the payment work practically for free.

IGN PC: Clued PC game reviews.
~~Gamespot~~: Useless reviews. Crappy website with way too large fonts.
Almost the same applies to all of ZDNet.com and CNET, BTW.

C++ Reference Draft: 1997 C++ Public Review Document
Introduction to CORBA: CORBA 2.0 spec in HTML format. Newer versions available only as PostScript or PDF.
CORBAServices (San Diego State University): Short overview over CORBAServices