The Geeks Blog

The Gartner Group, a highly influencial consultancy and analysis group, has given an unusually blunt recommendation(PDF or HTML) and told all their users to immediatly stop using Microsoft's bug filled IIS server or at the very least look into other options with the intent on switching. They also recommended users not move to aything in .NET as it relates to IIS until the code is completely rewritten, which is not planned, but may be after such a strong statement from such an influential advisor. This does not bode well for the Redmond giant in the dawn of their .NET revolution. I have recommended this myself, but this statement by Gartner will have one hell of a lot of clout in the IT industry, and this is a much more blunt statement than the company is known for.

The Register reports that in light of their report yesterday of a call by the Gartner Group for corporate and small business customers of the IIS software to drop it in light of the many security holes and bad code, Microsoft sent a letter to all sales staff announcing that they are immediately beginning a rewrite of the IIS code for the 6.0 release. This wil delay the launch of the server software, possibly pushing it beyond the end of next year. As well, the Redmond, Wash giant is releasing upgrades to their lockdown software in an attempt to lower the possible number of bugs in the software. All in all, not a good sign for the Beast.

TechTV reports that Exodus Filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy today. The web hosting company blames many differnet factors, including the large scale tech slowdown to blame for their bankruptcy, and one large mitigating factor was that a huge percentage of their clients were dot com's that went under in the crash.

The Register reports that Intel is suing VIA on three more fronts now in the battle over the chipset/CPU war goign on. Intel sued VIA for copyright and patent infringment, then VIA sued the chip giant. Now Intel has sued BIA and a variety fo their partners in Hnk Kong, Germany and the UK.

A lot of news from the Virus Bulletin Conference in Prague to mention today. A new grassroots group, Avien, made up of a variety of firms that have a combination of 3 million PC's is calling for changes in the way virus alerts are released, and a stop of the cross vendor squabbling. The group, which was represented by IT admins from Boeing, Ford and K PMG during a keynote presentation at Virus Bulletin yesterday, feels that much trouble, and hassle, could be saved by using their early warning system instead of the current thought line, which means that the virus alerts are not released until the AV program from the alerting body can fix it. This is not practical nor is it a worthwhile policy when it comes to infection prevention. This will be another group to watch closely.

Microsoft says that a distribution of security patches with Anti Virus updates is the greatest idea since flying pigs, err, I mean sliced bread, though many AV makers think this is a bad plan. They say that the time for patches is as soon as they are released, not when a virus comes out to exploit the bug. I can't help but agree wholeheartedly with them on this matter, though there are ways to get it done. The best plan, to make this work, is to have the patches released using the AV's as soon as they are released. The point was made that even if this worked perfectly, to have the patches installed when they are released, it would still require that the security patched actually work properly.

Pulsing Zombies is something I am not going to get into, I will simply leave it to you to read up on it. It seems to show that virus writers are getting more and more creative in how they write these things and ways to spread them. Nimda and Code Red have both woken us up to only some of these new ways, and these so called pulsing zombies are yet another way. It will get much worse, and I am not sure it will ever get better. <sigh> there goes the 'I will not comment on this' line of thought. Sorta like Craig pointing out that Doc and Dave say their posting will be light and then proceed to post like mad blogger's.

Today has got to be the slowest tech news day ever. The Register has not even one new story, and Wired has only three stories, all of them not worth mentioning. Tech TV also has very little in the line of news, only recaps of the last few days. I think this points out perfectly what I was saying to Mat the other day, that I feel like a guy only rehashing outher people's news. Oh well, have a good night, and if anything worth mentioning comes up I will be sure to post. Night.

The Register has a huge fact filled article to open the week. This goes in range from the ATA, to ICANN 'volunteering' to help out in this time of crisis. One hell of an opening to the week, and well worth spending the time to read. Excellent points, and just the right dash of cynicism only available to a foreign publication like The Register.

Will It Be Cash, Check or Finger? is a very interesting article on different ways we may be able to pay for stuff in the future, which goes well with the new Comments, Statements and Arguments addition which will be uploaded when I get home. [Ed. Comments, Statements and Arguments: Making money online still does not work, yet]

Nimda worms its way to top of September virus chart while SirCam slipped out of top spot. The person who made Nimda should be happy as a clam that his progeny was able to reak such havok upon the web servers of the world. Hopefully this will be the last we will hear of this god damned virus. Ha! I could only wish.

The free Web's over as W3C has moronicly allowed patented format's like the controversial GIF format, to become international standards, thus allowign corporations to put a net tax on the use of their standards. Kiss the net goodbye, for it is now dead.

After losing several major partners, AMD is now pissing off the smaller system builders with their higher priced Palomino core CPU's, that have little or no performance boost over their non Palomino core cousins. This is not the kind of thing that AMD needs in a time when they are walking on thin enough ice as it is.

Easy Installations Kill say the experts at both SANS (System Administration, Networking, and Security) Institute and the FBI-led National Infrastructure Protection Center. According the joint report just put out today by the two organizations, the default install is the top security threat, not malicious and skilled hackers nor well written viruses. The report clarifies something I said awhile back, in that Microsoft and many other software makers try too hard for user friendly, and not enough on security, thus making their software hacker friendly too. This is not something found in Open source software, as the code is picked apart by hundreds of hackers to make sure it is good.

Novell Files Suit Against MS and other stories. Salon sets user fee. Cisco announces three new products. Amazon on track to reach it's profit goals(though I wonder how much of that is taken from 09.11 funds). Xerox to sell half it's office equipement manufaturing operations. More.

Just one day after AMD released their 1.1 GHz Duron CPU, Intel released their 1.2 Ghz Celeron. This has got to be a major marketign move to stop the competing chip maker below them, not beside or ahead of them in processor speeds. The new chip will sell for $103. No word on the pricing for the Duron.

In the aforementioned article about Novell suing Microsoft from Wired, it was mentioned that Novell is suing over a new ad campaign which questions the longevity of Novell's software, but The Register points out that Microsoft is taking the idea one step further then the have recently, with expiring the certifications yearly when they release a new OS, to the rental software they are working with now. Not to mention that the day the suit was filed was the day MS officially stops supporting the NT™ name, moving into the current century. They will not support it, they will not license it, they will not upgrade to it, so you're stuck with 2000, which itself is rumored to be close to expiration shortly, within a year of the XP release I am told. Windows 9x/ME will also be shut down within a short time after XP, even shorter then the network version. Forced upgrades is my thinking.

On the virus front, two stories, one good news and one disturbing news, on this front of computing. The Register has an article on the great profits of Sophos, the UK based AV company, which announced increased profits and even the addition of 160 jobs, all this in a time when competitors are anouncing layoffs(F-Secure) and lowered profits or even losses. Sophos attributes that slowdown in AV to the decentralized nature of both McAfee and Symantec, which do not purely specialize in AV anymore, branching out to remote administration, diskcopying, and other software services.

In other news, Sircam is seen as the top virus being spread by email, even surpassing Magistr.a and Nimda, whose maintransmission method appears to be the server based attack. MessageLabs, a managed service provider that scans its users email for viruses, blocked 143,949 emails containing SirCam, originating from 18,700 different email addresses, which I must agree with the writer at The Register, should be suspended until they are able to recieve the clue that they should CLEAN THEIR SYSTEMS.

IBM is at risk of losing it's cooperation with the Linux community due to it being the initiator of the recent patent vote at W3C, while HP states that web standards should be royalty free. I can't help but wonder if IBM has not been looking for a way to simply lower it's own costs in all of this, instead of truly supporting the Linux community and the idea of open strandards and source. This is dissappointing information from big blue, whom I had high hopes of turning the computing world towards free and great instead of costly and ransomed. The one thing Linux developers are now forced to consider is whether or not the billion dollar's in R&D support are worth working for such a closed company.

I seem to have some heady competition in the search for AOL CD's for my wall, though the competition, 24/7 Freecall from the UK and nomoreaolcds.com, have more impressive golas and uses for them. Nomoreaolcds.com is planning on dumping them on the ISP's front lawn and claim unneeded pollution, and 24/7 wants into the record books, somehow.

The other day, Imation sued Quantum for antitrust in regards to the storage media for Quantum's DL Tape drives. Today Quantum sued Imation in return for "extreme and pervasive" misappropriation of trade secrets, deceptive and misleading advertising, and unfair business practises. The soap opera goes on.

The GNOME Project released Gnome 2.0 to very little care by the world. This is the wannabe competitor to KDE, which has been out longer, is much more advanced, and sure doesn't take long to update, mind you they(The KDE team), to my knowledge, have never rewritten the whole code before.

Even with all the bad news lately, The Register seems to be having a hard time understanding why AMD is using it's newest naming scheme, instead of simply telling users what the clock speeds are. This after they have been reporting of the chipmakers eventual and rapidly impending demise. Intel has faster CPU's. AMD has better CPU's for less money then either the comparable in speed or performance counterpart. This is a world, and marketing scheme, based in the ful knowledge that people buy(even myself) by the hertz.

Meanwhile the pricing for the new Athlon XP(god I hate those two letters together) is beign leaked all over the globe, ranging from $115 for the OEM 1500+ all the way up to $155 for the boxed version. The pricing, to me, seems a little high, as those will translate to close to $200+ here.

The RIAA and it's many supporters are holding secret meeting to find ways to keep us from using our own purchases. The memebrs of bleed em dry ass, and other people like the CEO's of corp's like IBM, Intel, Disney and even US senators Fritz Hollings and Ted Stevens, the proud fathers of the SSSCA(AKA Ass kissers of the RIAA), met in Washington to discuss ways to stop us from having fair use of our CD's, Hard Drives, including a revamping and resubmittal of the Copyright Protection for Removable Media (CPRM).

I hate to agree with Bob, but I really cannot stress enough that you should stop supporting these companies. I know it is not going ot make life easy, but you wil not be hurting the artists, programmers and actors in the least, they already got all they will be getting. It should be mentioned that IBM was a part of this as well, which means that they are certainly turning down an anti consumer rights road that takes them away from their open source compatriots.

It seems Sun is lowering the prices of the iPlanet web server software to around $1,000 a CPU. This is in response to the Gartner group call for enterprises and people to drop IIS for other vendors. I should add that Apache is lower then both, as it is FREE, and it is very easy to set up.<g>

From CNN and Wired, The United States Supreme Court said Tuesday it will not consider Microsoft's request that it overturn a lower court's ruling that found the software maker guilty of violating U.S. antitrust laws. The Redmond giant has now lost it's best and only chance to overturn it's conviction on breach of US Anti Trust law. Look for MS to now begin to really bargain in wholehearted conviction with the Justice dept. as they now have no chance to overturn the conviction.

Bob is having problems with the Duron machine he uses.I am not a hardware expert, and thus cannot comment on the reasoning he uses, but since the Duron's are the equivalent of the Celeron, which is a known buggy and unreliable processor line, so thus I would not trust them anyway. Surely, beyond all that, one cannot use this as reason to blame and dismiss the entire company as a viable processor manufacturer. I know many people who happily run AMD Atholon's and Thunderbird's without problem. Many people take the word of Bob Thompson as the word of gospel and it is irresponsible for him to continously talk down about AMD as a company, or their products. He claims to have given them a chance, but has done nothing but talk down about them.

The Register reports a not so surprising Canadian story. Apparently Future Shop has a great sales scheme working. They are charging you $20 for a check to see if you can run the $150 Windows XP Home Edition, and if not they will direct you to the parts section to get it ready to run this. They charge you $20 to charge you $150. A truly Canadian Idea that is for sure, though the scam will surely spread as the Microsoft frenzy to prep people for XP, as if they somehow have hidden the fact that XP is on it's way, which is beginning with the $200 Million media blitz beginning Monday. Joy. As if the guy at his desk speeding across the desert is not bad enough!

Hi,

The URL you suggested

http://www.geeksworld.net

has been added to Yahoo!. It will appear after our next update, probably within the next 2-4 days. You can find your site at that time by looking through the "What's New" listings (http://www.yahoo.com/new/) or by searching on its title or URL.

It has come to our attention that various organizations have been sending unsolicited messages to new sites that appear in our listings. We're sorry if you're inconvenienced by messages of this kind; Yahoo! does not condone these messages in any way, nor do we divulge to anyone contact information for the sites we list.

Thank you for taking the time to suggest your site. We rely on our users to make Yahoo! complete and comprehensive. In order to keep Yahoo! accurate, please also let us know of any future changes that might affect your listing.

If you haven't already done so, and you'd like to return the favor and put Yahoo! on your own site, please see http://www.yahoo.com/docs/yahootogo/ for detailed instructions.

Thanks again,

The Yahoo! Team

Many blog's/daynote's have commended MSNBC for launching an Arabic language version of their site. First off, this is a bad move for many reasons, second, it is transparent as glass. Those that have access to the internet are not the people we need to reach as they have little or no effect on what happens in Afghanistan, and it will be seen as a pathetic marketing scheme by one of the 'American dogs'. I very much hope that they have no intention to report on current activities both inside the US and in the middle east as it is not too surprising to know that the Taliban and Al Queda have access to the internet, and they wouldn't even need to know English.

Meanwhile, the US now has active ground troops working at low level(helicopter launching from the USS Kitty Hawk) and on the ground(special forces with the Northern Alliance) and the activities led to the loss of two specials forces search and rescue personnel waiting in Pakistan for any need of assistance in Afghanistan by pilots and troops that were on the offensive. The info on these attacks are very limited, though it is hoped we will have more tomorrow on it from CNN or another news site./channel when the Pentagon gives more info, presumably in a press conference. This will most certainly lead to many US citizens getting very mad at the idea of the risking of further American lives to these terrorists.

Baltimore Ravens' coach Brian Billick has made a fool of himself by "blaming the Linux operating system", for his team's loss on October 14, in which Baltimore went down 31-23 at the Green Bay Packers. This, I must say, is hilarious, and, frankly, ridiculous. Anyone with more info on this, please let me know.

Legendary hacker Kevin Mitnick is playing a spook this Sunday on Alias, which is an episode I will certainly have to catch. The show is, well, interesting, though I may have been more apt to tune in more regularly if not for the, well, incredibly bad timing(it is on the same time as Enterprise) and only plays on one channel on the Shaw network, which is CKY on Sunday nights, which I usually spend at the parents till Enterprise.

"Don't tell the world how we screwed up!" is the message coming out of Redmond, as the world's largest(and worst) software company takes back a patch it released that has caused many problems for most of the people who have installed it. This is reminiscent of the patch for a patch series back a short time ago, whereas a patch for a dangerous bug caused more exploits to come available and the patch for that did the same. This went on for several patched until the Redmond giant got it right.

What Microsoft is complaining about is that security companies are releasing how to's for exploiting the bugs in the Windows and other Microsoft software programs, in order to ensure that the software vendor affected releases a fix very soon. I am not one for pointing out a step by step of how to hack a vulnerable machine, but until the software vendors do a better job of making their code tighter, this is something we have to do to make sure they are not lazy in the patching.

I just saw an ad for Future Shop, telling you to come in tomorrow and buy Windows XP, and if you do you'll also get a free stick of 128 MB RAM, and a virus scan program free. This highlights perfectly why not to upgrade to XP, as both of these and more re required to make it work. First off the VirusScan is needed to prevent you from getting one of the many viruses written for Windows in general and the many that will be written in the days to come for XP when it's many faults are revealed. More on Windows and viruses in a moment. Second the RAM. The box on XP says you need 128 MB RAM, but as Windows 98SE will not even run decent on 192, I recommend 256 as a bare minimum, and 512 as very reasonable for web surfing and email. Running anything larger or more intensive will require close to a GB of RAM, which is what most of the manufacturers who are shipping XP preinstalled are including.

CNN reports that machines will be in place in 5 weeks to eradiate mail. Kiss your credit cards good bye. Kiss your bank cards good bye. Kiss anything that is vulnerable to radiation goodbye. This is too much, and it will be too late. One person died weeks ago. The government officials said 'we have learned from this, we can prevent this' Two more people died over the weekend. 'We will put the measures in place to prevent this again' is what they say now. These terrorists are like hackers. The officials put in place measure s to prevent it, like anti virus makers and security professionals put measures in place to prevent attacks and viruses, and the attackers will continue to find new ways to perform these attacks.

You have to stop the terrorists by catching them and jailing them, not find ways to prevent one form of attack. This is very much a temporary solution to a all too permanent problem. How many more will die in the time between now and the implementation of these technologies? How long will it take the mad mailer to use a biological agent that is not detectable or neutralized by radiation? I suspect that the answer to both will be sooner to arrive then anyone wants to imagine, and have no fear, it will be deadly.

The US government today is debating the stimulus package. One proposal is to support the big Corp's in the hope they 'might use it to hold onto employees' that there is 'a possibility there will be some jobs created'. Might? Possibility? Maybe I am missing the reason behind this which is to be sure it will support the citizens of America. If there are no strings on this to ensure they create jobs, it should not be given. 1.4 Billion to IBM without the requirement they reinvest it in jobs? There are no controls in place to make sure this money is used for the purpose it is being given for. 'You might as well just write checks and give it to the big corporations and that is what they have just done by having no strings attached" said Paul Kugman, a guest on CNN.

It is disgusting to think that there is not a central organization in place to funnel the money from the many places collecting the money and send it to those who need it. Close to a billion dollars have been raised "in support of the victims of 09.11", but only around $100 Million has been disbursed, and most of the money will go to stuff meant for prevention not to people who have been affected. I know I gave money to the Red Cross to directly support 09.11. I do not know anyone who did not give this money in the belief and understanding that this would go right to the victims and their families. I guess you need to read closer even when you give for something like this. If you want to donate, I recommend the September 11th fund, which has pledged that every penny raised will go to the families of the victims in the tragedy.

Back to the topic of Microsoft, they are saying that computer viruses are forms of terrorism, and the writers of such should be treated as such. This comes on the heels of the passing of the USA act, and the Redmond giant taking on security firms like Security Focus who they say are irresponsible for releasing info on vulnerabilities before there is a patch, which is the policy of Microsoft. Sadly, they fail to point out that the vulnerabilities are generally well known among the black hat community, thus leaving the users at the disadvantage in the up to 2 months between the discovery of the vulnerability and the release of a patch if the software maker does not announce it. In this case 'That which doesn't crash me only makes me stronger' does not count.

Bloody Blogger. not only do I not know if all of my posts since noonish have gone through(they have not been uploaded to the server) but the web site has not been updated since around noon to show newly updated pages. Grrrr. Wow, I have posted a lot today, and most of it is relative commentary on good topics. Ok, so who possessed me???<g> I will give it 'til 8 and try again. On the topic of Blogger, is there a way to post via email? Does it require that you post from a specific email address? The reason is that I was hoping to have the form on the User's Blog post right to Blogger, instead of going through me.

Snow? Yes, it seems to be getting ever more likely as I watch more of the news tonight. It is snowing in the Whiteshell national park, and in parts of the city here. In Grand Forks they got 22 centimeters of snow, which is a record for an October day. Umm, John? You should have snow by the morning, sorry. It just couldn't wait until the weekend with such a blatant invitation. You, as a Minnesota lifer, should know better then to mention the s word publicly, just as I, a Manitoba lifer know better. Shame on you.

From The Register, "Paul Stamatis, a trafficker in counterfeit Microsoft software over the Internet, was sentenced Thursday to two years in jail, and was ordered to pay $500,000 in restitution to Microsoft" and from TechTV. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Billy want a bottle?

Cisco today unveiled 12 new hardware and software products. On the software side, San Jose, California-based Cisco's new products include Cisco CallManager 3.2, Cisco Emergency Responder, Media Gateway Control Protocol, and the Cisco IP Contact Center bundle. New hardware products include the Cisco VG 248 voice analog gateway, which lets customers still use their traditional analog phones, faxes, and other public branch exchange, or PBX, equipment until they install all digital, all Internet Protocol equipment. (TechTV)

MS-DOS R.I.P. "MS-DOS passed away Thursday, October 25, 2001, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Times Square in New York City."

Courtesy of The Register "Hewlett-Packard today suffered a major embarrassment when the offspring of founder William Hewlett announced their intention to vote against the proposed takeover of Compaq. HP shares leapt 19 per cent on the news. The Hewlett family account for approx. five per cent of Hewlett-Packard's share capital, directly or through trusts. But unlike, say the Ford family, which effectively controls the eponymous car company with just six per cent of stock, the Hewletts do not have a say in how their company is run." This makes me feel good about the fact that at least someone finds the merger to be a waste of assets. It is simply HP eliminating one of their competitors at too high a price, which obviously leads the Hewlett's to question why the hell it is going down.

David Sims of O'Reilly is right for wondering what will be the result of Xerox winning a lawsuit against Palm for it's graffiti technology. His point is that everything great we use in technology these days, from the mouse to the GUI, are Xerox PARC's wasted R&D inventions. So, if Xerox has gone after Palm, how long will it be until they go after Apple(since they admit they had it first), Microsoft and other makers of products that steal from Xerox's wasted R&D? My thinking on this is that since Xerox wasn't doing anything with them, well then it is open for anyone who wants it.

Now Palm is up, who everyone knew was going to be at MacWorld, but many thought they were there as a new subsidiary of Apple, and announcing a new Apple PDA. Instead they are showing how to connect a Palm PDA to OS X. I don't think that is very big, as I thought it was already possible, but maybe I am wrong.

Mike Evangelist. A Marketer. How ironic. He is showing a program for editing video called Final Cut Pro. He shows it is quite easy, but reminds me more and more about the fact that an expert showing it done is very different from doing it yourself. Cool, it works on Mac, Windows and presumably Linux as speakers said you can take it to any platform.

TechTV is reminding us all way too often that they are TiVo'ing the speech back in the studio so we don't miss anything while they cut to the obligatory commercials. Say it once, not a dozen times. I caught it the first time, and I will continue to watch it as long as they show it, though I admit I would prefer live commercial free broadcast, since they claim to have a sponsor. Their talking head, Chris Breen, editor of MacWorld, says the major stuff is the major apps they are releasing. 'A lot of people have been waiting for apps because they have had so little under Mac OS X'.

Well, the only major tech news of the day is the new worm, W32.Myparty@mm and at least one variant. Here's what Symantec has to say:

W32.Myparty@mm is a mass-mailing email worm. It has the following characteristics:

Subject: new photos from my party!
Message:
Hello!

My party... It was absolutely amazing!
I have attached my web page with new photos!
If you can please make color prints of my photos. Thanks!

Attachment: www.myparty.yahoo.com[Ed. The URL in email is NOT a link, it is the file name]

The worm sends email to all contacts in your Windows address book, and to email addresses that if finds in the Outlook Express Inboxes and folders.

In addition, the worm sends a message to the author so that the author can track the worm.

On NT/2000/XP systems, the worm drops a backdoor Trojan that allows a hacker to control your system. NAV will detect this as Backdoor.Myparty.

Finally, the file name of the worm is Access., it may launch your Web browser to http:/ /www.disney.com.

Also Known As: W32/Myparty@MM, WORM_MYPARTY.A, W32/MyParty-A, Win32.MyParty, I-Worm.Myparty

No word yet on how bad this has been so far, but as it is very much a social engineering exploit, I suspect it will be well distributed.

Brent has posted the days worth of code improvements for Blahg, and updated the version to 1.1. I must say(again) that Brent did some excellent work, in a very short time with more questions then help from the many people in chat. He had the hands on help of Tim Aiello this afternoon, and has made a great improvement in the software in only a day. I hope he is able to take a break after being outted by Doc, because if the software improves by a .1 every day, it will not be long before we are dealing with an out of control version. I swear, I will have to send him a check for a little(and I do mean little) amount of money for his efforts. As I told Brent, this app is the kind of thing I would have loved to create, but I have neither the knowledge or creativity. Sad, isn't it?

I read on Wired that Sen. Leahy has said that he will kill the CBDTPA just like he did the SSSCA that Hollings brought in. I wish he could kill it forever, and toss out those who brought it and similar bills in, but I figure I'll let the Americans who brought him to Washington throw him out. I hope that we will see the EFF and other consumer's digital right's organizations make their presence known in those places and remind those voters exactly what they did while in office. I hope to god that whenever Sen. Hollings, Rep. Adam ASchiff of California and the rest of the RIAA ass kissing bunch of them come up for election that the voters show them just what this hefty RIAA contributions did to help their reelections. Then again, I think it is unlikely the biggest payoff will be after they are out of office, not while they are in.

It looks like the guru popular Linux Distro, Gentoo Linux has been released in version 1.0. this just a day after KDE 3.0 was released. this looks like March will be a good ending for the Linux community, with a new version of Mandrake and so on, but I hope that April can begin even better and keep the momentum throughout the month. Now, I have to figure out what to do for April Fool's day, since it is without a doubt going to be an interesting day on the internet, a place that some people still call the world's biggest practical joke.

AFD has always, since my first one after going online, been a really interesting day for surfing. you see all kinds of practical jokes, and any veteran of the net knows you always have to be careful what you read online, because nothing can be fully trusted. I mean I could sit here and say that I have decided to eliminate Linux and Open Source from my life and apply for a job with Microsoft. Now I would hope you would all be very skeptical of it but in my current situation I would not put even that past me. I really need work, so I would say that there is little I would not do, even admin*gasp* NT and Windows networks.

So, Bob announces that his new book, PC Hardware in a Nutshell is up for pre order on Amazon. I recommend ordering it, as I have had the pleasure of reading the first couple of chapters and it is a great book. It looks like it'll be printed and up for sale in about a month, I guess.[correction, according to the Amazon page linked to above it is available in June]

I mentioned in the hack the other day about the new MS/Unisys site that is strongly anti-Unix. called wehavethewayout.com. Netcraft showed that the site was hosted on a FreeBSD(version of Unix) and the Apache web server. Well, shortly thereafter Microsoft switched the web server to Windows and Internet Information Server. It now appears that, shockingly, IIS on that server has crashed, completely, and the site is dead.

Not to be rude, Bill, but 'Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so, Told ya so,'. Thank you for your time.

The Register reported yesterday that Bill Gates, co-founder of the world's biggest software vendor was tricked and conned by as couple of Canadians. According to the Globe and Mail report the story is based on, they spent a month working through the red tape, pretending to be Jean Chrétien, and when they finally got through they got around to the Canadian PM having a problem with Windows and asking who the hell created it. It must have been one hell of a trick, because it seems that until the end of the call Gates had no idea it was a prank. I guess Bill is even more gullible then to think his software is good enough to withstand the force of a bunch of angry Unix geeks.

Tech Live just did a piece on Hub IM, a more secure intranet IM program. I have long been a proponent of IM in the office, as it is good for idea sharing and especially good for tech support. A Program like ICQ(last I used it) was excellent as it had a white board and the ability to show pic's of screen caps. That would be really good for tech support and conferencing between several co workers, and something like being able to give control of the desktop would be great for tech support. The one catch would be telecommuting. If someone is coming in from the outside, it would be hard for them to connect.

One thing that has happened on Tech Live has pissed me off, though. I am pissed that they are playing so many stories over and over again. I have no use for the same piece on advertising on the console's, which I first saw back in January. I would guess that in the one hour episode of Tech Live at 3 PM CST, they are now showing maybe one or two fresh stories. That is really pathetic. I mean why do I want to see a story that aired so long ago? I mean it is bad enough that the hosts of TSS decry Microsoft and promote Linux so often, but yet promote their own products ad Windows XP at every turn. Going based on their shows you would guess there were only two OSes in the world, Windows and MacOS. Bah!

They mentioned on TSS tonight that Google is blocking spammers. I am not sure how they are doing this, whether it is results doping or simply people looking to cull email addresses from the Google search engine, but either way it is important to eliminate it at the root. This is the kind of thing that Yahoo, Alta Vista and other's have failed to recognize as something wanted by their visitors, and they were always too afraid to tell someone no. When I get back online I will be sure to look into this more, though, and give my opinions in a more authoritative way.

Well, the results for the HP/Compaq merger. The results are 51.4 for, and 48.6 against. HP/Compaq cannot certify as HP must wait for Walter Hewlett's suit, says Hewlett, while HP CEO Carly Fiorina says they can, due to the lack of a temporary injunction. Walter Hewlett says he will ask for one soon, which could delay the certification indefinitely. Looks like TechLive is helpful after all. I think we will find Sun, IBM and other competitors will happily support the merger as everyone except the Compaq and HP CEO's know this will benefit only those who are competing with the two apart, or together.

Well, TSS mentioned the news that IBM is stepping out of the Hard Drive business. This is not surprising as they have been hit hard by the dismal performance of the 75's, which have led to many law suits, including several class action law suits. they claim the market is too crowded and it is too difficult to be competitive, but anyone who had to deal with one of the horrid drives that died on the majority of users, it is clear that IBM tried to cut costs, they got screwed and cannot afford to go through all of this again. Good riddance is the thinking of most I have heard from.

Ok, so Bob sent out an email days ago about this, as well as posting the same on his journal, and things are just today coming to a head, as well I am now back online, so I can properly rant on this. As someone who just bought a Dell, I am pissed. I am more pissed that someone who claimed to be Dell Certified did not mention this to me. I am not sure if Grant simply didn't know, or maybe he just decided not to mention this, but I am very happy that I heard about this before I ever had to replace something what would make this an expensive piece of junk.

I would like Dell to explain what they define as well known, because most tech professionals I know had no idea about this. A few mentioned that occasionally a non Dell Power Supply would fry a Dell board, but this was never mentioned as something to expect. This takes use of proprietary formats to a whole new insidious level. Needless to say, I will be scrapping this machine as soon as I can possibly do so.

Ok, so the Duron is gone. It is dying, and expected to pass on soon. So the question remains, what will be the low end AMD CPU? The Hammer's are the new and greatest thing to come onto the scene, so the only other option is that the high touted Athlon will become the low end cheap processor, that is unless AMD decides that it will not have a lower cost, good performance CPU. I doubt it, but I wonder what Intel would do about such a high quality low end CPU that could and would kick Celeron ass.

Sadly, not it was not the electric chair, though some of his actions are certainly deserving in that he monetarily and technologically rapes the consumer and kills any company who tries to compete. More to the point, Bill Gates was in court today and he said a few interesting things. The first quote is that if the judge finds in favor of the 9 remaining states it will put back the computer industry by ten years. Is that how far behind he feels Linux and BSD are? I think if Microsoft get their due justice, that it will take only a few months at worst for the current options to come to the forefront. I do, though, wonder if putting the software industry back 10 years means the prices(were OSes free 10 years ago?) or does he mean competitively? We all know that before Windows 95 Microsoft didn't really own the markets it does now.

Closer thought and analysis I would say he would talk about the net, because 10 years ago MS didn't have a browser, and in fact the book I am reading shows that the only person in MS who cared about the net was J Allard, though to be honest the book has a pro MS slant to it. Overall I think that Bill made a much better impression this time then he did in taped testimony last time around, but then again he and MS didn't really like the judge back then, and the judge admittedly had no great love of MS. I really hope that the judge does not buy the propaganda from the mouth of BillG, but I have to admit if the judge does tear up or kill Microsoft, I have no doubt that they would harm the market. We need a slow ramp down of the influence on the economy that MS has, not an swift and surely painful death.

Last week the guy who did the Yahoo-oo! yodel sued the Web portal for $5 million. Today Yahoo! settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. You had to know that Yahoo! would not let this go to court because it was obvious they were in the wrong and they have made a name off that. Yes, they were well known before that but the yodel made them somehow better, newer and neater. Who out there has not heard that yodel? Hell, my mother knows it! The settlement apparently solves to problem and allows the web's worst site to keep using the infamous and disputed yodel.

Well, this are looking positive for the site contract. Al seemed to understand the pricing and why it is so high, and the need for a retainer. He said he would take it to the management and he said he will try to get it through, but sometimes he is outvoted by the management team. Overall I think it went well, and he said he would pass it by his computer guy to see what he says, and put it to the management team and have an answer tomorrow or Friday. That has to be the best news I have heard all week. Yeah, I know, the week is only two days old, but I want to leave room for the better answer of yes. He said the amount, if approved, was no problem as they are government supported. That was a relief. Now, it is all up to the uncontrollable variables and patience. Wish me luck!

It seems that if the schools of the world were not already using non-MS products, be they Open source or Mac software, they now have an even stronger reason not to use Microsoft retailed products. MS has begun blackmailing schools at a critical time of the year, the last few months. Several schools in the Us have reported being given three options by MS rep's, to do a self audit and remove any illegal software, have MS do an audit and pay through the nose for it, or they could pay MS $42 per computer and MS would forget about it all.

So the first two would take away valuable computer time from students that need it as the school year comes to an end. The third option is unreasonable when you look at the 2,500 computers that they would have to pay for. $105,000. That is one hell of a lot of money to pay, and is tantamount to blackmail on behalf of Microsoft. If it were my choice I would tell Microsoft where they can shove their little scheme, and format the hard drives and install Linux. At the very least the students could easily use open Office to complete any office based assignments.

For a company who frequently say they need to go through their customer's businesses and do what they have to in order to eliminate non MS products wherever possible, they are sure doing a good job of convincing the educational institutions to throw away their MS products for kinder and more understanding vendors. I would say it is 110% likely that Red Hat or another Linux distributor will offer up one copy for each of those 2,500 computers of their software. This is a key mistake by Microsoft, though those are coming more often then one would expect from them. Could it be that Microsoft thinks they are untouchable?

Damn. Here we go again. After the pre thanksgiving weekend layoffs last year, and the late March cancellation of Silicon Spin and Audio Files, the TTV staff and viewers are once again on pins and needles as we wait to see who is in and who is out on the network in the newest round of 50+ layoffs. The one thing applauded by those angry about the November layoffs is that Larry Wangberg, the personmany blamed for the layoffs last year, resigned after 5 years with the network. Meet me in the BlogChat if you wanna talk.

Well, the first presentation I hit was the one titled 'A night on the internet, introductory hacking session'prexentedby Mike Legary of Seccuris, which was the kind of presentation I was really looking forward to. I had expected to be seeing more then one,but the one I did attend was excellent in that they showed everything from how a buffer overflow attack was done, including downloading exploits and writing your own, to how to prevent them. The room was packed as we were in one fo them smaller rooms, and it seemed to be a great presentation. Wow. I just had my picture taken mid blog. Cool. Maybe I will be able to post a digital copy soon. More at lunch.

Well, the lunch, which we were told at the 3rd seminar I attended cost them a pricing and overpriced $14 per person, was decent, but I would have preferred skipping it and going to Subway. It would have also been cheaper. The second and third seminars were decent, and just to let you know I plan to do more indepth reviews on the entire day when I get home. I am not, though, sure when that will be. I was planning on being home for TSS at 6 PM, but at this point that looks unlikely. I doubt I will go to the shindig after(cash bar is never a cheap soundign phrase), but the prize draws are relatively late in the day. I did, though, win something from SonicWall, though the guy has nothing here to give away, so he said he would send me something. I hope it is a useful and pricy something, let me tell you. Well, I am off to seminar 4. See you all back here later.

Well, I am home. I have been for awhile, but I wanted to formulate my thoughts and have supper. Now that I have had a chance I have a few things to say. First, I cannot pick the best seminar I attended. It is a tie. The best technical one, I guess you could call it, is the one done by Mike Legary of Seccuris. The most honest and interesting to watch was the last one by Dr. Marc Rogers of Deloitte & Touche. both were very informative and the reason I found the two of those the most interesting, I will be honest, is because of the hacker angle. Both of those presenters were very wise to point out that there are some big differences between a hacker and what the media calls a hacker.

Overall it was an excellent show, and I really enjoyed it all. I still have no idea what I won from SonicWall, but I have no worries. The Networking thing at the end, well, it was not really much to speak of in my view. It actually looked rather boring. It was simply the center serving expensive booze and pop while the vendors tore down their exhibits. I took one look at the posted prices($2.25 just for a pop) and took my leave. I will do a more comprehensive write up in the next few hours or next day or so, and will either put it up here or toss it onto the Hack's. We'll see.

Brian and Greg's much mentioned new effort was released today, and LinuxMuse is cool. To me it looks like a blogish type of site with a wide variety of content and articles from Pseudo experts to GPG with KMail. I have spent a while reading it and it looks really cool. Check it out, and between these two guys it will surely be an excellent resource.

I forgot to mention that I tossed up a few new add on's to the Geeks World site. The first is a comment on blogging, titled "Weblogs: Past, Present and Future". It was not as much as I wanted to write initially, but it just ran out of steam and I could not find anything to add. Sorry. I just have not bee up to my best writing.

The second is what I decided was the best thing to do, and that is to break apart the Blogging tip into more then one part. I am also having problems with that, and felt it best to toss up what I have and title it "How to begin a blog, Pt. 1". It includes stuff on Blogger Free and Blogger, as well as an overview of blogging in general. I also plan to put up a hack tonight, though it may be in the later parts of the evening. the next part of the Blogging tip, I hope, will have live Journal and Radio at least.

After that, Greymatter and Moveable Type are the last two to be taken care of. I hope to get all 4 done next part, but I don't count on it. After that is done I will be doing one on Blog tools and treats. That includes the various comments tools and tools to use the news aggregation feature that has become present in blogging.

From Dave Markowitz, it seems that after being literally raided by US Marshall's, being shut down for a day and paying $90,000, ErnieBall, maker of popular guitar and bass strings and the like, has moved to eradicate everything from their business that is Microsoft. They now run Linux and Star Office 5.2. I have an idea at this point to begin an organization. There are compliance for all kinds of things. There are certifications for anything that is standardized. I propose the creation of the MS-Free organization which will certify that businesses are completely MS Free. They would go through each computer and make sure there is not a dual boot, wine install or other MS related products running or installed. Any thoughts?

Ok, I am trying to finally catch up on all of my emails, and am down to almost under 100 unread total, but I am trying to catch up on the Lockergnome newsletters. The Tech Specialist from 04.17 has a link to a Security Focus reported bug that allows domains to run code when you use the back button in IE 6.0. Wanna know what I run? IE 5.5. every time I hit Windows update(several times a week) I get nagged to download IE 6. I refuse to.

My sister runs it, and has apparently upgraded my mother. I guess my view is that any person willing to read and believe the reports of insecurity and anti privacy that comes with .NET(1 virus written before .NET even got released this week), XP and all the things included in that, knows that IE 6 is a bad, bad program and should be avoided at all costs. Sorry to mix rants, but my sister told me the other day I had the same tone as my older brother does, and it was my reaction to her telling me how burning shit smells like. you know what?

If I have a reaction of not really needing or caring about the smell of shit, maybe it is because I don't need or want to know what shit smells like. *Gasp* My sister has the impression that anyone who tries to advise her that something she uses is not good is trying to be smug and superior. I guess I should not advise her not to open attachments so she won't get viruses. Along the same line, maybe I should not pass on security vulnerabilities and patch instructions. And she wonders why no one will help her with her computer. God, I hate dumb asses.

Liorean, a friend who occasionally stops by my BlogChat, has just informed me that the Mozilla 1.0 RC2 is out. He has been a strong proponent of my use of Mozilla as a viable alternative to IE, and I keep him up to date on all the problems I have with the free browser. Sadly, I am not expecting the biggest problem to be solved any time soon, which is that all copies of Mozilla running are one process, and this when one crashes, which happens all too often, it takes all the other windows with it. I am downloading it tonight, but I will install it tomorrow as I am very tired and heading to bed in a very short time.

Ok, so today was a great day for Apple as a company. Today was also a very bad day for many Mac users. The great company stuff was the announcement of the new XServe, which is a very thin rack mount server. A lot of people have been wanting to see Server's from apple, and this will make many a geek's day.

From The Register "Xserve is 1U rack available in single or dual 1Ghz G4 configurations, with room for four ATA-100 drives, with 60GB and 120GB as the options. Each is hot swappable. There is a Gigabit Ethernet port built into the motherboard, and three slots, with one taken up by an addition Gigabit adaptor. It's the first Apple system to use DDR SDRAM, at 266Mhz. The base models with 256MB and 512Mb of memory are priced at $2999 and $3999 respectively."

And "But Apple made as much of OS X Server's unlimited user license at the launch today. With a 25-user client license for a Windows server costing $3295, the price of an entry level Wintel rack can double."

The second is not so good for the Mac users of the world. Phillips, the creator of the CD and the patent holder for it, has said that music makers cannot sell disk's with copy protection as CD's because they violate the format. Well, one of those non-CD's was discovered as able to totally crash Mac's and make them reboot to a grey screen with nothing else, and with the new iMac's it makes them completely unusable as it freezes the desktop, and upon reboot does not allow you to open the CD tray.

The new iMac's do not have the force open pinhole, so those users who put one of these CD's in their drive have to ship their brand spanking new iMac's back to Apple to get the CD removed, all at their own cost because there is a list of CD's that are not able to be played in the iMac. The only CD so far is the new Celine Dion, but many others are out there that reportedly do the same thing.

Well, this first part is not news of a interesting nature, but leads up to the main topic of this post. I mentioned to my brother that at month's my domain expires and I think I was meant to get the impression he would take it if I did not get it renewed in time. I know he would only do this to hold it over my head, but it still pisses me off that he would do that. I just think it might be prudent of me to reregister it the next day to save a few bucks, but that would require a credit card to eliminate the downtime. So, I guess I will find a way to get a check to DNS Central or pay my brother to renew for me.

Now, for the main topic of this post. VeriSign. Yup, those fuckwads, as a friend has taken to calling them. They have been sued by one of their competitors for 'slamming' their competitors clients. BulkRegister.com Inc, sued VeriSign over allegedly deceptive business practices. I expect this will certainly not be the last, especially if this one is won by their competitor. I mean how many registrar's has Verisign been trying to steal the customers of? How many other Registrar's have followed suit? 'Nough said.

Next, VeriSign is under assault by the webizens of the world, or more specifically those who support Leslie Harpold, who's Hoopla.com domain was transferred by mistake and fraud to a German buyer by VeriSign, who did not even check with Harpold before going ahead with the transfer, and has yet to give her back her domain. Yet another VeriSign fuck up.

The supporters of Ms. Harpold were planning a massive Google Bomb to point to the story from Harpold's view but since Googles new found anti bombing techniques, they will have to look elsewhere. I have no doubt, though, that the mass linking that happens in blogs will achieve the same result. So, Verisign (or is it VeriSign?) it is!

Well, EDS, aka tech support at my mom's work(or is it a different EDS???), has given IM in their work places(or at least those they control) a reprieve from the death it assigned them a short time ago. This led to a trend as Samsung has recently done the same. I know they do not allow it in the Province, but then again they own all the computer(or most of them) in the province. In fact, there are very few CD ROM's in the provincial tech collection, as the only things allowed for install are installed by EDS themselves. Humph. Asses.

We hear from the lovely and talented Ms.Morrone, who cannot comment explicitly, that they heard the ratings and they are not good at all. Leo said they were great though, so I am confused. either way, I know a lot of people would be broken if the network went dark again, and the tech world would be a lot bleaker if it were permanent. I know TSS will never be outright cancelled, for it is likely still the most popular show on the network, but there is nothing we can do if the network dies.

Ok, so :gnome: reports that the new MS patch I recommended personally just this afternoon is actually another that breaks as much as it fixes. I hope no one has found any worse problems, as I did not notice this one did what Chris says it did because I run Outlook Express, which is doesn't seem to break. It may be a problem more with IE 6.0 users who also use OE 6.0, or it could be an Outlook 2000/2002 problem. check into this more before patching, and I hope to have a report of a patch for the patch soon, but will only recommend it after I know a few who have used it successfully.

You know, I should have realized that the first time I put out a mail list posting, blogged it here and more, I would be shown the error of posting MS security patches right away. See, These two stories, from The Inquirer and The Register show a very disturbing problem with the patch I pointed out. No, this is not the font problems presented by :gnome:, this is totally different.

Even worse is a problem with the patch not actually solving the problems that it says it does. This goes even beyond the problems with it solving one problem that Microsoft denied as a problem. I think they said a lien like the oft quoted 'it's not a bug, it's a feature'. Not surprising at all. I think they are the reason the line was written the first time, and most of the times afterwards.

This does not mean the Security Service list is dead, this just means I will have to be quicker about announcing the problems, and even quicker with the problems with the problems I mention. Gladly, there are no current subscribers to that list, so I am safe in my conscience that this did not badly affect anyone. Now, for those who read it here, well, caveat emptor I belive is the Latin.

I do not purport that all thing I mention here are excellent and perfect. I simply pass along those problems and the possible and/or recommended solutions. It is up to you to take the risk immediately, or wait a few days to see if anyone else has problems. In the end, the decisions are truly between whether you want to be bleeding edge, or whether or not you want to be the guinea pig this time around. Everyone should take their turn, though not all users can provide as much info as necessary to narrow down a solution or even the problem.

So, Jim Allchin says that opening the windows source code would be a risk to US national security. He also says it is too insecure to open up. Therefor, to combine the two, I have to agree with my source, :bob: in that it must be too insecure for the government to use at all, since it is assumed all government workers have access to stuff that should not get to the public.

This is a bold set of statements, and if anything should be reason enough for the US and all other governments to immediately seek out ways and option to remove every bit of windows code from their machines. I hope, gleefully, that this will be a big boom for al sorts of Open Source options, and may seriously impact the future of windows in the office or government. On behalf of the Open source community, thank you for finally admitting the truth, and giving your users no other choice but to throw away their Windows CD's.

Bob says "More to the point, though, Allchin's testimony raises some serious questions about whether any government agency should be using Microsoft software at all. Or, for that matter, whether any private company with a fiduciary responsibility, whether to its customers or merely to its shareholders, to maintain data security can afford to continue using Windows. When, inevitably, private data is released to unauthorized parties and liability is subsequently determined, one measure of a company's culpability is (or should be) whether that company "knew or should have known" that their software was inherently insecure, as Allchin appears to be saying is the case for Windows." For once, I cannot find fault.

Ok, I shoudl be putting this in the previous one, about the testimony of Jim Allchin, but this was too good to be 'comingled' with another post. From Dave Markowitz "If true, (a) then Windows is in even worse shape than we thought, and (b) we as a country are in some seriously deep shit if we have major national assets running on Windows."

Sadly, I don't doubt that many assets are held on windows boxes. This all is merely just validation of my hatred of Windows, Microsoft and all things associated with them. It also allows me to gloat, if I so choose, to those like David Lawrence, and others who sit there and tell me that Windows is the best thing since sliced bread, and try to reason that windows is secure and XP fixed all the problems with the Windows code. Obviously even Windows itself does not believe it can fix all of it's problems.

So, one of the bigger stories of the day is the verification that the copy protection which rendered the new iMac's useless if you played the new Celine Dion CD in them with the copy protection they use, has been beaten down like the bull shit it is. The copy protection method put out by Sony, called Key2Audio, has been beaten not by wise crackers and heavy duty cracking software. No, it was by an apparent accident that someone found out that using a Sharpie marker(99 cents or so at the local dollar store) and drawing a line on the outer line of the CD will make the protection useless.

This enables the CD to be played in all kinds of CD players, from ROM's to CD players, and also allows the CD to be ripped to MP3 for playing in MP3 players. So, assuming you are still buying CD's, or at the very worst still buying copy protected CD's, this is how you can take back your CD from the music monopolists who want to control how you use a product you bought and paid for. Another scheme bites the dust. I swear, there should be a site detailing all these schemes and how to beat them.

From :mike:, it seems that MSN, in it's ongoing attempts to eradicate will be releasing an MSN Switching Tool on Tuesday. not surprising, but as Mike puts it, in regards to moving from AOL's proprietary crap, "Of course you're trading it for the proprietary MSN stuff, so which is worse?" Hmmm. Interesting conundrum.

"With MSN's Switching Tool, it takes three steps to migrate an AOL customer's address book, calendar, and archived e-mail over to MSN. As part of the deal, Microsoft will cancel your AOL account and for 30 days will refer to your new address any e-mail sent to your AOL address."

I knew I should have emailed my mother about this, or told her when I was at her place. I knew I should have told her, I swear it. Now I suffer the consequences, though thankfully they aren't too bad. I will say this now and not again. DO NOT DELETE FILES WITHOUT CHECKING THEIR USES! I will now point you to me Security Services list, where I also posted about this subject this afternoon. So, here I go, yet again, after strongly encourage you all to just join the list above.

Earlier this year, we had to deal with the SULFNBK.EXE Warning hoax. Today we have dealt with earlier versions of the same damned hoax, which has been spreading wildfire. SARC calls this Jdbgmgr.exe file hoax, and it is not nearly as nasty as the SULFNBK one. This one tells you to delete a file that is simple a Java script interpreter. I thought everyone had learnt before, but I have heard from a dozen people already today who have followed these instructions. it has become so bad that I have this as a text file on my quick launch.

"DON'T DO THIS!!!!"

Simple I think, but by the time I get it is too late. The worst thing is apparently some of those who have are reporting to me that they have no problems on reboot, so they have no fear they can forward the warning, as it is obviously not fatal. It isn't, but it is a pain in the ass. I know at least a dozen people who will have to go and find a geek, or find a store which will do what is needed to get the file back. For those who don't want to, and think they can do it themselves, the instructions are below.

Surprising to me, since this does eliminate Java support, Microsoft has already set up a good page telling about the hoax, what the hoax tells you to delete in fact, and how to get it back. Essentially, you need to go to this page, find your Windows version, assuming you use XP, 98, 98SE, or 95 because those are the only ones which do not have automatic file recovery. Windows 2000 and Millennium Edition have file recovery, so they are safe.

Once again, if you get this in email, do not delete the file. Do not delete any file you are instructed to without first checking sarc and with your local Geek or computer store. the only OSes affected are Windows XP, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows 98, and Windows 95.

Requisites: Installation prerequisite for all users Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 or later must be installed in order to use this version of the Microsoft VM.

Installation prerequisite for Windows NT users Windows NT4 Service Pack 3 or later must be installed prior to installing the Microsoft VM on Windows NT 4.0.

Installation prerequisite for Windows 2000 users Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 2 must be installed prior to installing this hotfix.

No, I do not know why 2000 is in there. Run it anyway, if you deleted the file. Please, listen to the experts. We know these things. Just cause on reboot it doesn't hurt you, doesn't mean it is safe. I think that is about it. Here are some additional links and news stories.

Newsbytes
News.com
F-Secure

Doc, yesterday I think, wrote up an article on the Linux Journal site about CARP and the decision to reject it. I don't think anyone out there knows where we go from here, and at worst we have internet radio for one more month(you know, they can say they rejected the recommendations because they are too lenient, after all), and I must say Doc's article is one of the best I have found.

Oh, and he also mentioned :chey:, which has made her ever the more giddy after her(and Mrs. Gnome) public drunkeness after the show yesterday. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Here are a few more links to opinions and stories on the CARP rejection. NY Daily News and Declan McCullagh's Politech article. I am sure there are more, but for a few weeks at least I will remain silent on the subject. I think.

Jim Kershner today took the time to warn us about the new Diana Krall CD, Look of Love, that he says is similar to the Celine Dion CD in that it is unplayable in anything that can play other items beyond regular audio CD's. He tells us that not only would the CD not play in his CD ROM drive, but it wouldn't play in the CD/MP3 player in his truck. Her label, Justin Time Records, has no comment so far. Be warned, this kind of crap will soon become common place if these greedy bastards do not get the hint.

It seems that Klez-H has officially surpassed the infamous SirCam worm today. SirCam has held the lead for a very long time, even in the heat of Nimda and Code Red, but today Message Labs has blocked 775,000 copies of the pathogen since it first appeared on April 15.

"Although the infamous Love Bug virus is generally regarded as the fastest spreading virus ever, and accounted for one in 28 at its peak, its outbreak only lasted a short time, while Klez-H has continued to spread."

This is not surprising. I alone have received about one every two or three days, often more then one from an infection in fact. The reason this seems to be spreading still, even after almost two months, is the fact it uses different names, email addresses, and mixes up the attachment and the subject from a large base of variables.

The logical answer I come up with for this is that if people were to actually listen to me and other's who have one key to mass mailer virus protection, which is "do not open attachments without well regarded corroboration that it is in fact expected" then this and all those others ones out there would not get through. Sadly, this is not listened to by many.

Here is one recommendation for those of you out there who try to use the excuse that some viruses don't require you to open an attachment, and in fact Klez, to my knowledge, shows up as an attempted audio file playing in the background of an HTML message. If you use Outlook Express, right click on the toolbar up near the top, the place where the new message button is and so on, and click customize.

Next, scroll down to the Preview button. Click to add it. That will then allow you to turn off previews, and then those viruses that only require the viewing of a message to infect won't work cause you can turn it off before you view it, and verify the message if it has an attachment. Simple. Easy. no infection. How hard is that, I ask you? It is the simplest answer to the problem if mass mailer virus infection.

You can also go into the properties, then the details tab, then the message source button to view the source. you don't need to know the meaning of the headers, all you need to know is to look at the code of the attachment. View the code below to see what the source of one Klez copy looks like. the Many A's are a key pointer that this is a problematic email.

Last day for Star Office 5.2 free end's at midnight tonight. Get your free copy for a variety of OS's and try it out. It had a few problems, but all in all it ran quite well and was a great replacement for MS Office. If any of you want, I may be able to toss it on the server here for anyone who did not get it. I do ask, though, that you try to get it in the next 7 hours. Even on a 56K dial up you should be able to get it if you start now.

The reason, by the way, for doing this is to encourage the adoption of Star Office 6.0, which is just out in retail. Version 6.0 costs $76.00; but after the 29th you'll be able to get 5.2 for $40.00 if you want the deluxe setup and $10.00 for a stripped-down version. There is another option as well, by the way, which is Open Office 1.0, which is also new to market and is free to download.

Well, it looks set. The release of Mozilla 1.0 will be happening on June 12th. To celebrate, the makers and millions of people across the world are partying to celebrat. Yes, that's right, millions of geek are going to get shit faced drunk. Across Canada it looks like we'll have a couple in Ottawa, one in Halifax, another in Toronto.

Hell, there will even be one in Hamilton! BC has a couple, but none are registered in Winnipeg. I think it could well be because of the fact there is a MUUG meeting the night before, which I suspect will be celebrating it as well. So, register your Moz release party, and let the world know. Then, party!!!

Ok, I will be very candid here. Bull shit. The Register reports the BS(a) claims that while 81% of people of the 1000 in their software piracy survey admitted to software piracy, 95% agreed that stronger protection of intellectual property protection is needed. Now, maybe it is just me, but this sounds like a survey done by a group that conspicuously has exactly what said group wants to hear to backup their reasons for doing what they and their members do. Hmmm. Almost(or specifically) too good to be true.

That would be like George Bush doing a survey of 1000 of his biggest supporters and announcing that 100% of Americans support him and his war on terrorism. It's called cheating. I don't believe that 95% of Americans know what Intellectual Property Protection really means, not to mention 81% of people actually committing piracy. I mean I could see it if they asked 810 people who were convicted of committing piracy, but otherwise I take this with not merely a grain of salt, but a big ole bucket of salt. In other words, the BSA should shorten it's name to BS.

So, The Register reports a 'study' is being released next week that, among other things, is claiming that Open Source Software is a security risk, that MCSE's are better then a University diploma and that MCSE holder's are more successful then college grads. Maybe if you are thinking those kiddie colleges that I have heard about, but those used to be called Daycare.

The 'organization' that is releasing this study, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, appears, not surprisingly, to be funded strongly, if not completely, by Microsoft. I guess we know now the spin control from MS after Mr. Allchin's admission that MS is a security risk and is too broken to fix. pathetic attempt, I might add.

Ok, so it is not a scam, by legal definition, but it stinks like one, and looks like one, so the only thing missing is the proper definition. See, the maker of scanners and other products has begun charging for drivers as of about a week ago. Not a $1 a driver fee, like some had expected, but they don't even have a download price, and instead have 1 CD per driver available for $32.

Hmm. $5(generous) for shipping, and $1(also generous, especially in the quanitity they would need) for a CD. The man hours to burn a CD and ship it might be worth $10. Ok, that's half. Oops, shipping and sales tax are extra. Knock $5 off that cost. Oh, wait, isn't the rule of business to charge double the cost? Ahhh, so we see the deal here. This is a revenue base. We had to know it would happen, right? Oh, and the $32? That is at a minimum. the average appears to be about $60.

Their tech supports answer to why they are now charging, which only people in the America's have to pay for by CD as everyone else in the world gets to download them for free, is that the drivers are too big for modem users to download. Ummm. I have yet to meet a file too big for me to download. So, you were saying? Ok, maybe 14.4, or 28.8, but shouldn't it be up to the user to choose to download or pay for a CD?

Like I said, the only logical reason is that this small North American outfit is charging for drivers is to make money. I think they will quickly see the problem with this plan, when they lose virtually every customer and recommendation they ever got. They already lost :bob:, and I am not to keen on recommending them now either, not that I ever did. why would I recommend people get ripped off when buying hardware, when there are better options available?

It's out! Brent was in my blog chat just now, and he pointed out that Mozilla 1.0 has officially been released, more then a week before the planned release parties across the world. Brent was really seeming to enjoy the .0 release and I am installing it now. I may not be able to test it much as my mother offered me a prize she won to Coyote's nite club at Pembina & Bishop Grandin, so I will not be around tonight. Go to Mozilla now, and check it out.

Well, the MPAA, RIAA and other monopolistic organizations better take note. The user's are biting back and their asses are the next target. A Wired story tells of 5 ReplayTV users who are suing the big Hollywood studios with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This comes after lawsuits by those same studios aimed at the makers of PVR's, and argue that skipping commercials is theft of the programming, as the ads support it.

The logic then goes that the studios think(no doubt) that you should be forced to watch their ads, as not watching the commercials is content theft. The extension is argued that it should be illegal to go to the washroom or go grab a snack, basically anything that is not watching the commercials. Therefore, if the CBDTPA were to get passed, like Hollings and the other RIAA owned political properties are trying to get done, then a washroom, VCR or fridge would have to be wired to ensure one cannot use them while a commercial is running. You can use the washroom while the show is running, after all.

The EFF press release says

"ReplayTV customers today sued the entertainment industry to protect their rights to skip over commercials and record television programs for later viewing using digital video recorders. Responding to both the lawsuit brought against ReplayTV and the industry's public claims that these actions are "theft," five customers, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Ira Rothken of the Rothken Law Firm in San Rafael, filed a federal lawsuit in Los Angeles asking the court to rule that their use of the ReplayTV device is legal under copyright law."

Well, the Register reports that the cyber fraud prevention groups CardCop and PPenetrationtest.com did a little test and pulled a wildly hilarious hack. On some skript kiddies. That's right, they dropped the IP or URL to an Apache server that only mildly was masquerading as an IIS server(it had some of the same directory structures) and made sure that the kiddies could get in if they used the mock exploit, and let them go at it.

Within 24 hours of dropping the info into a few IRC channels they had over 200 attempts to access the mysterious server with only a couple exe's and an Excel worksheet with some fake CC numbers. This truly shows how pathetic the skript kiddies have become when they don't even do a nmap or run the URL through netcraft on their target. A true hacker or even a mediocre mid level black hat would knwo better. They should consider themselves lucky that this was not the true cope, because a lot of them didn't even use proxies or Trojaned systems.

Yahoo reports that Microsoft has released a new patch for the patch they released awhile back(released on May 8) that didn't do it's job. The patch if for the MSN Messenger, MSN Chat, and a few other services that allowed a buffer overflow. The bug "could have allowed an attacker to run code on target machines via a buffer overflow in ActiveX. The original patch did not, however, stop the affected ActiveX component from being reinstalled on systems in all cases, leaving the potential for patched systems to become vulnerable again, Microsoft said. To address this, the company released a new set of fixes on Tuesday for all three affected products." The new patch is available now.

As well, MS has released a work around for the Gopher bug, which is entirely futile as Gopher is really not being used that much anymore. their workaround is not unique, and in fact this is the same thing issued by those who discovered the bug, Online Solutions: "that users should select Internet options from within IE's Tools menu, then click Connections and select "LAN settings." From there, users should check "Use proxy server for your LAN," click the "Advanced..." button; type "localhost" into the textbox next to the word "Gopher" and put "1" in the port field."

In a not so shocking rebuttal, the Open Source advocates of the world got back at Microsoft and Unisys for their "We Have The Way Out" advertising campaign with the "We Have The Way Out" site that not only allows visitors to get the facts on Microsoft, Unisys and their respective products, along with dispelling the FUD, lies and myths that is perpetrated by those two and others. A very well designed site and very informative.

A Few days ago Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued an order to the two sides in the MS Anti trust suit to sit down and each was to come up with a set of things that were necessary and what could be gotten rid of out of each side's proposals. The 9 dissenting states came up with a couple things they just had to have. They, in other words, are able to listen when an order is given.

Now, I am not sure if the lawyers for Microsoft were not listening, but the Register reports that Microsoft has essentially said that the deal it came to with the DoJ and the other 9 states was as good as it could do, and that the last 9 states should simply let it be, and the judge, just like they thought in the consent decree case, should just shut the hell up and sign off on the deal. This is not an exact quote, but simply a summation of their attitudes and actions.

Now, saying that the blatant cave in by the DoJ is the best they, Microsoft, could do is a joke of the funniest variety, in that it is obvious lie. It is like looking at a Cessna and claiming it is going to get a person to space. They know they could do better, but the DoJ under the Bush administration is so spineless that they know they will not have to fight hard to get a better deal, and they must hope, a better, more 'informed' judge. In that light what reason does Microsoft have to negotiate and bargain? The answer is they don't.

They know the government, federal at least, will not fight hard, and therefore they can just wait for more favorable water to come about. God, I can't wait for them to fall. Expect an article soon on the Subscriber only section that started out as an analysis of UnitedLinux, but has grown into an analysis of Microsoft's actions and the Open Source communities reactions over the last little while. It is looking good, and I expect to be done over the weekend. I will post a paragraph or two from it on this blog, but the full article will be up for view only by payment. Hopefully I can figure out how to accept some form of credit card payment by then.

Ok, so let's see, we have this and that. Can't forget this from Wired, and these two, also from The Register. I suspect Palladium is the reason for this. (This one too, it seems)

Now, my question, which still has not been easily explained, is what the hell it is. Yeah, it is like the SSSCA without it being law. That is the best summation of what I have seen. It is a bad thing for Linux because Microsoft would control it and, well, we all know how Microsoft feels about Linux, don't we? So, can anyone easily summarize this bloody idea for me? I know it is bad, because Microsoft has backed it, but why is it bad?

Ok, gonna do a quick roundup with small commentary to both quickly go through the news and unclutter my desktop. First up, Lindows selling monthly subscription pricing to OEM's for unlimited installs of the LindowsOS. The plan is that the OEM's, for $500 per month, can install as many copies of LindowsOS that they want. This, I assume, would work well for the WalMart Lindows machines, but there is one fatal flaw. No Open Source advocate will promote this, as they are breaking from the Open Source software model.

Next up is The Register, questioning who really owns the server space. The numbers are far from conclusive, and while it is clear that Windows is losing the server battle in all area's, the battle seems to me at least to have moved to between Linux and the other variants of Unix. BSD, Solaris and other's have a lot of market share, and they are all growing quickly.

Speaking of BSD and Linux, Theo de Raadt, apparently maintainer of the OpenSSH package, and I believe the notoriously hot headed leader of the OpenBSD group, has announced a major vulnerability in OpenSSH that is not patched yet, but does have a work around. The idea is to upgrade to the latest version(3.3 or so) and that will allow you to turn off the vulnerable section. While not perfect, it will do for now until a patched version of the code is available. If you run OpenSSH I cannot emphasize enough, DO THIS NOW!!!

Lastly, the view of The Register's Andrew Orlowski is that like NeXt being bought out by Apple, Be Inc. has succeeded in its takeover of PalmSource. I am not really sure I understand the logic, but from my view they have assumed that a few key people placements means total control which I am fairly sure is not the fact. I may be wrong, but it sure didn't look like it was a takeover by Be.

Ok, my posting yesterday of the OpenSSH bug was a little late. Not only that, but today I read on perlguy that OpenSSH 3.4 has been released. I didn't really catch if this fixes the bug I mentioned this morning, but I would say it is smart to install the upgrade anyway. I am happy to see that it has a secure file transfer protocol built in, which will allow one to transfer files simply and easily without needing to go to another program. Now, how long until there are GUI implementations?

Hmm. Interesting couple of days in the tech news. Beginning is the pathetic ad-zine Yahoo! Internet Life folding YIL. This magazine is being shut down after about 10 years(maybe less) while it still has millions of readers. This magazine was always, in my view, a users mind. It long ago stopped being a magazine for the readers, nor a magazine that was of quality.

It was a magazine that was more closely related to what the advertiser's wanted to see. I doubt that many of the top rated sites in the magazine were non advertiser sites. It was of little use to me not long after I stopped reading. It only got worse, and is the main reason I lost interest in Yahoo. Long ago this magazine lost all credibility for any reader who knew how to look for the info. They were rating the most commercially based sites and the best, while the best resources were the lowest rated or completely ignored all together. Not worth the $6 sale price.

In two stories out of the EU, MS security is being given unheard of scrutiny. The first is a warning that the new Palladium hardware with built in security better not shut out competitors, like Open Source and other competitors. "Microsoft's new security product, called Palladium, would use Microsoft's Windows operating system and custom computer chips to encrypt data, like documents or music files, so that only the intended recipient could use them."

To say that Palladium has raised significant questions about extending monopolies is an understatement, and it is good to see that there are some governments out there who have not been corrupted by the political contributions of the Redmond Giant. The EU seems to be the largest single governing body who has so far fought against the Windows invasion.

In the second story, another one of the EU standing nose to nose with Bill and his boys, the Globe and Mail reports that the EU is bringing up even more issues it has, this time in security, with the much touted Passport part of .NET. the plan, according to MS, would be to have the users store their data with MS, for a price, and this raises security and privacy issues form the EU and the rest of the right thinking populance.

Ok, so there is a challenge that has gone out like those of the days of archery and jousts. A challenge to knock the top software vendor off it's horse. The challenge has an overall reward of $200,000.00. This is a piecemeal split, but still some hefty amounts for the pieces it pays for. The idea is to make the MS Software only hobbled PC that is the X-Box run Linux, though there have been measures implemented to make this impossible, without a doubt. As well, there are mentions that it has to be legal, which makes me wonder what part of hacking an X-Box is illegal.

Ahh, here it is
"The policy of the Xbox Linux Project consists of the following important points:

• The project is completely legal.
• We do not have anything to do with software piracy and we are not interested in it at all.
• We do not use any non-licensed software for development, such as the Xbox SDK.
• Reverse engineering of the Xbox system software is only done in compliance with corresponding local laws.

All new project members are asked to comply to this policy. "

I would wonder what the SDK software does that makes it illegal, but I assume it is using software piracy of some sort. Check out the Manifesto for a more detailed run down of what the project is all about. Also, the Roadmap for a rundown of what is needed and the rewards for each part of the project.

Hmm. So, Microsoft wants to be an exhibitor at LinuxWorld, eh? what's the catch? They say it is simply to open a dialogue, but I agree with the article when it points out that the only previous dialogue Microsoft has wanted to have in regards to Open Source is to accuse the community of being a virus, and trying to bad mouth the whole bunch of us.

So, what kind of starting point is that? Have they changed their minds? Or have they finally realized that they use too much BSD to talk it down. What the hell am I saying? They are still going to talk it down. No doubt they will ensure even more inflammatory bull shit comes out between now and Linux World, just so they can walk in with some 'hard facts and published reports' under their wing. There will yet be a catch, I promise you that.

Hmm. I never thought they would give up without at least a supreme court ruling, but The Register reports that the magazine 2600 has dropped it's battle against the badly decided ruling that the publishing of the DeCSS code is illegal and a violation of the really badly designed DMCA, which also led, you got it, to the death of Internet Radio ruling by the Library of Congress. God, I hate that law. So, they say that it is already precedent setting, and they might bring this back up when the DMCA is proven illegal.

Ok, so Wired and Reuters.com are both(as well as Mike) reporting that eBay is buying PayPal, the embattled and controversial internet payment system for $1.5 billion in stock. I can only hope that eBay does a better job of customer respect and service then did the creators of the service. You readers will know that for a long time I have despised the service, for it's disrespect of Canadian customers, and it's double talking(aka false advertising), where the announcements say one thing, but the site says another. Hopefully eBay taking it over will fix some of these problems.

Well, I guess if Red Hat can be profitable, then I suppose even the demon of the net, Yahoo!™ can be a profitable company(by 3 cents a share), which leads to questions on whether they have lowered their expenses a whole lot, to coincide with their rumored lower income, which caused the elimination of the broadcast arm, as well as a high level shift in style and layout. As long as they are profitable without true change, they will never get the hint that no one likes them, and no one wants to do business with them.

Ok, so I see that Qwest, one of the big US telecom companies, has revealed that it is indeed under criminal investigation. After WorldCom, it is clear the US stock markets, long held as the basis of the US economy, could not take the result of such a hit. The market slumped, the shuddered, but they did not collapse. They still suck, but not quite as bad as everyone thought they would. So, who's next? what big US corporations going to reveal or be exposed as having defrauded the public and it's shareholders? It is not a matter of if, instead it is a matter of when.

Ok, so Thursday USA Today was hacked, with headlines like Oops, says pope.,, Christianity a mistake, and that the 9th circuit court of appeals had ruled the Pentagon's shape illegal. Obviously neither would actually happen, but some stories had not been fixed when they fessed up on the front page of the paper and on the same previously hacked website. The Register found the 9th circuit one and pointed out that it had not been fixed up right. I guess major news outlet's being hacked isn't much of a story these days, and has become almost a sign a news outlet is good.

Not happy to lock users into proprietary hardware that costs the earth plus an arm and a leg to upgrade and a rough upgrade cycle, Apple has turned their iTools web service, which until now was free, into a pay for service priced currently at $49.95 a year for the first year, until Sept. when it goes to $100 a year.

I have not used a Mac in many years, and have no experience with the iTools service, but I would think that they would be smart enough to try to keep their customers they have, as sales have been dismal for awhile now, for their new iMac's. Oh, yeah, and the new service will be called .Mac, which is a really bad title. I mean don't we have enough .$dumbNamedService's??

As many companies begin to get very serious about how employee's email habits affect the companies reputation, Hewlett Packard has suspended 150 employees, and fired two for their actions. Around 60 permanent and 90 contractors are under investigation. All affected employees are in the UK and Ireland.

Ok, so along with the moronic move to charge for iTools, one of their most widely used tool for OS X, Steve Jobs announced a few other neat things in his keynote, which I am sad that I missed. On the iPod front, Jobs announced a new slimmer and better(new case and remote control) 10 GB iPod, as well as both of the iPod's have been lowered by $100. As well, he announced the new 20 GB iPod, and all of these will be available in early August.

"Next, he announced the new windows version of the iPod, bundled withthe MusicMatch jukebox. Whis was not unexpected, especially since a lot of software makers are trying to scramble together iPod for Windows softwre that allows you to upload songs to the iPod from inside the Redmond OS. All three of the versions, 5, 10 and 20 GB will be avbailable in the windows version in late August."(CNET)

"Jobs also introduced a new iMac model with a 17-inch flat-panel monitor. The model offers a widescreen display with 1440-by-900-pixel resolution vs. 1024-by-768-pixel resolution for the 15-inch iMac. The new iMac features a larger display, 800MHz PowerPC G4 processor, 256MB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, an Nvidia GeForce4 MX graphics card and a DVD recording drive for $1,999. Jobs offered a brief preview of "Jaguar," version 10.2 of Apple OS X, which will include 150 new features and enhancements. Enhancements to the operating system include interface and performance tweaks, and a new e-mail program with an enhanced address book and a built-in spam filter.

Although the spam filter didn't work well during Jobs' demo, he assured the crowds that "Junk Mail" was "very, very cool." Jaguar will also include enhanced search functions built into the finder, "iChat," an instant-message application based on America Online's chat program; "iCal," a calendar program; and utilities that will help Macs and PCs co-exist peacefully on the same network. Jaguar will be available August 24, and will be priced at $129. Special upgrade pricing will also be available."(Wired)

Overall, the keynote seems to have gone quite well, with a lot of new tech and software, but this keynote is nothing like last time when Jobs announced the new iMac with a flat panel screen. I am sure that this is also not as fun for the Mac enthusiasts who realized that the price for .Mac was not only for new customers, but for all users. Of everything that I have read I think the new iMac is the most exciting, and makes the iLamp even more lusted after.

So, on the same day when the Washington Post announced it's investigation into the Internet giant showed that they cooked the books during the time when the dot.bomb crash happened(detailed in part here and here), it's COO Robert Pittman has resigned at a late afternoon board meeting. Pittman will leave AOL after the company finds a new CEO for its AOL Internet service. No word yet whether the two stories are related, but the departure of Pittman will give more power to the Time Warner side of the recent merger.

So, the other day I mentioned that Steve Jobs announced the move from iTools to the pay for use .Mac, as well as the fact that the Mac OS 10.2 is not going to be available in lower cost upgrade that is normally expected of most software, in a Microsoft like cash grab. Well, the users have ranted, raved and fumed, but shortly after most posts to the Apple forums that said non flattering things about the Keynote and it's announcements were deleted and removed without care for the right to free speech and accepting criticism. "This kind of seems like Apple taking advantage of our unconditional love," writes one user.

There are those, though, who think that the move to .Mac is worth it, and that those looking for a free service should stop being cheap asses. I disagree, but if I were a new Mac user, and wanted to look at .Mac, I would like to see a 30 day trial to see if the tools are useful to me. I see nothing in the .Mac or iTools service that cannot be replace, and those that cannot be replaced, are not of any use to me. I don't use a scheduler, I don't have any use for half the stuff. Therefore, like many iMac users, I would not, if I had an OS X capable machine, upgrade to 10.2 nor would I use .Mac.

So, the owner of the Patent for JPEG, Forgent Networks, began a short while back enforcing their patent over the standard, charging upwards of 15 million to some companies. this has become a very disturbing habit, with other formats like GIF and stuff like that. Companies are increasingly allowing their patents to be used, to become standards, and then they sit there, after the world is using them in many aspects of essential life, and then they say 'Wait, now you have to pay us to keep using it' which is wrong and a very bad move.

In response to this trend, GIF is not a standard, not officially, and now the JPEG committee is going to drop the JPEG standard. Where does this leave the graphics people? Bitmap? PNG? Either way, it is a good stand to take by the ISO(International Standards Organization), but JPEG will not stop being used, and it will not die. I wonder though, since JPEG was a standard established by the Joint Picture Expert's Group, how the hell did Forgent Networks get the patent? JPEG is supposed to be an open standard, not one that's owned by any one company. The patent expires in 2004 anyway, so there is little worry that this cash grab will last long.

Hmm. You ever see a news story that you mean to read, and you know you'll want to comment on, but somehow you lose it and forget you wanted to post? Well, back a bit ago this happened, and a recent article on The Reg reminded me of this. The news story is the fact that Fair Use advocates were told to shut up and sit down at a digital rights management workshop last Wednesday. The article reminds of us of a few BS lines that the MPAA and the other panelists and their respective organizations have tried to pass off as fact, like Jack Valenti saying that they didn't fight the VCR.

It is interesting to hear that Robin Gross of the EFF and her organization were told to not show up as their views were not welcome. Other fair use advocates were there, along others like Richard Stallman, and not one of them were given their chance to speak. The best quote, and I assure you there are many great ones, is from Ruben Safir, president of NYLXS, "If someone breaks into my house and steals my CDs, who calls the cops, me or the music industry?" Safir asked. "If it's me, then that's my property.".

I was talking to :brad: earlier on IM and we were discussing the MPAA hacking and shit. We both agreed that the MPAA and the RIAA have gone too far, and the Congress and other lawmakers have given the copyright monopolists too many rights to take away our property, infringe on fair use, and all around screw with the only right holder who matters, the buyer. I don't know when the record companies and movie studios began to think they could get away with fucking over the customers, but there needs to be a time when those rights that have been removed get returned, but I am afraid what it will take.

The RIAA is trying to kill Internet Radio, but refuse to see that Internet radio is not costing them anything, and helps encourage sales. I have said it many times before, and I will say it again. when they succeed in killing Internet Radio, be it in October or a few years of then, they will whine that increasing piracy has cost them money and lowered CD sales, and will, in their typical ignorance, wave off the death of internet radio, 200 stations already, as causing the lower number of CD sales. Let me remind you all how mot of the webcaster's made their money. By links for people to buy the CD's.

:josh: posted about Windows 2000 SP3 coming out, and while I am surprised that MS released another Service Pack, since I thought they weren't doing that kind of support for anything but XP, but it looks big, as it has been quite awhile since the last one, and apparently they are working on SP4 as well, which is a good sign. I will be waiting for more reaction to it, to see if there are complications or other Trojans in the pack, but barring problems I will install it when I get back online. I recommend waiting on this for awhile, at least a week after official announcement.

No time to blog this now, but check this link out. I will read it over when I get home and blog it there. Night.

Ok, so you have likely heard that HP has threatened to use the DMCA to throw any person reporting bugs in it's software in jail. I am not sure if Carly Fiorina actually realizes what this threat means, that she is essentially saying that HP thinks it is illegal to look for and publish bugs in software. Meanwhile, Richard Clark, the cyber czar, has announced that he encourages the hacking that is meant as a way to find bugs and says that software companies cannot do as good a job of bug hunting as the users and hacker community(the true hackers, not the wannabe crackers and skript kiddiez) can. So, the government will put you in jail if you cause harm by cracking, but wants you to find bugs so that software companies can put out better product, So, do we listen to HP, who threaten to use the DMCA, or do we listen to the governments computer guy who says to go ahead and find bugs?

In a declaration reminiscent of many historical battle cries, from the war of 1812, to many more recent wars where the opening shot was fired by a ruthless bunch of crooks, Harley Aulance, a reader of The Register, wrote a sample of what kinds of bills the people of the US should be seeing from their elected representatives, but it clearly turned itself into a declaration of war in what has clearly become a battle to the end over rights and privacy. The bill was in response to the recent bill from puppeterr, I mean house rep from California, Howard Berman that would literally give the MPAA, RIAA and other unscrupulous 'copyright owners'(do they actually own many copyrights? Or do they simply rip off err, I mean represent many copyright holders?) the right to hack, disrupt and damage the computers of anyone suspected of piracy.

There are a good many points in the declaration, and I don't see anything that really I can disagree with. My view is that if someone tries to DoS my system, or network when I have one, they deserve to get the result, which would be me doing everything I can to defend my property and life, which is heavily connected to my computer and the net. If their computer, ISP or other property gets harmed in the process, well, oops, I thought they had content of mine that they were pirating, and therefore have the right to disrupt their computer, and if it is harmed, I am not held responsible, according to this law. Clearly this is a loophole that was not guessed on, in that what is good for them to do to pirates, is good enough for the rest of the net to do to them. I think that this was the reason the RIAA's site was knocked offline for several days, likely due tot he fact a smaller copyright holder was checking for and disrupting a content pirate. Sorry, Ms. Rosen, but it goes both ways.

I noticed that California is setting up an Internet law enforcement agency called Netforce to combat those who break laws on Spam and stuff on the net in that state. Interesting name for an organization, seeing as Tom Clancy is the co-creator of a series of books about an FBI managed organization called NetForce, which enforces and investigates cyber crime. I plan to look into this a little more, to see if the 30 second or so piece on CNN was heard right, but while an organization like this is required, it is hard to do that as many of the criminals operate from outside the US, and thus would be impervious to those US based laws. Anyone out there have info on this that you can point me to? Much appreciated either way.

Let's see, :chey: is confirmed for Gnomedex, with help from a friend of hers, while things are progressing nicely for the top secret geek site. As I said, I have 4 articles already for the site, and another 4 coming soon enough. It looks like :mike:'s web host got hacked, and his site hijacked, but it was quickly remedied, and answers are being asked of the host. My own attendance at Gnomedex is looking firmer, but the school site paying up is still a requisite, or a modest gift of $400 USD to cover my rent and bills for Sept. 1 would do. The one thing I am nearly certain of is that I will not be going to Ohana's, due to the fact A) I don't use PayPal, and B) do not have $10 right now to spare for a deposit. I hope all of you have a really good time, and I'll expect to hear about it when you get back to the hotel, or back from the trip if I don't make it.

Microsoft, not happy with their hidden authorization to apply unauthorized and unwanted patches at their discretion that came with the most recent WMP patch, the new Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2000 SP3 have the same or a similar clause in the EULA(which we all know so few people read). The clause reads: "You acknowledge and agree that Microsoft may automatically check the version of the OS Product and/or its components that you are utilizing and may provide upgrades or fixes to the OS Product that will be automatically downloaded to your computer,", according to The Register, and that essentially means they have root rights to your box. I just will have to recommend against installation, folks, sorry.

As well, it appears that some copies of OpenSSH from the OpenBSD mirror have been trojaned, giving whoever cracked the mirror remote access on the machine it is run on. The trojan is executed in the make, and a clean process has likely been completed by now. I am off now, see you all later in the week.

So, Tech TV mentioned in their half hour Tech Live show(boy, has that show turned into shit from what it was my first day of viewing) that NEC is going to be brining out ecologically safer computers. The only problem is these things, which are made out of mostly environmentally safe materials, are about twice the costs of a normal computer, and obviously could not be kept environmentally safe without proprietary hardware and replacement parts. I personally care a great deal about the environment, but know it is not worth it to me, personally, to make my costs anymore then they already are if I want a new computer. I can't afford a new HD right now, so a environmentally friendly computer would be entirely out of my price range, coming in around $3000 I suspect. I personally think that companies and users will not go for this either, as those who can afford to do this know better and would rather spend that money on better hardware inside the box.

So I was just watching Tech Live on TTV, and they mentioned that Motorola, who produces a large variety of electronic products from Cell phones and pagers to set top boxes and DVD players, has issued a recall for possible electrical problems in some of their set top boxes. This worries me, primarily because the set top box they showed on Tech Live is identical to mine, but they mentioned the recall was for boxes issued between May and June of this year, and mine was sold to me nearly a year ago. which is far outside of the recall period, though I assume Shaw would contact me if they thought mine was affected. It is good to see the electronics giant is able to admit it's faults, and not try to hide it's faults like so many companies do.

I have never tried to hack this thing, and doubt I will start anytime soon, seeing as I spent $200 only a year ago on this and it hasn't quite paid for itself yet(rental would have been $10 a month, so I need it for 21 months before it is paid off), but after that, I just might take a look at the innards, though I admit a TiVo is on my wish list, after I figure out if it can be used on Shaw's network. I am not sure what is required, if anything, of the cable company, but I have yet to hear of anyone on Shaw's network using one, but I have also never heard of one being kicked off the network for use of one. I know some satellite companies sell PVR's with their set top boxes, Bell I think is the primary one, but I just don't know about the cable companies, and have yet to see TiVo's for sale in the cities electronics retail outlet's. Anyone know if TiVo's are available in Canada, more specifically Winnipeg? Also, what is required to plug a TiVo into a cable outlet? Does the company have to set it up?

They mentioned on Tech Live last night that the FCC has decided that TV maker's need to convert the TV tuner's in their TV's, instead of Analog ones, by 2007 for all TV's over 13 inches(which is pretty much all of them). on TSS they mentioned that this also now applies to cell phones, with the mandated move to Digital from the Analog standard that now exists. I personally prefer digital, because it is clearer and easier to use, but it also sees that the signal is easily lost by comparison, especially in motion. If I am sitting still the signal tends to lose it's signal a lot, or is bad when in my suite, while moving the signal will be clear and strong. As well, for some reason when I was sitting in a restaurant on Tuesday I picked up my cell and it told me it was roaming, while a power off and back on my phone went back to the normal signal as it should have been. It worried me a lot to see this message, since I am sure even one minute of roaming would kill my available amount.

So, I noted on the news last night that they were showing off a TiVo/Microsoft teamed PDA/Cell phone that is windows powered. See, I really liked TiVo because they use Linux in their very popular PVR, but this move towards Microsoft and their crap products means that they are potentially corrupted. I hope I heard the piece on Tech TV wrong, because this would be a bad sign for the company that literally broke the ground in the PVR market and revolutionized how we watch TV. Just as with the TiVo PVR I suspect that a TiVo PDA, if only available with Linux, would quickly be hacked and cracked, making it run Linux or any of a dozen other implementations of Unix. That is one thing I can say TiVo does well, is make truly hackable hardware. More when/if I get online and am able to research.

So, I am trying to catch up on all that I missed in the 2 agonizing week offline, and while I have read more then 500 emails, with only abut 400 left, and most of those ones sent since my return, I only have a few things to catch up on, and many more things to do in the next week. 1 week and 8 hours form now I will be grabbing a plane to Minneapolis, then after a 2 hour wait I will be on another flight to Des Moines, where I should arrive around noon, for a quick ride to the hotel for a quick nap then supper and a booze fest.

so, I hope it is understandable if I missed the fact that Microsoft's new licensing forces OEM's to include some OS on their computers, essentially making it illegal to ship an OS less PC if you have signed a MS licensing agreement, and I assume if you do start to, MS will pull your licensing. Nothing is said about those who might be installing Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE or any of the other dozens of distributions, or those who already have corporate licenses, and would be forced to buy two licenses for the same PC, essentially screwing the customer(what a shock).

Well, I have to applaud Dell for their move to ship an OS, as per the licensing agreement, which does not, naturally, say what OS it has to be since MS cannot begin to justify how they feel they can tell people what OS to use, even though they market and pressure everyone to the point of annoyance. The story is that Dell, in order to comply with the requirements of the new licensing for resellers, has begun to ship FreeDOS in a box with their n-series corporate boxes, which then allows the customer to put whatever they want, though there will surely be harassment form Microsoft if it is anything but Windows.

Microsoft's explanation of this, though I have not heard one, is surely to be that due to the rampant piracy of their software(yeah, their bottom lien is sure hurting), they have the right to force an OS to be installed, or else they figure it is surely going to be used to pirate a copy of Windows. Again, they feel they have the right to say how and when we use our computers, and charge their customers the earth for the pleasure of having so little control. Tell me again, how did they become the standard? Oh, yeah, DOS. I forgot.

Ok, so the biggest story of the last 24 hours is that the owners of the Godzilla trademark have issued a cease and desist order on the owner of the DaveZilla blog, because he has some semblance of a dinosaur and looks too much like the best selling Godzilla movies and between the name and the dinosaur amount to copyright and/or trademark infringement. So my question, being an open source geek, is why have they not gone after the Mozilla project, which is huge, well known, and a much bigger infringer if it is such? I mean why go after one small, tiny blog, infinitesimal in the big picture, and ignore the big browser project?

Ok, now to the news of the night, oddly just as the midnight rerun of TSS is doing the same run down too. The Davezilla story is up front, for them, but for me, that is past, and I will start with the Microsoft infested Linux World. CNET has a list of articles about that show, including the biggest topic of discussion, the presence of Microsoft at the largest Open Source conference, which no one could have predicted, and fewer can figure out other then perhaps MS being more open about spying and stealing from the community.

The Register did their usual thorough read of the MS license agreement, this time the license for Windows 2000 SP3, which was released recently. The details look grim, and no doubt they look even worse for those on XP who blindly(or unknowingly) installed that version's SP1. The story says that two key pieces of the license for SP3 says that MS can both run code as they wish on your machine, and the other says they can record and share info about your OS. More reasons not to use Windows.

In this story, we learn that in all the talk about the threat of massive collapses of the American infrastructure, a test was done to see what would happen in a real terrorist attack on the nations cyber setup. Well, the predictions were wrong, at least in the mock setup. It looks like it was well done, and showed that while the collapse of the twin towers was obviously a shock, and knocked out a lot of services in the area, and across that part of the US, things are not as threatened as we all have talked about. Mind you, this could not have possibly tried every form of attack, and it will not last forever.

ActiveBuddy won a patent right to the IM bot, and with the court win, they are expected to find themselves locked out of every major IM program, and shunned by users and geeks alike, who were looking forward to an opening of the market. The fact they are essentially saying that anyone who can think for themselves in the creation of a competing product is thieving and cheating the company out of patent royalties. Hmm, I wonder if they have spoken to MS lawyers lately, because they are sure spewing a load of shit.

In a typical ploy that has become wide spread, the Anti gray market alliance(AGMA for the purposes of this) has set up a snitch line on the web for those looking to rat on those they suspect are thieves, and those they don't like for the purposes of making their lives hell, which I am willing to bet is what 90% of the calls will be about. I still don't quite understand what gray market software is, but I would guess it is resold used software, which people buy instead of new copies that the software makers make money off. Like I said, typical.

Red Hat and Dell, two giant's who have worked closely to provide Linux to resellers, have agreed to work even closer, which is not surprising in light of the recent Dell instigation of MS. The deal will be to provide the much needed service of helping enterprise level customers migrate easily to Linux. "Specifically, the two companies will offer assessment, planning and proof of concept, application porting and implementation services. All services will include a total cost of ownership to detail potential cost savings, according to the companies. Dell Professional Services already offers services for the design, configuration and implementation of Red Hat Linux Advanced Server on Dell's PowerEdge server as well as PowerVault and EMC Corp storage systems. "

In other Linux World news, IBM is using the show to slam other supporter's of the Open Source community in a very uncool way, by saying they were the first to back Linux, and the rest of the supporter's are only following the leader. While IBM does have the honor of being one of the first big name backer's of the great free OS, they should not be throwing sticks of dynamite form inside the glass house that is their home. They have done a lot of very unopen crap since they announced their support of Linux, and have no room to slam anyone.

That's about it for today, though I am sure there is something I am missing. A couple of other links, helpful ones too, that I wanted to point out are a couple of non Blogrolling.com user's who have provided me with some of the 350+ average daily visits and 40 MB+ bandwidth that are rolling here. The first is CYBERFROST.net, which while it could use a design touch up, looks pretty nice, and has me listed as the Geek's only links :{D>. The second is Dredel BLOG, which I will admit I have not read much of, but form what I have read is one to look at whenever you can. On that, night to you, one and all.

:bob: makes some really good points this morning in his post, I had not heard that XP DRM was able to prevent playing of MP3's, be they self ripped or not, at least those ripped in WMP, but I would think the really easy solution would be to not play them in WMP, which is an insidious piece of shit in and of itself. Another story Bob is the utter ignorance of Microsoft shining through as they attempt to minimize the gaping hole recently found in SSL, trying to act as if it is nothing, and of course blaming the people who found, waited on and announced the bug.

Microsoft makes no good points, and obviously the person who wrote the bulletin has no technical experience, and the person they were speaking with for references knows nothing about SSL and the hole. They start out saying the original security alert was inaccurate, which is not true, and it is clear they are simply making excuses and trying to blame anyone else. My question is how long it should be expected that those who discover a flaw wait after informing the vendor? I mean clearly MS thinks it should be always until a patch is released, but what if the vendor claims there is not flaw and refuses to patch? Then what?

Ok, :jim: mentioned that we tried to get PGP running on his system and it nearly forced a reboot, if not for the System Restore turning itself back on again. Well, I know Jim is unhappy about this suggestion, but I want to try again in the new year. Why, you might ask? Well, I reported awhile back that NAI had shut down sales and production on PGP, and was trying to hawk it off on someone willing to pay too much.

Well, someone paid a price, no idea what, for the rights to PGP, and thus PGP Corporation is born, and while I don't know if Phil is going to be working there, it is nice to see the announcement of the new company, and that they are bringing out a new version of PGP, the eighth rendition, around the end of the year.

I also hope this will make the version of PGP I have work right, and allow me to upload keys to the domain server at keyserver.pgp.com. So, Jim, what do you say? Can we talk securely in January? Don;t forget to grab my key, and the blog key. Soon, my TSGS email will have one too, when it is launched.

Ok, who do you think is bigger, ore powerful, and is more willing to 'lay the smack down' as one person would say, the greedy monopolistic RIAA, or the US backbone providers and ISP's, let's call them the internet? Well, The Register reported earlier this week that the RIAA had sued the backbone providers, AT&T among them, over the fact the providers are not blocking music sharing services and web sites from China, specifically one called Listen4Ever, that share music. They are essentially suing the net. Uh huh...

So, if you think the RIAA is bigger, badder, and more willing to kick some ass, raise your hand. Ok, and those who think the monopolists are going to get their asses kicked by the Internet, raise your hands. While I will grant the RIAA points for determination, and the fact they will likely eventually get their law, and kill themselves corporately, I think they are going to get a good ass whooping from the backbone providers. This User Friendly comic from Sunday speaks volumes. I think that while Napster, Kazaa, and other file sharing networks may have once been the fly, it is the RIAA's turn, and they are going to go splat. Go get 'em AT&T!

You may have heard of late of the argument in the Open Source community over political efforts in some places to make Open Source the only option. From a politician in Peru rebutting Microsoft in their fear tactics, trying to scare governments and corporations with words of collapse and poverty. I have to applaud anyone who is dedicated to do a point by point rebuttal of the FUD and lies So few who do are listened to, that when a non geek does, people listen and take strong consideration into the words.

The argument is over whether it is right to legislate what kind of hardware and software can be used for government or anyone else. You see, the problem is that most people agree it is wrong, but when you are faced with Microsoft trying to use legislate Open Source out of existence, you have to fight fire with fire. Tim O'Reilly thinks that it is wrong to politicize technology, while Microsoft has clearly become a political lobby, not only a software company. If anyone thinks the Hollings bills aren't helped along by Microsoft is kidding themselves.

Thomas C Greene, a writers at The Register, has a problem with this, and says so. In the oddest opening barrage of a verbal war, Greene starts off by giving Tim O'Reilly his due as a long time advocate of Open Source, saying "We'd be hard pressed to identify a person with better open-source advocacy credentials than Tim O'Reilly," which is an excellent point. That said, I think the point of the Linux World march and the Peru bill are that Open Source is often overlooked, and this has given the tech's and geek's the much needed chance to bring up the subject with their managers, which seems to have been the point. the threat of forced use shed light on the OSS world.

Ok, I know I am a few days late here, but I have been super busy, blogging poor, and now have time to kill so I am going to mass blog. Ok? Good. This story, the one about an ISP who plans on blocking access to the RIAA's web site, and blog the RIAA form accessing their network, is one that must have the RIAA fuming. The ISP warns it's users that they are going to set up a fake Gnutella server and anyone trying to access that service will be banished, but I predict the RIAA will really not like that idea, even though it is the same thing they have been crying about for so long, that ISP's are not policing their users. I feel the RIAA wants to police users, that's all.

I suspect that we will see two kinds of ISP's soon enough, those that allow the RIAA to monitor and blame the RIAA and the user when a system goes down, temporarily or permanently due to hardware failure caused by flooding, and those ISP's who send out regular letters of warning to the RIAA and eventually blocking for inappropriate conduct. I hope that the latter outweighs the former, but I somehow doubt it. I know monitoring and censoring will happen, it is, after all, only a matter of time, but who does it makes a lot of difference.

I take note that almost every major news site is reporting that the RIAA has dropped it's suit of major US backbone providers like AT&T after the disputed site, listen4ever, apparently took themselves offline, says the RIAA. Now, whether the site was voluntarily taken offline, taken offline by the enormous traffic rush that headed it's way after the suit, or whether other means were used by a certain Ass., I wonder, because a site that did refuse to go offline suddenly going down is a very odd thing to find. I would say that all three of the previously mentioned possibilities are more realistic then they simply decided to pull the plug.

For a long time PayPal, the net non-bank that acts like a monetary Gestapo with those who try to withdraw large sums of money, has finally lost a battle it could not afford to lose when it was decided by a very wise judge that the PayPal launched and managed private arbitration system for those who have disagreements with accounts being closed is not enough, and gave way for lawsuits against PayPal. The money swapping service has always avoided this, even going as far as to include a line in their user agreement saying you cannot sue them. The judge allowing this is a great sign for the many people who have problems with PayPal, and the deluge of expected lawsuits could quickly cause eBay to reconsider their purchase. Watch for a lot of suits against PayPal over problematic transactions and closures.

Taking their war on Linux and the hackers from the Windows world to the console world it recently tried and failed to invade and conquer, Microsoft has put up a want ad on their site for someone to research 'security' circumvention measures and to write walk arounds for those measures to add to the XBox. This person is obviously being hired in an attempt to ensure that the Linux on XBox project never pays off, and surely the future version so of the XBox and perhaps also software updates to it will have ways to get around the work arounds, and likely more stringent anti Linux licensing which will make it entirely illegal and a violation of the TOS meaning they could legally come and take away your precious XBox. Yeah, Linux isn't a threat... no, not at all...

Ok, so TSS mentioned that the much anticipated XP Service Pack 1 has finally been released, and it appears to be the only source for a fix that popped up in the help system in XP, a very dangerous one that could allow malicious code to be executed on your computer that could wipe out significant amounts of your data, even though it appears the windows directory on your XP box would be safe. It is clear that the immediacy of this bug is the one and only reason Microsoft is putting the patch only in this SP, which also forces the user to go through a clearly buggy product key check that has messed up at least one check, live on TechTV, when the SP claimed an obviously good key was a bad, pirated one. Oops! I cannot recommend this, but will try to find a workaround.

Update: The fix for this problem, without the patch, can be found at Leo Laporte's weblog, and from those I have talked to this works well. The problem that Leo pointed out, I think, is a good one, but twisted in my mind from his meaning. His quandary is that we don't know what else is there, and my thoughts are that this has not been a coincidence that XP SP1 has anti piracy and privacy features, as well as the only patch for this bug. My only question is what the bug will be next time that is found right before SP2 and forces people to upgrade again, and perhaps upgrade to XP from 2000, which they have sworn to not support any further. God, I hate XP.

"For the past few weeks, Moline, Ill.-based QliTech Linux Computers has been selling PowerBooks, iBooks and Power Macs containing both Mac OS X and one of several flavors of Linux, designed to run on PowerPC chips used by Macs. QliTech is capitalizing on newfound celebrity status that the Mac is enjoying within some circles of the open-source community. The trend has been growing since Apple moved to Mac OS X more than a year ago. The new operating system has an open-source core and a Unix base that shares more in common with Linux than did prior Mac operating systems." So opens an article on Linux and Mac OS X working beautifully together, something Apple has to like seeing as they have a great OS and something the users like to avoid the high upgrade price of 10.2.

So, the LA Times has an article entitled 'Crashing the Blog Party'(REGISTRATION UNFORTUNATLY REQUIRED), which discusses why the 'blog-o-sphere' is rife with argument and anger over the invasion by dead tree journalists in the community. Not to forget that an original dead tree journalist is a blogging star(Doc Searls) and many other's who are also dead tree journalists got in on the ground level with personal blog's and thus are not counted in the arguments. Now, 'I don't mind dead tree journalists starting blogs, for I describe a blog as a personal, non edited(other then for spelling), operated by one person and controlled by no one other then the author.

Now, if a dead tree journalist starts a company sponsored, controlled and edited web site that only looks like a blog, they aren't a blogger, only an imitator. A blog must be free of editorial influence, and a lot of these new journalist blogs do not have this. Doc Searls' blog does not have any of this, as he appears to have known how important this was well before blogging became popular and chic. Steven Levy did a blog to demonstrate blogging for his Newsweek article, but the only focus was those blogs being covered by the article, and those talking about it, but it was clearly not a blog as we know them, and it was also clear that he had no interest in continuing beyond the article. That is not a blog, that is an extended ad. That is the difference between a blog and a blad(ad in the form of a blog).

Ok, so The Register reported yesterday that AES, the expected replacement for RSA and DES, has been cracked, of sorts. Just as with RSA when it first came out, a low key size and thus lower security version of the algorithm led to a very easy and fast cracking of the new encryption algorithm. Now, RSA had not been cracked in the 128 bit key size, and I would say that there is a good chance that this will have the same shelf life, or better as key sizes continue to grow. Anyone know something I don't know in my estimation of this story?

Ok, so Richard M Stallman spoke. What's new? He spouted what must by now be a form letter to prevent having to type the same drivel over and over again. He wrote to Linux Journal and spouted the correction he continues to make between Free Software and Open Source, and even has the audacity to say in a letter to SecurityFocus' Jon Lasser, in response to his article Lobbying for Insecurity that, essentially, Free Software is more popular and desirable to developers. Hmm, so how many people use non open source software versus free software? Better question, how many people even know or care about the difference. I mean other then Richard and Bradley.

Ok, so the FBI and the federal government of the US are trying to increase cyber security by publicizing and will be spending millions on advertising for this. So, essentially, they will spend millions of dollars on what geeks and admin's have been trying to say to the public for more then a decade. Get a firewall. Encrypt. Patch. I see little new in this message. I still can find few users of PGP, and those who do have it refuse to use it. Yes, it is complex, but would you rather lose your email because your password passed in plain text and your email was used to Spam? How about your net because you didn't patch, or you left a gaping security hole like IM open without a firewall? I would think not. I have been saying this for years, as have many others. What's new again?

So, the one industry, or set of industries, who have made a habit of suing people into submission, be they right or wrong, have taken a number of hits as of late, being sued preemptively by a maker of live video editing software, and now Intertainer is suing AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal and Sony, accusing them of conspiracy to fix prices in the digital distribution of entertainment. This is a long overdue event, as the music and movie monopolists have been screwing over the little competitors and the buyers for a long time. I have mentioned before the fact that CD's have not gone down in all the time they have been around, which is the opposite of every other music media. The movie companies have been just as bad, in the fact that movie prices have not gone down. Movies have not gotten that much better, either.

So, US Representative Rick Berman, the man bought and paid for by the recording, software, and movie industries to get them the right to hack the suspected copyright infringers, was interviewed by Wired and he tries to defend why the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA(emphasis on the BS) should have the right to do what other Americans would get life for. Sadly, I have not had time to read it, and likely never will as there is no reason for them to be able to hack legally. Yes, they need electronic tools to fight electronic piracy. They have always had them. they simply want more, worse tools, instead of trying to use the ones they have. It's called a monopoly.

The only reason they need the ability to hack is that they are either unwilling or unable to really compete with the small time record labels and refuse to consider the idea of a change in business and distribution models. Now, for my reasoning. Any other business, even Microsoft, is willing to change the way they do something. Microsoft did that with the internet when they realized they missed the boat, and other then the anti privacy measures and other junk, they make the best browser I ever used, IE 5.50. There are many other examples of companies changing as the time and tech does. So, I think, we need to ask why the record companies, movie companies, and software companies(including Microsoft) feel the need to resort to killing innovation instead of adopt it?

Ok, so I failed to bring this up because I was fairly sure it would go away. The Grecian lawmakers made a law clearly attempted to ban online gambling, but which had the effect of banning all playing of games in public, from Gameboy to games on a laptop, due to some truly horrid wording. Well, a Judge, as I predicted, was wise enough to overturn charges again several web cafe owners, who were charged under this law and faced prison time and hefty fines. Well the government has clarified the law, but I predict now this could make matters worse. This clarification still can be interpreted to outlaw web cafe's, and really doesn't appear to clarify much. Gaming in public is still illegal, and it really only clarifies what the law already allowed gaming in private. Look for more on this soon.

As proof that blogging is a big thing, I note that The Register(US) has a news piece up that announces that the queen of PocketPC, Beth Goza, is admitting she is cheating in a game on her XBox. Now, some may say that The Register is not the biggest and most unbiased news site, but the fact that a blog post is used at the center of a news article on a widely read news site is a great thing to see, and a major occasion in the blogging world. I doubt this will become habit, nor do I think that the New York Times or Wall Street Journal will use blog posts as the center of major articles any time soon, but it is still an important development. My big question is what's the full title of the game she was playing, because if it is a so far unknown to me BTVS game then I just may consider the XBox.

Ok, so I was not sure where this falls under. Stupid or tech news, but since it is tech, and it is newsworthy, I decided to add this in tech news. As you all know by now, Sam Cook, aka BeachTechie, got into a lot of trouble at school for posting form school on his blog. The thing is, that the school did a lot of wrong things in this. First off, whatever he signed must be illegal, as he is a minor. Second, he has had a lot of contact from friends and strangers supporting him, and many of those have a lot of legal knowledge and have looked into this and given their opinions, which is that the school broke their own rules by making an emotionally distraught minor sign an affidavit about his life outside of school.

I don't care if Sam is a blogger, nor do I really give a shit that some student thought "UPDATE: fjdsfjdslkfjklsdjf" was code. It is no business of the school's what he writes on his personal site, and while he did break the AUP in all likelihood, but in a time when a university is offering a course on blogging, a school that offers courses on Oracle, which I cannot find any school in Western Canada that offers in high school, that feels blogging is a irrevocable crime is both ridiculous and beyond belief. To the admin level at his school: Get over the attitude, get whatever is stuck up your asses(including your heads) out, and come into the 90's, please. It is pathetic that one student is pressured and traumatized for the sake of an action that is considered education by many.

I have avoided this subject for good reason, the basis of it being that I don't want to repeat my views from when the IBM HD failure fiasco happened, but now that even an almost unheard of, by me at least, organization from the UK is writing about this, I feel the fact that Fujitsu is ignoring customers and accusing suppliers on the topic of this round of hard drive failures at astonishing rates, I feel it best I comment a little. I honestly have never been a fan of their hard drives, but then again I have been mostly a Maxtor fan personally, as many other drives from IBM, Seagate, and a couple Fujitsu's have failed miserably on me, several very suddenly.

That said, the treatment by Fujitsu, of primarily it's customers, even going as far as talking badly about a company no longer in business to sue them for slander, it horrendous, and while this all may have begun as an attempt, as the letter says, to save stock value, it has now had a much worse impact on the companies relationship with it's customers, several of whom do the buying for major companies who buy millions of dollars in hardware a year. I doubt the reputation of Fujitsu will ever recover, and if it does it will take a lot of goodwill, and I know I will never recommend their hardware again. I cannot recommend hardware that is so likely to fail , so probable to cause more troubles in lost data, lost time, and lost money. So, back to Maxtor drives for recommendations.

I work for a customer service center. I deal with a tobacco companies current promotion. They offer an option for movie tickets. One of the participating theaters is Regal Entertainment. Regal Entertainment just signed a deal with IBM to port all of their applications and computers to Linux. Yeah, it may seem like I am trying to stretch this a little, but these are all big parts of my life. It is nice to see retailers becoming the next big industry to move to Linux and away form the Beast, but I can't help but wonder when Microsoft will use their ultimate card as strongly as they can, the card being politics and cash. I mean we all know that they are using money now, but they have so much more to spend still. The article is an interesting one, and looks at Linux from the view of one who has obviously never heard of Linux, but knows, somehow, the names like Sun, IBM , and companies like that.

Ok, maybe not, but I can imagine so many things I would do if I had a 320 GB Hard drive. Yes, that's right, I said 320 gigabytes of data. I tell you, if these weren't family sites, I would praise this idea with profanity till red in the face. I will simply say this is an amazing thing, and proves that we are moving closer to a terabyte drive in much less time than many though we were when we hit the gigabyte mark. I know this may be older news, but I am sure happy to see the progress some drive makers are making, while others are clearly not able to make a decent drive, based on the comments I have received.

So Wired says in an article on the founders of the Linux Revolution as a where are they now type of article, that "now that the Linux revolution is over". Excuse me? Might I ask when the revolution died? the revolution may have simply changed faces, going from a underground movement to a mainstream competing OS that practically owns the server market, and one that now has the desktop squarely in the crosshairs, but the revolution is still nowhere near over. We still need to change the way business and software companies think, and how MS runs their business. Much to come.

Well, The Register reports that Microsoft put out a list of top ten things people want from Microsoft, specifically to Windows Media Player. It looks, at least to me, to be more like an advertisement for more XP use and add on's, while the replies by The Register author John Lettice are fairly accurate, though I would not have been nearly as nice about it. If Microsoft thinks anyone but them and the content distributors want DRM then they are swallowing more then their own bull shit. I don't use WMP. I have used it a couple of time for playing WMV files, which I have found no other way to play, but I certainly will not be using it to rip, burn or play MP3's anytime soon. Of course, I won't use XP either, so it looks like I am safe.

Well, I thought something was up. I though a few sites have been a little slow, and email to some people was taking especially long. Well, I now know why, that is the fact that the WorldCon err WorldCom owned UUNet is having some problems, but there is no clear reason why. Some believe it is Slapper worm, others think it is a fiber cut. Yet others think it is router misconfiguration. Either way, this could reasonably be expected to continue in that WorldCom (Geez, I just have a hard time resisting putting an N instead of an M) is in serious financial troubles, and if there is no one paying to keep up those lines and trunks across the US and the world, then the service disruptions could easily be more frequent as their troubles grow, and worse if they fold.

I know, I might be a hypocrite for this one, but I think it only right. A Microsoft employee tried saying that Palladium, their new DRM and content protection enforcement hardware model, wouldn't, in fact, be able to do some of the things it had been claimed to be possible, claims I add made by Microsoft itself. So, in response, one of the listener's to the speech has filed for patents on doing exactly what Microsoft claims Palladium cannot and is not intended to do. You see, the logic is this. If Palladium is not going to do these things, then Microsoft cannot be worried about this, and will not try to stop this application. If they do intend to do this, and are, as many suspect, full of shit, then this will prevent it by the patent being enforced strongly by it's owner. That's called Win-Win.

In a story from Wired, Reuters, a world renowned news services, has been accused by several Scandinavian companies, most prominent of which is Intentia, a Swedish IT group, of hacking their services and releasing their quarterly results before the company was ready, forcing the company to release the results itself earlier then it had planned. "Intentia said that an internal investigation revealed evidence of an 'unauthorized entry' into its IT systems 'via an IP address belonging to Reuters'." Sadly, Intentia itself may be the most responsible, due to a pathetic lack of proper security, 40 bits only, in a world where 64 bits is too weak. Other companies are accusing the same, which leads to many questions.

Ok, so the first big story, I will get to the review of the event in a moment. The story is found on many big news sites, and it has been covered on a ton of blogs, like Brad, Mike, and an excellent post by Tony. The story is that of Microsoft killing off the usefulness of Windows 98 through ME, including XP and NT, by not allowing Office 11 to be tested on or coded for any version of Windows before Windows 2000. To say this is pathetic is an understatement, and while Mike thinks those who use 95 and 98 would not want to use Office 11, I think that is wrong, as I know a number of people, including a co worker, who uses Office 2000 on her Windows 98 box. Microsoft will likely back off on this a little, just so we all think we won.

Ok, so I have no idea what the requirements are for the judgeship in the US, but clearly the requirements have lowered as of late. I mean how the Judge in the Microsoft anti trust case can actually find the deal that George gave as a gift to Bill right and proper, I will never understand. This is ridiculous, and a sell out by the judiciary in the US, adding only to the insult of the DoJ selling out in the first place. In the end, MS was found guilty. Their punishment is an improvement of their death grip on the market. How is that fair? This deal is only second in both clarity and shortsightedness to the school deal of 2001. Frigging ridiculous! WebGirlie? Thoughts?

So, The Register has a very good and thorough examination of the many and huge loopholes in the Microsoft/DoJ settlement, and how Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the judge in this case, made the situation much worse by taking out several much needed safety measures. The changing of the technical committee from outsider based to MS shareholder based is a huge mistake. No self serving MS stakeholder would ever report when their own company was screwing up, knowing it would likely cost the company, and bring down the stock price. As well, the loophole is wider now for reasons why MS can say no to releasing API's, which essentially makes this new version even more toothless than before. Thank, your (dis)honor, for screwing over the public.

I am reading a few letters that have been received over at The Register, and from the ones I have read so far, a lot of people are pissed off, rightly so, over the gift from George Bush to Bill Gates that is the doJ se(a)ttlement that was negotiated and then approved by a Bush supported and likely equally bought judge who clearly, as one reader put it, "was selected to return a verdict." and that is a good point. I think this was wrong, the decision to have MS regulate itself will prove to be the worst decision in technology, and that the ruling that anything brought before the committee cannot be used in court will prove to be the easiest way for MS to avoid any further legal action.

One person kindly pointed out that goal with this was supposed to be remedy, not punishment, but I think that the solution was reward, not remedy. Another pointed out that like at AT&T after their breakup, where breaking the court imposed rules could land a person in jail, the difference is that there was a breakup, there was proper punishment whereas here Microsoft was rewarded for their greed, their campaign donations, and their anti competitiveness which brought them the pocket book they. Look for Microsoft to be listed on many political campaign rosters as heavy contributors. After all, all they need to give is like 5 billion spread to the right people, and they'll still have $35 billion left, right? Perhaps the EU is who we need to look for to get justice...

So it seems that Eric S Raymond, lead Linux evangelist, has come across a new Memo out of Redmond, one that reveals the results of a research group done by The Beast when it comes to some of Microsoft's actions and words towards Linux. It seems that their customers are looking more favorable towards Linux now than when the Linux Jihad began, and even more think the verbal attacks and outright lies about Linux have done nothing to improve their reputation. I knew this to be true about their rep with Linux geeks, but I didn't realize that Windows users were equally perturbed.

I think the one thing that must have pissed Bill and Steve off the most is the fact that the Linux Jihad improved the number of users of Linux and gave it much publicity. Cool! '"I've suspected for a while that the anti-Linux, anti-GPL FUD campaign was actually rebounding on Microsoft. This seems to confirm it," Raymond said.' says the CNN article. I also suspected that their anti Linux FUD campaign would bite them in the ass, and I am happy to be right. Many Windows users didn't know about Linux a year ago when MS announced they were to be brought down, and the facts have shown to be the downfall of it. This does disprove my thoughts that Windows users didn't know better than to ask the right questions. I applaud you all for not really trusting them!

I really did, but I got tricked into some backgammon, which I am proud to say I lost 4 in a row, yet to have a win. Ok, maybe proud isn't the word... more like unsurprised at the fact. Ok, but back to the story. It seems that in a fit of irony in the class of the Linux Jihad improving the name of Linux, someone somehow got a virus out to the recipients of Kaspersky virus warning list. The irony aside, though, it is a point to be made that Kaspersky, being an Anti Virus designer, should have virus check on both incoming and outgoing mail, and the virus that was sent, Braid, was not new and unique. Sadly this is not the first time a anti virus list got spammed with an infectious agent.

Gary McKinnon, a british cracker who the US government is accusing of repeatedly breaking into around 100 US military computers for nefarious purposes, has been charged with several crimes in the state of Virginia, and an extradition request has been sent to Britain who has yet to catch the man. As of Monday the news services didn't know who it was, but yesterday afternoon CNN showed a news conference where the cracker was identified, and it was announced that they want him here for trial. This should be an interesting story to cover if this guy is captured. He could be, for the media, the next Mitnick.

Once again, just as in the now unsuccessful remaining states trial, someone from Microsoft, this time Craig Mundie has said that Microsoft's previous products, Windows 95, 98, 98 SE, and ME, are all too broken to fix, but this time he says what could not be said in court, that their customers should just move to Windows XP for security. Now, I am not really aiming to slam them, as it is clear people are getting frustrated with constant slamming of Microsoft, though I doubt those people read my blog anymore anyway, but I would suggest that this announcement, and the failed track record of Microsoft for those who actually pay attention, should be a sign you should more away from Microsoft altogether.

Ok, so I am lowered to this kind of round up of the news. Let us just begin, shall we? the first story I want to share has been covered, but the stories vary so much, and the angles covered unlike they usually are from the particular news sources, I am not really sure how to take it all. The Register reports the story as salvation, while the Wired reports it as death knell. Talk about confusing. The story, of course, if that of the fact Congress has passed a bill seemingly to, as the original attempt, defer the need of web caster's to pay huge royalties unnecessarily. The confusing things is all parties on the webcasting side, sell outs and hobbyists alike, are heralding this as a saviour to webcaster's. This doesn't sound right. The sell outs are also warning us of danger, but I can find none.

Next, the british hacker accused of hacking the Pentagon it seems used a commercial tool, and used his girlfriends email address to do register it. This is a so called veteran hacker. Meanwhile, a late addition to the homeland security bill(why are late additions never good ones? or short ones?) makes hacking punishable by life. The Cyber Security Enhancement Act (CSEA) expands the ability of police to conduct Internet or telephone eavesdropping without first obtaining a court order, and offers Internet providers more latitude to disclose information to police. The house passed this before, but the Senate killed it. At the risk of the Homeland Security bill being turned down, hopefully the Senate kills this damned bill again.

Lastly, PC vendors and Intel set their Christmas time hopes on the new 3 GHz processors. Intel is trying to make a big deal of this, making it seem like everyone needs these new processors, with HyperThreading and all. They fail to mention that precious few programs and no OSes I know of make use of HyperThreading, and they forget that no one is buying computers right now because they do not need it. Yes, they are still following Moore's law, but people are following economic laws, in that they do not buy a 3 GHz when all they do is Word Processing and email. It's major overkill. I can do all the things that most people do on their computers just fine with my 266. Why the hell do they need a 3 GHz? Intel says so, that is the best excuse I can give. Bah! Marketing!

So I see that the CEO of Microsoft Israeli has not learned from the well publicized report saying that lies and FUD surrounding Linux did not help Microsoft, in fact helping Linux greatly, and that the customers really didn't like all the BS espoused by Microsoft executives. You see, the CEO, Arie Scope, has announced that companies going with Linux solutions need to begin asking for indemnification from the suppliers, most prominent of which is IBM, in the chance that you are sued for copyright or intellectual property infringement. Now, I am not a lawyer or anything, but I am fairly sure that if we were to all take a look at the Windows source code, there would be a great deal of infringement in there. Ahh, gotta love legislated closed source.

Ok, so I was just belatedly watching TechTV from today, and saw Leo Laporte's report from Comdex. He showed a few things that really interested me, but first gave his thoughts on possible news of Apple. When the MUUG meeting had an Apple guru awhile back, he swore up and down that Apple would never create an x86 version of Mac OS, because it would erode their profit model that is essentially that they sell hardware to pay for the OS. Well, Leo mentioned that AMD CEO Hector Ruiz has a keynote tomorrow that is rumored to include Apple announcing they are going to be releasing a copy of Mac OS X for the new hammer CPU's from AMD. This will be awesome for x86 users, as well as a big change for Apple. This should be interesting. I will have to try to watch.

Now to the toys. Leo showed a few things that I really like. The main thing is an external HD by Maxtor, I believe, which will be a whopping 250 GB. Wow. I still have less than 20 in this computer, and Windows will soon be left with only 12. 250 GB. That's 50 full length DVD's without DivX compression, or 385 CD's. Whoa! I can only imagine. Ever closer we draw to the magical Terabyte drive mark and it may not take nanotech. As well, he pointed out a very low cost $50 Sandisk memory card reader that works over USB 2.0, and takes an awesome 6 different kinds of memory formats. If I ever get more memory card accepting devices, this may become useful, or maybe if I just get a laptop. I see that while Comdex may have shrunk, it is still the key product launch event.

Ok, so the SEC filling of Microsoft was made public today, it appears due to the tighter controls on the corporations of the world in the wake of Enron, WorldCon, err Com, and others. It appears something good might come from a government policy yet. Well we note that the filling shows a department by department breakdown of profit and loss, and it shows that Windows and Office have subsidized all the other stuff that Microsoft does, from Smart phone/PocketPC, to XBox. CNET and The Register both have much to say, and both make the same connections. Am I to be surprised at this? I think not.

So the Comcast AT&T merger is approved, and layoffs are on the way. We now see the new Comcast is the largest cable company in North America with a value of $60 billion. The FCC says that this will allow for a more centralized industry, but I think, like the critics, that this will only allow them to use their position in more markets, controlling more TV's, to screw over and control more people. Merger's like this, between two larger companies, is only good for the shareholders and company execs, and never good for the customers. Oh well, maybe they don't really have government granted monopolies down there.

Ok, well, I know the statement has been made time and again, but one should always be careful what they do and say, online and offline. This was proven by one little hacker who really trashed the reputation of his ex who he found out was cheating on his with an old ex. He found out she was by friends at O2, I assume a British ISP or cell company, and his revenge included posting pictures of her and he in bed in her home town, making a web site of video and pictures of the two of them mid intercourse, and more. He also hacked the provider(clearly not a hard thing with friends on the inside) and changed her profile to include nudes of her. this is why I will a) never let nudes be taken of myself and b) will never exchange solicitous emails over the net. I prefer words. Check it out.

Ever wonder why hotmail.com runs on FreeBSD? Well, most of you don't, and the rest probably know, but this whitepaper taken from a badly secured server on the Microsoft domain shows that the people at Microsoft wrote a completely honest paper on the benefits of Unix over Windows, apparently written when Hotmail was purchased by Microsoft, and it clearly explained many of the benefits, the true ones, not FUD, behind using Unix instead of Windows for your server. Sadly, and yet not surprisingly, the TechNet article made form it made it and it's message completely different, and takes away all proper meaning. If you don't understand the fact, check out that article for more info.

Ok, so I am reading a little news on this, a day off for the US Thanksgiving, and I see that there are two Microsoft related stories. The first is a story of how Microsoft is adjusting their Licensing 6.0 that, contrary to what some say, many MS reps were trying to push on unneeding companies, to try to entice those small businesses to sign up for the software rental profit model in the form of significant discounts, frequently as high as 50% off. According to Yankee Group's Laura DiDio, if a rep thinks a company is about to go with something like Open Office(I refuse to amend .org after a program's name), the rep can call and ask for authorization to offer the discount, which by the sounds of it is an incredible move that shows how much their sales of Office are suffering, and if that is true, than one must wonder how much worse that makes the other departments it props up with it's profits.

The second story is a little different. It is one of the Initiative for Software Choice, an Intel and Microsoft sponsored organization, who is attacking a report that put out by Mitre Corporation, titled 'Use of Free and Open Source Software US Department of Defense'. Their attacks are very similar to those put out before my Microsoft, so clearly the study that showed their attacks on Linux have earned them the disfavor of their customers hasn't quite sunk in yet, or they have a complete lack of control over those they contribute to, which is highly unlikely. The Mitre report has a lot of statements that can be interpreted differently based on your point of view, but to say it is not anti FOSS(I assume that to be Free and Open Source Software) is not really much of an exaggeration. The ISC accuses the OSS makers of perpetuating a thee of either or, but in reality they need to look at who writes the checks, as Microsoft has been more 'us or else' than any OSS maker. Sorry Steve, not winning this one.

Ok, so apparently some people just simply can't figure it out. The missing first chapter of Kevin Mitnick's book, which I linked to awhile back, points out the inaccuracies of several articles written about him. It is truly ironic when others use both the missing chapter and the original slanderous article as material to back up their newly slanderous article. I am happy that Darci is taking these pricks on, though still thoroughly disturbed that in the US journalists feel that they can get away with this shit. Yes, you have freedom of press and speech, folks, but you also have a responsibility to report facts and truths, and be able to prove what you write. Several times I have remove3d or corrected information I have posted her, if I was thoroughly corrected. Why can't WorldTechTribune do the same?

Ok, so MozBlog is out as it just made Mozilla crash, while trying to blog this story. w.bloggar is looking good though. Now, to the actual post. It is nice to finally see a school which is forward and logically thinking enough to actually credit a student for ethical hacking. This CNN story shows one 15 year old who really had to try hard to figure out what to do when he cracked his school's grading system, being a 4.0 GPA student already! He is now helping the school fix the hole, which was a bad password, and get this, he actually got credit for the hack. School credit! That is the kind of stuff school's need to be more open to, instead of punishing students who find holes in school systems. One can only hope this line of thought spreads like wildfire.

... He says knowing it never is. Ok, so it is almost 4 AM as I begin. I would rather not post once for each of the like 20 stories I have to post about, so I will not even comment, as that always leads me down the path to ruin. Instead, I will post the story titles and links. Hopefully this will speed the process up. Sorry for being so quick and unusually speechless, as there are a number of things that deserve comments, but I just need to get to bed, as my parents are finally picking up the monitor in the AM, and I need some sleep for work tomorrow. So, here goes.

EU tells HP ET al to scrap inkjet 'clever chips', So sorry Adobe urges more DMCA busts, Mentioned before, but the Reg's take Student gets merit award for school computer hack, Welsh Web designer pleads guilty to virus creation, One Click Fraud: more MS scammers likely, Sklyarov reflects on DMCA travails, Mandrake in Financial Crisis?, Duval Clears Up MNF Controversy, Studios See Red Over DVD Burning, Shots fired in copyright cold war, Cities Say No to Federal Snooping, Digital Copyright: A Law Defanged?, Sysadmin accused of Paine Webber computer sabotage, US Dept of Untruth prospers - Rumsfeld, US military takes pot shot at 802.11a, and lastly, SSH flaws sighted. Enjoy and be sure to comment below.

In this city, Winnipeg, Manitoba, there are now three wireless providers. MTS, the local telco, Roger's/AT&T, and Telus, from Alberta. I like my Telus number, 998-GEEK is fairly memorable after all. This story tells that in the US wireless providers will have to allow their networks to support Wireless Local Number Portability, which means that your wireless, and even land line numbers can be moved to a new wireless provider, which means that you can switch providers without losing your number that you have given out to everyone. I seriously think that this should be available for the internet, though I guess for $9 USD plus an email service, this is available.

This article on Wired shows another extremely inappropriate corporate use of the DMCA to try to bully those with less legal means into doing the wrong thing. This is not, I will add, even mentioning how totally in error the DMCA is, but that is for other past and future posts on this blog and :gm:. For those unwilling to follow that link, or too lazy, it is this. A activist group put up a parody site of the Dow corporate site, in anger over statements by the CEO of the company, and the Dow Corporation is now forcing the makers of the site take it down through their host's own host, and the place that hosts the parody site is having their service disconnected on Feb. 28th because of this and other events by the host. I think this is an outrageous abuse of the law, and is glaring evidence the law needs a make over by a just and unbiased group of people.

So, the XBox Linux project, started in early 2002, has awarded it's first bunch of money, and extended the original deadline for part two to the end of 2003, but the more important revelation today was the person who ponied up the 200 K in the first place. It has long been talked about, and theorized, who the put the cash on the table, and now we know. The strongest suspect was Michael Robertson of Lindows based on the evidence that was given when key members quit the project, as reported in this NewsForge article. It turns out they were right, and gives more credence to the opinions that Robertson is not doing the Linux stuff for the right reasons, but to take down Microsoft, making me worry that this is all a grudge match.

So, once again we are told, by Wired this time, that it is the birthday of the Internet, or at least was on the 1st of January. They reason

"perhaps the most famous of the lot is the acclaimed Jan. 1, 1983, switch from Network Control Protocol to Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. The transition from NCP to TCP/IP may not have been the sexiest moment in Internet history, but it was a key transition that paved the way for today's Internet. Call it one small switch for man, but one giant switch for mankind.com."

While it is surely not to be open sourced, Microsoft has not shot down, and seems to have actually encouraged the idea that Windows Media Player, DRM and all, can be made to work on Linux. The Register's John Lettice suggests Open Source, and questions this based on the anti GPL rants that Microsoft is as well known for as is anti Microsoft rants from a Linux Freak. First, I doubt they will Open Source it, but they may make it as free as WMP for Windows is. Second, this is not surprising at all, as Microsoft is quickly realizing that they need to put aside their biases in the OS market and take hold of the viral nature of Linux for their software. The question: Will Linux users put up with the WMP DRM crap?

Have you applied for your $20? I know I would if I could, but I cannot being of the Canadian persuasion. The big record labels, found guilty of price fixing, have tossed some cash at the problem, $143 Million in cash and CD's to be exact, to be split between those who bought CD's between 95 and 2002. The problem is, as Wired shows here, is that very few, only 30,000 people or so, have signed up for the offer. The people administering the settlement have a web site, and have been talking the deal and the resulting payout, to the media in big ways, so if you bought a CD in that time, which most people did, then go to the website for the settlement and sign up for your well deserved cash!

So the Norwegian teen who created the DeCSS program to allow him to play DVD's on his Linux box, but then distributed it on the net for free before courts ordered him not to, was found not guilty of legal violations as the program had strong legitimate uses for those of us who run Linux boxen. Wired reports "The three-member Oslo City Court found Johansen, now 19 and a household name as DVD-Jon in Norway, innocent on all counts in a unanimous 25-page ruling in the latest setback for the film industry's drive to prevent film copying." while The Register says "Judge Irene Sogn ruled that there was "no evidence" that either Johansen or others had used the decryption code (DeCSS) illegally, Aftenposten reports. Judge Sogn dismissed prosecution arguments that Johansen intended to aid and abet DVD piracy. The ruling means its legal to use DeCSS code to watch legally obtained DVD films, at least in Norway." Now, for the rest of the world...

So, after :brad: raving about the Jobs keynote, and The Woz showing upon The Screen Savers on a Segway Human Transport, I think this is the time to talk Mac, specifically the news form MacWorld. Sadly, it appears form those I know at the show that the keynote was once again the highlight, as bad as it was, and the show floor was dead. This Wired article talks about how people began lining up for the keynote at 2:30 AM, and this one from the same source talks about how there was a mêlée as people tried to get into the Woz talk which was booked into a very small area of Moscone Center.

In what has got to be a last ditch effort to win back some of the Linux converts, Microsoft has changed the name of it's next version of Windows Server from .Net Server 2003, which I still have a disk for, to Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Yes, they dropped the moronically conceived and even worse implemented .Net from the name. Now, if only we can get rid of the whole of .Net and it's plan to take over the net, we'll be doing good.

Ok, so I have for a long time ranted at how much the Canadian government seems to hate technology, and takes every measure to make us the most technologically unfriendly nation in the world. From refusing to encourage tech investment in this country, to the CD levy, the government has chosen to push away any company that would improve our technological prowess. Now Wired is reporting that the group that manages the current 21 cent per CD levy wants to raise it by more than double.

The Canadian Private Copying Collective, which is a group notorious for shunning Canadian artists for American ones who they claim are more popular, is proposing an extension of the current levies, using a study showing almost half of the CD's bought are being used to copy music(no mention of legality of said copying), but they fail to mention the fact that this study also means that more than half are being punished. Clearly the CPCC is only concerned about US artists, not Canadian ones, and are trying to stop the sale in Canada of any blank CD's. Is it me, or is this all like putting a levy on booze, because some it might be consumed by a minor? Gotta love Canadian politicians, or should I say RIAA pawns?

Ok, so Goldman Sachs released a report that vnunet.com is titling the 'Fear the Penguin' and in it they say that Microsoft should fear the explosive growth of Linux i the enterprise, that it is taking over in area's Windows just began marketing to, but Linux has a firm hold of. Microsoft was very busy protecting from all the Linux on the desktop rhetoric and failed to see that with something like Linux it has a large number of aspects it can get you in, and for a lot of those businesses that were asked in the survey(only a pool of 100, which is not that great) they got in on low end servers, moved up to high end, and are likely to hit the workstation soon. Yes, Microsoft has to fear, but we as a community need to worry what the wild tiger will do when it is caged.

So, I was reading the other day, and I was really surprised, well, actually not at all surprised, to see this story. We have seen the DMCA being used for all kinds of really stupid things, from shutting down parody sites to killing the Internet radio. Now I see that Lexmark is trying to use it to kill off the toner cartridge re-manufacturing industry. Lexmark says that the company it is suing is selling chips that illegally forge the authentication of Lexmark's own technology. So it seems that they are pissed that someone besides them is making cartridges for their printers. They are the number 2 maker. Whaa. This seems to be just as anticompetitive as Microsoft forcing OEM's to only offer Windows.

Steve Case, co founder of AOL and the brain from day one, is quitting his job as chair of the AOL Time Warner board after getting frustrated with the blame that has been focused solely on him when it comes to the lack of share value increase since the merger of the two media giants. AOL was a very well off company, and so was Time Warner. Together the companies have floundered. I will not blame Steve Case as I know he is a great businessman, I just think he was thrown in a hard situation as he went from running an ISP to running an ISP, several TV channels, and more. I don't think there should be one chair of the company, I think one should run AOL, and another should run Time Warner. Mind you, I think the merger was a mistake in the first place.

Ok, so the RIAA was hacked. Again. 4 times by the count of this The Register article, which shows that the person responsible did what they consider a political hack in that their message made references to the fact the RIAA wants the right to attack users and networks, but cannot even keep their own servers secure. the defacer then proceeds to add salt to an open wound by listing a series of file sharing tools and claiming them to be supported by the RIAA. I have to agree with the following statement: "The RIAA site has been hacked four times in recent months. Surely, they should have figured out how to put a stop to this by now?" You'd think, wouldn't you?

So it seems that now the President Bush appointed United States Sentencing Commission cannot figure out how hard to punish computer criminals like hackers and virus writers. I think it is safe to say that logic would dictate that a hacker should not get more prison time than a murderer, but that, I assume, is why this group is looking to the public for input. I have no say, even though I can be convicted and sentenced under those laws, so I have to ask you all to add some sensibility into this, since we all know that there will be many lobbyists who will be pushing for tougher laws.

Even the US Supreme court are full of politicians that are bought and paid for. This story, this analysis, and this other analysis show how moronic and political the US Supreme court is, as there is no legal justification for the continued support of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Let the mouse, and billions of other works, be free already. It is ridiculous to believe that this law encourages innovation. Disney has hardly innovated at all, making name for itself on one mouse. I is about time the US government realized that until they change the laws to allow for new players to enter the markets they will never have true innovation in the areas that the original authors meant to be open, not filled with collusion and price fixing.

Ok, so the official number for RIAA site hacks is 6 times in as many months. A few points become quite clear, if they were not before. They suck at tech. They cannot innovate worth a damn, but we knew this already as the MP3 revolution has left them scrambling to legislate it out of existence. Second, they do not get the web. These people can make billions off the stuff they know, that is to say off ripping off the artist's at every turn, but in the first hack mentioned in the number above they got hacked the same way as the most recent one. Hello? Even the newest computer user knows better than to leave a hole open that is used once to your knowledge. I am seriously considering advising they hire an outside development and security, as each hack just proves they know fuck all about technology, which really explains why they need the law to kill the MP3.

I am not surprised, or I should say I wouldn't be surprised if this were a true situation, but I doubt at this point that the RIAA is that stupid to go to an outside firm that is clearly very vengeful and loose lipped. I mean don't get me wrong, I have little or no respect for the lobbying group representing the greediest, dirtiest pricks in corporate America, but I doubt that Hillary Rosen, technophobe that she is, would actually be stupid enough for this. She would(or perhaps is) more likely to go with individuals that work full time for them and not likely to go to the press. Good try, though I have agreed with Mr. De Raadt "He's a funny guy". Enough said.

Here are a few stories that have been attracting the moths, and I figured it is best to post and get them out of the way. The first is a Wired article pointing out that while there are a lot of vulnerabilities in many OSes, very few of them are being exploited in a public way, ie viruses, major hacks. Next up is The Register(what's with IP's in their URL's now?) talking about the lack of macro and floppy viruses. I have noticed this as well, but we have far too many easy to write and execute mail worms to make a difference.

Next up we have the blogosphere, we have this one about Chinas blocking blogs. It seems to be limited to the focused group of Blog*Spot users, and seems to be nationwide in the communist nation. Is this possibly a case of 'you know you're big when you get blocked by China'? I mean Google, CNN, now Blog*Spot?

Next up we have this one about a new startup out of Dublin talking advantage of the blogging revolution. The apparently want to make blogging software so mobile phone users can easily blog from their phones, and there is a mention of the new camera add on's to phones, so one can safely assume that this will play a big role. Maybe they will come up with a way to make blogs easily readable by phones too.

Ok, I wasn't going to post this yet, but I felt it relevant. MandrakeSoft, the France based Linux distributor, has filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, protection from bankruptcy. Their web site states "The liabilities accumulated by MandrakeSoft through a series of quarterly losses have prompted the company to file for "declaration de cessation des paiements". The filing, similar to the U.S. Chapter 11-Reorganization, took place on January 13, 2003." This is a hard thing for fans of the distro to see, but it is not unexpected as Mandrake has been panhandling for money in every way possible for months now. This is what happens when you download a distro and use it, but do not support the industry.

So, Microsoft has finally, after more than 2 decades in business, decided it will offer a dividend to it's customers. Now, this is not too unusually, companies do it all the time, right? Not tech companies. Especially not tech companies who are known to have questions about their profitability in the 2004 3 fiscal year. So, Why are they doing this? Well, you recall when I said that the DoJ cave in was a gift from Dubya to Bill Gates? It appears likely it was only a favor, one Bill has no returned. This article at The Register makes a very convincing case that now that George W has a dividends tax repeal in front of congress, Bill stepped up to help it along.

I appears that a Dell Latitude laptop was the machine that caused an explosion in a South African diplomat's home. This Register reported on Thursday that a laptop had exploded while the diplomat's 15 year old daughter was using it, but it was not then known which brand or model. They then reported earlier today that the laptop was a Dell Latitude(gee, I guess they are off my list of options, more on that in a moment though), but other information is quite sparse. Dell in South America say they have yet to be contacted by police, though it is certain that they will very soon. More on this soon, I am sure.

A little late, but worthy of mentioning still, is the announcement that Register.com had received a buyout offer form a consortium of Register shareholders who feel the company is badly run and not living up to it's potential under current management. "RCM Acquisition Co LLC, a consortium of several Register shareholders set up specifically to launch the bid and apparently led by Barington Companies Equity Partners, said it presented the board of directors with a cash offer of $4.95 per share." reports The Register. The company instituted a poison pill defense in October for just this kind of plan, but has yet to comment on the offer.

The Register has an article up that details Micheal Dell's seeming selective amnesia when it comes to Dell's policy on Desktop Linux, which he has yet to actually prove is an option when it comes to selecting a system on their online system. Aslee Vance is the one who has gone through a lot of Dell's statements on his company and Desktop Linux, but found more inconsistencies, especially that Dell insists that people choosing Desktop setup's to customize their system's have the choice to have Linux instead of Windows, which my own research shows is not an option on the 7 systems I looked at. Clearly not only does Michael Dell have selective amnesia, he has hallucinations when using Dell.com.

Ok, I knew the early reports would not be the end for awhile on the topic of the agreement between the RIAA and the Tech companies to avoid allowing the government to make policy when it comes to content protections, but I thought the articles and info would be more forthcoming. Essentially what happened is the RIAA, in a clear attempt to avoid Rick Boucher's rights protection bill, and the tech companies, in an attempt to avoid being forced to screw over their users by putting on board DRM, have come to an agreement on Digital Rights Management. Sadly, the tech companies are allowing far too much freedom to the RIAA. The agreement allows for the hacking of file sharing networks and their users, as long as it is no destructive and maintains the privacy of the users.

"In exchange, the Recording Industry Association of America agreed to argue against government requirements to build locking controls into future generations of entertainment devices to make it more difficult for consumers to share music and movies. Technology companies have complained that such controls are too expensive and complex." This is the only good part about this that I have read, but then I saw the following article, that the MPAA feels cheated in their attempts to prevent people ripping them off, and they feel this alliance is unfair. Jack Valenti said on the 14th

"The film and music industries are separate, unique enterprises with different strategies for addressing the outstanding issues concerning digital copy protection. We are not prepared to abandon the option of seeking technical protection measures via the Congress or appropriate regulatory agency, when necessary, such as the adoption of the broadcast flag or closing the analog hole. Designing ways to protect valuable creative works is very much in the long-term best interests of consumers and indispensable to the nourishment of our nation’s economy. Because of this, we believe that no reasonable alternative course of action should be eliminated from consideration. "

Yeah, the gloves are off!

So, today, a few minutes ago, Kevin Mitnick, legendary hacker, was finally allowed to touch computers again. I am not even close to thinking my site will be in the top, ya know, million or so sites he hits, but I wanted to congratulate him on making it through a time that I would certainly not have been able to. Computers have become a major part of life, and to go from not being able to touch one to having unlimited access, it must be amazing. From the sounds of Darci's post, it seems that they will both be very busy for the next few days as many people want to know how his first days back online have been spent.

I am not in a rush, per se, but I really have not the energy to comment on every single point. the first one up is the fact a web security group came up with a list of the ten most critical vulnerabilities found in web apps. This is by no means a specific list, but it might be some stuff to keep in mind for the programmers out there. Next we have Salon writer Siva Vaidhyanathan really trying hard to be encouraging in the face of utter defeat in the copyright issue. Lastly, Wired laments the many varied and ultimately inappropriate new uses of the DMCA.

This article is one geek reminiscing how the closed source software is actually the new kid on the block, not the old wise man. I was at first mad when reading, and saw them say Linux was a new thing, but then further reading cleared up the context they were using, and it is true, they did do a lot of this stuff far before Linux was in existence, hell, some of them were doing it before I even existed. Best quote: "Linux is not so much about building a better operating system, or even a cheaper one," Ferrell said. "It's about self-actualization and user involvement. It's about people with knowledge and creative insight being allowed to participate in the process by which one of their fundamental social institutions (the Internet) is brought into their homes."- Robert Ferrell

Ok, so I have 24 items in my news story folder under favorites, and this is surely a sign I need to quickly clear them out in a big way. Since I know of no other way, I will do a news roundup, hoping to get out about 15 out, as I have other stories I want to cover, like the MS Java thing, and the Slammer worm. Not to mention Amazon going into the black, and the last of stories from Linux World. What else does one have to do when the rest of the continent and large parts of other ones, are watching second class football and half time shows with artists that bore on their best days. Ahhh, enough with that, let us focus on the task at hand, which is to provide some quick links for perusal.

First up we have the US District court ruling upholding the DMCA's allowance for copyright owner's to force ISP's to turn over user info without a judge's ruling. To say I thin that Judge Bates is a moron would be understating my feelings. Next, we have bet365 apologizing to it's user's for sending them the Avril Lavigne virus. They also provided an explanation which is really a rarity in tech companies. We also have a link about a piece of spam sent out to media the other day all about, well, spam. The irony of this is not to be mistaken, and even Wired points out the frustration of the mail.

Next we have an The Register article about the Gartner Dataquest report that they expect tech spending to rise a little this year, but not very much. This is a good thing, as tech has been suffering for far too long. I recommend Linux server's and Red Hat desktops to spend but save at the same time. A big story this week was the fact that live on The Screen Savers Kevin Mitnick went back online for the first time in years. I even saw Kevin on CNN today talking about newly being online, and the fact his first week online showed how it was so vulnerable by the Slammer worm hitting, and hard. Speaking of that The Register finally covered it.

About a week ago Fast Search & Transfer ASA, owner of AllTheWeb, and Ask Jeeves, owner of the latest Google wannabe search service Teoma, announced that they were refining their search algorithms, in order ot make them more user friendly and useful. The Register also mentions that one of their readers was kind enough to point out that the Department of Defense has kindly offered a useful interface with passwords automatically available, that lets you register a new domain, and edit current domains, without trouble.

News24 posted an article that described how an LA man is suing eBay for refusing to take down a slanderous mention in their feedback section, a section that eBay is proud of for it's ability for buyer's to check up on seller's and vice versa in order to ensure you are not buying from someone who is commonly accused of fraud. This will be a major test of this service, one that the auction site depends on heavily. Also, Wired magazine has an interesting article that describes why it is that freedom lovers love to hate Hillary Rosen so much, an article that is in the new issue. Very interesting. More soon!

So, Microsoft was ordered it had to provide Sun's Java with all copies of Windows within 120 days. Of course, Microsoft, unwilling to give any leeway to such a fierce competitor, has said, and actually filed, an appeal of the order, written by Judge Motz, claiming that there is no irreparable damage to Sun if they do not follow the order. They clearly were ungrateful and unimpressed that the original judge gave them an extra two weeks, and instead fee. that being Microsoft, no one else matters besides them. How typical.

Of course, not happy with making more money than any other man on earth, Bill has apparently decided to push their dismal server software, and bug filled(and virus attacked) database software by hiring another 1,500 people on a quota basis. If that isn't a recipe for layoff and high pressure, I don't know what is. I predict we will hear more stories of MS reps coming in and harassing admins and execs.

Lastly, in Microsoft news, is the revelation of not one, not two, not even three, but four, count them four vulnerabilities out of Microsoft in one day. First up is a buffer overflow flaw in the Locator Service in Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, second is a flaw in how Outlook 2002 handles V1 Exchange Server security certificates, third is a cumulative patch for Microsoft Content Management Server 2001, and lastly is the re-issue of an alert on a flaw in Server Message Block (SMB) signing that could enable group policy to be modified. Go to Windows update, if it still works for your OS, to get these fixed, or, if you are smart and have Auto Update disabled, go to those links for patches.

We have two stories, one is about Sun and Linux, and the other is the last from Linux World. The Register reported this week that Sun;s version of Linus, currently known only as Mad hatter, will ship in the summer with a Beta in the spring, though no dates were formally announced. This si their weapon of choice in their attempt to take market share of the desktop from Windows. Should be very interesting. This next story explains that is not only cold outside the Linux World show, but it is very cold to the typical audience, geeks, inside the show with an all business atmosphere.

Ok, so here we go, the last nit of news from the world of tech for awhile. I hope. Anyway, here we go. The first story is one from the latest issue of Wired all about the problems that Sony has as both a content and technological provider. They have a desire to stay in the music playback industry, one they were instrumental in when they created the transistor radio and the Walkman, but one they are almost being left behind in when it comes to the MP3 player market. The major problem is that they also are 'copyright owners'(which we all know is another term for corporate pirate), who wants to protect their investment. On of the many articles to look forward to in the newest issue.

Now, one article from The Register and another from Wired, all about the newest group set out to fight the Hollings bill, calling themselves Alliance for Digital Progress, a coalition of unusual allies like the BSA and DigitalConsumer.org. It is good to see someone fighting this, but hollywood is not going to let it die easily.

The group was founded on two basic principles, according to Fred McClure, president of the ADP: "We support the protection of all forms of content," he said. "And secondly, we strongly oppose efforts by the government to design and mandate copy-protection technology. In other words, no tech mandates."

Next we have another Wired article, this one about Marilynne Eichinger and her site Museum Tours, who got a letter from SBC over patents that are both vague and common design features. How long will it be until someone patents 'the use of select text to insert images in a graphical viewer'? One such patent is "selectors of tabs that correspond to specific locations in your site document" and "are not lost when a different part of the document is displayed to the user. This sounds like frames to me, which I seem to recall were debuted a long time ago, and are in wide spread use!

Lastly, we cover the Sprint DSL bug that allows malicious invaders to access user's modem's, and their info, even when the PC is powered down. Fast Connect, the Sprint DSL service, customers who got ZyXel Communications DSL modems from Sprint are well advised to contact the ISP for a new, more secured, DSL modem. "Sprint officials acknowledged that remote access to the administrative software embedded in the ZyXel Prestige 642 and 645 modems is by default protected with a password of "1234." But the company said users are responsible for securing the equipment, which stores login data, including the user's e-mail address and password. "

Ok, before Slammer hit, the big news story was the fact that 16 year old Dublin student Aidan Osmani has created the Xweb megabrowser, a web browser that is said to be able to speed up browsing be a factor of 600%. Whether this is true or not, no one knows because few have had access to it, and no one has access to the source code as Osmani is considering the almighty patent for some aspect foe the code. While I would like to see a 16 year old revolutionize the browser like Sean Fanning did music, I doubt it will happen so quickly, especially if the kid is in it for cash.

Ok, so The Register has a series of 3 articles so far on the site about the troubles with domain names and why exactly they cause so much trouble. The first one explains what it takes to become a full registrar, and how the troubles begin, and why the system is so flawed. The second article explains the system in the UK, and why it is so much better, along with how it can be a template on how to fix the ICANN system. The third article explains how to protect you and your domain. Very interesting series.

Well, in the last day I have heard of 3 well known software packages being brought into new versions. The first was Opera, for which version 7.0 was just released the other day. I have not tried it out yet, but I will see about checking into it the next weekend I have off. The second, and most relevant to my life, is the announcement that within 2 and a half weeks we will see a new version of Movable Type, this time version 2.6. The features include more SQL support, expanded to Postgres and SQLite, built in Creative Commons License's, and added XML-RPC functionality.

Lastly we have a new version of Ad-Aware. This proves a lot of those who were very worried from a 5 month break from updating and news, wrong, but there is only paid versions, and they may just find their users, or a lot of them, have moved to SpyBot. I will, though, include version 6 in my new freeware :gm: article, if it is out when the article goes up, if not it will go into the 3rd one, review and additions. I really recommend checking out :nf0: if you want more info on new software, it seems daily he has 3 or 4 new packages having been updated.

Wired today has an article on the platform wars, specifically the one between Mac and PC which has raged far longer than the article states. This war has existed as far back as Windows 3.1. They then go onto describe the change,as of late, to less battle and more discussion. Yes, that war has calmed down, and Apple switch ads have become more entertainment than advertising. They don't seem to sum up why the war has simmered down to almost nothing. The first is that it is no longer that important, the battle has moved ot Linux, even though Chris disagrees which I will cover in a moment. As well, a certain Redmond based company has a big stake in Apple, and does not want their investment to spoil. Simple economics.

Ok, sorry Mr. Robertson, but I refuse to classify your OS or any news related to it under the respectable title of Linux. Now, to the important stuff. First we have the news that Robertson, in another move of clear competition to Microsoft, is releasing the Lindows Media Computer, not unlike in title and specs to the Windows Media Center, but the LMC is not as good in many ways. Yes, that means the only thing is shares compared to the WMC is a shocking similarity in the name. Oh, and the LMC costs only about $329 USD, but the setup shows why. If this thing is meant to replace the tiVo, 20GB HD and 128 MB RAM is going to be bumped up, which translates to a much higher cost. Oddly, no mention of maker on those HD's.

While Chris Pirillo just announced that he has been asked, and accepted an offer to moderate at the Desktop Linux Summit, the show is in serious trouble in that it has lost all but one linux company, with Lycoris' recent departure among concerns that Lindows is trying to start war with the other distributors and exclude them from the Desktop Linux revolution. Therefore, this seems to be primarily a non Open Source conference. This means, in my opinion, that this is not longer what it should have been which is to say a show about the latest and greatest in Desktop Linux.

The two best Linux desktop's, Mandrake and Red Hat, are not going to be there, and the show is not entirely controlled by a company which while it uses Linux, is a great deal different from the meaning and message behind the Linux Revolution. The above link to the Lycoris departure also has a letter to Michael Robertson from Jeff Gerhardt at The Linux Show, which asks "I feel obligated to ask Lindows CEO to make a gesture at making peace with the rest of the Linux community." and this sums it up really well. Lindows has not only brought war with Microsoft, but it's many insults directed towards other Linux makers have brought war with the whole of the Linux community, which has not been dissuaded by the Windows style license and greed of LindowsOS.

In shocking news, IBM announced that they had lost a drive with data on it from Co-operators General Insurance Co., as well as other companies. That drive had 180,000 "names, addresses, beneficiaries, social insurance numbers, pension values, pre-authorized checking information and mothers' maiden names", anything else? Oh yes, their bank account details." This is really scary in a time when everyone is worried that their identity will be stolen. The Toronto Star reports that the insurance company had to send out letters to every person to warn of identity theft.

Well, this(top story) is not surprising, but I always thought it would be a bigger story than a 4 paragraph blurb mixed in with the other 4 stories. To me this makes an article I am writing a little more prophetic. I wrote the article on the the 18th of January and said

'All the way through to Comdex in November, which even the cabbie's think may quite possibly be the last one, where Key3 Media the presenters of Comdex worldwide was rumored to be near bankruptcy shortly after the show though nothing has thus far occurred.'

Not surprisingly, the Slammer worm is still big in the news - I suspect this will not change for awhile - and this time the major story is that Korean users are threatening to sue Microsoft over their damaged infrastructure, seeing as they were down for a fair while due to the Slammer worm.

Korea Times reports that the splendidly named People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD) group is considering filing a class action suit against the software giant. The civic rights group contends that Microsoft failed to do enough to help its customers fix a flaw in SQL Server, which was exploited by the prolific worm.

Second, we have CNet with a report that 'experts' are calling Slammer/Sapphire is what said 'experts' call a warhol worm in that it can infect all of the intended recipients within 15 minutes. Slammer, they report, doubled in size every 8.5 seconds, reaching full capacity within 3 minutes, which has got to be some kind of a record.

Researchers have theorized about such worms for some time, and a paper presented at last year's Usenix Security Symposium by security experts Vern Paxson, Stuart Staniford and Nicholas Weaver also predicted the emergence of such worms. Until now, however, no examples have been released into the wild.

God, I hate losing posts! It is interesting to note this story that Microsoft is actually admitting that they have fears of Open Source software affecting their business model. "To the extent the open-source model gains increasing market acceptance, sales of the company's products may decline, the company may have to reduce the prices it charges for its products, and revenues and operating margins may consequently decline," Microsoft said in a filing with the SEC last week. To say this worry is good news is like saying that the sun is a little warm.

In a recent series of email with Randy Nieland of Lockergnome, who said that he was really hoping that Microsoft does not die off ''. I disagree greatly. This analysis from The Register that says that, first, the part about open source is not that big of a part in that filing, but to think that they would not have even mentioned it less than two years ago, this is a major shift in their vocalized policy. Not to mention that they were once so prideful that they felt Linux was nothing, and now stories like the addition of 15,000 high pressure sales people to their staff and the slammer worm slamming them just as hard have got to be unmentioned issues.

Next we have this one from CNET that Microsoft has just updated XP SP1 to remove their own version of Java, which they had removed from the XP release, and added in for SP1, just before they won a stay of the court order telling them to do so, and put in the Sun released version of the Java Virtual Machine. To say this is surprising, that MS actually complied before they were supposed to, is, as I said above, like saying the sun is a little warm. They also explained how they planned to comply with the order, if they had lost. It will be interesting to see how they proceed not that they won.

The last story out of Redmond is this one about Microsoft cracking down on in house pirates who were funnelling tonnes of software, 9 million dollars worth of Microsoft software, give or take a hundred thousand or so. Clearly they have no real handle on piracy of any kind, be it their own or other's.

After more than a decade of gaining subscribers, sitting at well over 35 Million, it announced the other day that it has actually lost more subscribers, over 170,000 in Q4 of 2002, than it gained. '"While AOL is still the No. 1 online service in terms of reach and time spent online, it is losing relevance steadily," said Dylan Brooks, an independent analyst of Internet service providers.' While I personally feel that in a broadband world, dial-up service is becoming less and less important, and thus either AOL gets into the Cable/DSL market, or it will increasingly fade away.

I hope this story helps me when I purchase my new system, as new processors generally mean lowered prices for older CPU's. Unfortunately, the MLH site shows CPU's as high as a 3000+, done on a Barton core. I am happy to see that on the topic of the PC that I am on the top end of the pricing structure with my 2100+, as the 2200+ is more than $100 more. I will also mention that the CPU's higher than 2200+ are all on pre order, and it is still possible that those prices will go down as they get in the newer processors. It is surprising to see a company have items not even announced yet up on their sites, with a price. Click more for the pricing list.

As the tech world settles itself that one of the biggest tech shows, Comdex, is in serious trouble, one has to wonder why other companies are announcing they are getting into shows, all on the same time frame as the show that was once the biggest and best attended. Key3 Media, the organizer of Comdex, finally annoucned it has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, in an attempt at restructuring the company on Monday, after much speculation and rumour.

So the announcement by JupiterMedia that it will be launching it's own show to compete with Comdex was extremely surprising and worrying as I am prepared to post an article to :gm: that explains that the idea of a trade show is ultimately deceased. "Jupitermedia has booked the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for the new trade show, dubbed Computer Digital Expo Fall 2003. The two events will be held the same week in November, just blocks apart." I think we just might see that show dying off really quickly.

This is a story that surprised me at first, but after reflection it is not surprising. I have found no Apple Stores in Winnipeg, and only a few reseller's, but if one were to open up at least one store would likely be in serious trouble, as it's name gives the impression it deals only in Mac stuff. Therefore, I can see why some retailers are suing Apple, "with breach of its contract and fraud, saying the computer maker hurt their business by failing to pay them for repairs they made under warranty, by overcharging them for parts, and by disparaging the dealers to potential customers in an effort to gain more direct sales business. " This story has been progressing, as Apple opens store after store.

Ok, so this is not locally based, but more locally named. Intel has decided that it will be introducing it's Manitoba chip in Cannes at the 3 GSM congress in a couple of weeks. I will admit to not knowing a lot of the jargon in this, as cell's are not really of interest to me, I don't even have one active, but the name of a chip being
Manitoba, and this really being Intel's first foray into the Cell market, it caught my attention. Sounds interesting for now.

Well, AMD released the new Athlon XP 3000+ CPU's today, and while I have not seen one, the reviews and news stories are widespread and many. I am not sure if linking to each and every of the dozens of reviews is proper, but I will certainly link to The Register's article, which has many links at the bottom. The reviews seem to conclude that this is a major leap, with the Barton core being the best new core available. The Register says that with the new core, AMD is awarded the desktop CPU crown, but I again have to defer to the experts, but I am right now printing off a lot of reviews and conclusions, and will comment more when I get home.

Hacker legend, and someone I respect a great deal, Kevin Mitnick admitted that the web site for his company, Defensive Thinking, was hacked, not only the reported recent BugBear hack of January 30th, but on other instances. The company put out a news release on the hacks, and it quotes Kevin saying '“From the moment we launched we’ve seen a daily, consistent and significantly more complex than average number of network vulnerability attacks coming from almost every country.” said Mitnick. “I suppose if you were a young hacker and wanted to prove your skills, this is the place to go. It reminds me of the movie ‘The Gunfighter.’” he added.

It seems that Microsoft's been trying to patent even more things, and while their patent list grows, so does their generalization of patent applications. In a time when patent's are worded so carefully generalized as to mean a patent for one type of technology can be applied to something entirely different, it should come as no surprise that Microsoft is following the same route and filing the most generalized patents possible in a claimed attempt to patent the technology connected to their web services suite, .Net.

Western Digital announced their first S-ATA hard drives that are expected to spin at 10,000 RPM's, and have an 8MB cache, which seems to be standard for their hard drives. The Register quotes "Serial-ATA is too young for the desktop market - it can't reach maximum performance because of other limitations in the PC," says Ken Larsen, WD's sales veep in charge of emerging markets. "The vast majority of 2003 production will be replacing SCSI sockets." and this leads me to wonder what part of the desktop is the hindrance, as clearly it is a limitation that server boxes do not have.

Others have blogged this, and the original story, but I want to just send my thoughts out to this guy's family. Yes, he was arrested in December for ripping off Microsoft, but just a few short months later he is dead, and I choose to now ignore that past, as it no longer matters in his memory on this earth. Some have questioned how he died, but I really doubt that Microsoft is willing to go to even those lengths to remove an employee caught stealing. Come on folks, get real.

Ok, so Wired broke the story that Symantec was claiming to have known about Slammer at least an hour before the rest of the security experts did, and hours before it made it's presence known. The Silicon Defense analysis shows that once it debuted, it took all of 10 minutes to hit the majority of the server's it infected, which brings the bragging of Symantec into doubt in The Register's piece on the subject. All I can say is if Symantec knew and alerted their DeepSight Threat Management System customers an hour before the big guys knew, and either a) alerted no one else, or b) decided to let it happen to promote their product, then they should be held accountable.

It was reported in an uncharacteristically lengthy article on The Register that convicted, and released, hacker/cracker Kevin Mitnick has been turned down for a membership in an IT professionals organization called the ISSA(Information Systems Security Association ). I have personally never heard of them, and am pretty sure that there is no Canadian/Winnipeg chapter, but they sound like a very big, but for the most part unknown group. They have a couple of Canadian chapters, as their web site shows, and an amazingly fair membership price, but someone like Kevin could easily make them very well known, and he has done a great job of putting his past crimes behind him.

Sorry. I try not to do this, but I have found in the last week or so my news folders have ballooned immensely, to the point of about 35 or so links, so I will try to do this easy. I am going to list all the stories, hopefully arranged by topics and subjects, and will put them in a bulleted list, as even I have grown to despise the link after link only separated by a comma. I hope to have them all up by the time I go to work, but I will also be blogging the Daytona 500 which I have taped. Here goes... all of them.

• NASA: Nukes to Power Spacecraft
• Russian Space Program Needs Cash
• Searchers Snare Shuttle Nose Cone
• Doctoring an IPod to Run on Linux
• US and UK arrests in computer worm probe
• Insiders finger MS Shop as source of resale racket
• Microsoft phones step into Canada
• Security experts duped by Slammer 'jihad' rot
• AOL's Jekyll and Hyde act
• Europe Unites Against Cyberattack
• FBI Seeks Attempted EBay Hacker
• U.S. Plans for Cyber Warfare
• Apple refreshes Xserve
• DoJ: We Want to Read Your E-Mail
• Europe plans its own NSA to 'boost cyber-security'
• Europe threatens to invade ICANN
• Microsoft deploying work-to-rule for Mac browser?
• MS Faces New Challenge in Europe
• Sacked sysadmin arrested on hacking charges
• US may aid Microsoft in appeal by states
• Billg on Xbox 2
• Bogus Alerts Target PayPal Users
• BSA piracy audit deadline looms for business
• DMCA invoked in DirecTV hack
• Gates holds forth on the 'pervasive Linux' threat
• Inside the House That Woz Built
• Jedis reach the stars in UK census
• Make Love To Your IT Manager on Valentine's Day
• Microsoft vs. Nokia
• More Fallout Over Greek Game Ban
• New Linux support policies are ominous
• Spam Arrest denies sending spam
• The Price of Freeware Rises
• U.S. Tries E-Mail to Charm Iraqis

CNN has been reporting the last few days that a cracker(not their term) has gained access to millions of credit card numbers, including Amex, Master Card, and Visa. Based on that piece of info, and not having read much info on it I would have to assume that this was a vulnerability in the network that connects them to the machines in millions of stores and businesses around the world. The Register has their own take, but it seems to be a rewording of the CNN article with a few references not in earlier reports. Speaking of CNN, they are just giving an update on the issue. No new news. Just be warned that your card may soon not work.

On Monday morning a legal battle between the University of the Andes and the registrar for the .uk.co domains Net Registrar culminated in the closure of the .uk.co domain branch early in the morning. This is not to be confused with the british domain branch, .co.uk. This is also involving the government of Colombia, who announced that at the end of this year the minister of communications would be taking over the domain branch after the University announced it was going to sell off the rights to the branch. Obviously many of the high profile sites like Amazon and Priceline were very upset, as was Net Registrar managing director Robert Fox, who had no knowledge this was about to happen.

In a sign that the OS is losing some importance, and that the BIOS is becoming far more powerful far earlier than the OS makers had expected, Phoenix Technologies has announced they are working on a way to allow the user internet access and access to many programs without needing to load the Os or wait for the boot process to complete. This will also help in fixing broken PC's, OS problems, and flashing the BIOS I assume. "Phoenix Core Management Environment, or cME, promises a means for OEMs to include diagnostic and self help capabilities, Internet access and remote desktop builds, even after a major system malfunction. "(The Register)

Is it me or is The Register a little late to the table on this? I have blogged about log spiking and script poisoning several times, as my own script(on the left at the bottom) has fallen victim frequently, and the same goes for my stats. They still do. It is a rick I take in having such features, though a redesign may see them fall to the side as they no longer prove as helpful as they once did. They got their info from this post on the Kasia in a Nutshell blog located at www.unix-girl.com/blog/, and while there are good points made, it does not address how truly impossible it is with script like the one I use here. The risks are many of running a blog.

In a most unlikely turn of events, Microsoft has filed a 'John Doe' lawsuit against spammer's that use what I would call a brute force attack to harvest every possible Hotmail web address. Apparently what they do is flood the Hotmail server's with millions of emails using every possible combination of alphabetical and numerical combinations, and cross only those addresses that get bounced off the list, effectively gaining a fairly comprehensive list of Hotmail addresses. This suit comes just days after an essay from Microsoft came out calling on US legislators to ban spamming, a move that is not unexpected, but the source is a little odd. I am not saying Microsoft spams their customer's, but they usually try to not slam potential customers, though many spammer's may be Linux users.

Thanks go out to Andrew who pointed me to this site, which was hacked by, apparently, a Jehovah's Witness(or someone putting up an anti Iraq page who did) in order to attempt to reason with the people of Iraq. I am not sure if this is a government sanctioned action, but it is most certainly the beginning of the Cyber war. I doubt this is the only site that is or will be a target, it is simply a beginning. In case the site is fixed when you see this, please feel free to click below to see a screen shot, but be warned it is a large 1024 screen shot. View image

Grr. I really hate lost posts. Ok, I will try to recall what I wrote last night, that lost somewhere between draft and publish. Essentially, my thoughts are that this article adds a good deal of info and mystery to the case between Sendo and Microsoft, and I am sure that MB will be very happy to read more on this, even to the point of commenting on the topic and how close she was to this. I am also sure she will have a great deal better prospective having been involved in this, but The Register certainly raises some very good questions of the validity of Microsoft's lawsuit, and also the original suit by Sendo.

Yesterday The Register reported that several Department of Defense list's were left open to near virus infection and several messages sent to the list had the Klez worm. The attachment was removed, it seems, but the text of the messages still hit the lists which the readers originally thought was moderated. They claim that the infected messages likely came from an infected subscriber. "We didn't realize that the effect of the settings we had changed would leave the subscription list open, giving anyone the ability to post messages to the entire list," Terry Davis, manager of the Public Web Program in the Office of the Secretary of Defense told Federal Computer Week. "And we definitely underestimated how much people like to talk."

On Wednesday Wired reported that WalMart, who has thus far only been selling low end desktop's with Lycoris, Lindows and Mandrake, began selling Linux distribution box set's on their website. "Wal-Mart has already offered computers loaded with Linux for as little as $200. The boxed software, meant to be loaded on an extra, often older machine, is an expansion of the Linux product lines carried by the retailer." Now, if they sell Mandrake, Red Hat, or other more popular distributions, then I will take notice. In other Linux news, Lindows announced a $799 notebook PC loaded with Lindows. Again, when I see this running Red Hat or Mandrake, then I will take note.

In a shattering decision on Thursday the FCC gave control over local phone, and by proxy DSL service, to the states that the service is in, effectively granting the monopoly power back to the local carriers and removing the ability for competitors to actually compete on a fair platform as the telco's. Wired explains "The Baby Bells -- BellSouth, SBC Communications, Verizon Communications and Qwest Communications, which aggressively lobbied Congress and the FCC to deregulate the industry -- were disappointed that the FCC didn't throw out a requirement that they share their networks with competitors at a discounted rate. Instead, the FCC asked each state to decide for itself how to regulate competition in local telephone markets." Sorry to all American DSL user's.

Yesterday I noticed that AOL has joined Microsoft in the war against spam, which is not surprising seeing as they are two of the largest low cost ISP's, and each spam cost's them exorbitant amounts of cash. Therefore, for the one and I suspect only time in my life, I support both AOL and Microsoft in this effort. Yeah, relish it while it lasts. On other AOL news, they admitted yesterday that crackers had gained access to their customer database through programming and social engineering. How far off is the chance that AOL welcome kits will come with books like Art of Deception and the Hacker's Exposed series of books. So, was on crackers ands spammers. That sounds like a valiant and equally doomed task.

Yesterday Wired reported that the first known death by 419 has been reported in the Czech Republic on Wednesday. Michael Lekara Wayid, Nigeria's consul in the Czech Republic, was shot dead by an unidentified 72-year-old Czech at the Nigerian Embassy in Prague, which is the first known death associated with the now well known, but little protected from Nigerian 419 scam, in which a person buys a long(in the millions) list of email addresses and then makes up a bogus story about money hidden away from prying eyes, and the need of the sender to get it out of their country, predominantly Nigeria. Apparently the shooter was a victim of this.

The Register reports a secretary was also hit in the hand, but the consul general was slain which is a far worse tragedy. There is no word about whether the victim was the scammer, but it does appear the shooter has visited the embassy several times in an unfruitful attempt to get his money back. "It's not about raising a bank account, though. Those foolish enough to respond to the scheme soon find there's a host of problems in moving the money, which is supposedly held with in a secret safety deposit safe or similar. Various fees and bribes are requested from the victim."

Early on the 22nd Wired posted an article on their site analyzing why Google would be interested in Blogger. Since then, Evan's blog appears redone(I preferred the old look) but not gone as Wired says and he has a few interesting points to make, and discusses the first of many changed the Blogger service will go through as Bloogle, Blogle, or whatever you wish to term it. Evan has also posted a Google/Blogger FAQ that answers a lot of pertinent questions for fans and users of Blogger. Another link, just this last one, is to David Galbrath who analyses what CNET first reported(I lied), a description of the first change and how it is supposed to work. You mean we can toss out the ugly, annoying and useless banner ad's?

Ok, so I was woken up only 2 hours after going to bed at 7:30 from my mother calling to tell me my money was in, all 1680 or so of it. So, 9 hours later, guess what I have left? $40, $10 of which is gone and spoken for, and $20 of which is to get me through the next week. Yup. I am broke. Thankfully, Mike over at MLH(who sell to and deliver to people all over the continent by the way) upgraded several parts on the PC I am getting, and I ended up with the items listed in the expended area(click MORE below) for $1420 with tax. That is one hell of a deal, especially since he knocked off more than $60 off the price. Odd, though, I recall walking in there with my mind set at no more than $1400. I am happy though, I will have the new PC tonight, though I still have no name for it. Thoughts?

I recall reading back late last year the book Crypto by the once unbiased Steven Levy. He wrote about the cryptography battles, from WWI between countries, and into the late 20th century the one between the US government trying to legislate crypto and the users, creators, and freak's trying to bring it to the public. So, now that I read this opine on the new laws making it illegal to use crypto by Mark Rasch of SecurityFocus Online. I knew the law was bad but I really had not researched this angle, and it really pisses me off that the US government is once again trying to limit the citizen's use of crypto, and some of the ways it can be illegal are moronic. Filing taxes online using crypto is, in my opinion, the only way to go about it, and that would make filing an incorrect tax return punishable on two fronts.

In another freedom related topic, there is an unsettling decision in the Lexmark toner case, where Lexmark is trying to get a ruling against a maker of clone cartridge, Static Control inc., saying their reverse engineering the chip on the cartridges that the printer uses to recognize a legit one is a violation of the DMCa. Sadly, it was reported last week that the judge, moronic or technophobic as he must be, granted the request by Lexmark to have the maker stop their making of these, clearly skipping over the obvious anti trust violation that is going on. Sadly, this is yet another example of the US courts screwing over the little guys, users and companies alike.

This piece of news is a little old, but on the 20th Wired reported that Intel and DigitalConsumer.org hosted the Digital Rights Summit in their Santa Clara headquarters "I'm here today to tell you that I'm scared. Silicon Valley is under threat," said Joe Kraus, co-founder of Digitalconsumer.org. "The DMCA's blatant restriction on circumvention threatens a few of the core foundations of Silicon Valley: interoperability, innovation without prior permission and Silicon Valley's (belief in) empowering the consumer." I have to agree with Mr. Kraus here, the application of the DMCA has ben widespread, abused, and badly applied, and the challenges to it have been far too few.

In two recent stories, the war on Spam has taken two turns that have or can easily bring harm to users and their online relationships. First there was news on Friday from C|Net that Microsoft's attempt to have a more aggressive stance on spammer's had led to several of their rival's users email being blocked when sent between them and their MSN using friends. Once MSN was notified of the problem it quickly fixed it, and there is not word on whether this is another attempt to make their competition look bad in underhanded ways.

In other anti spam news, the two creators of AvantGo, Felix Lin and Linus Upson, announced a new tool to fight spam by using very extreme measures. Their plan is to use what is called a white list, which in their use will block all emails but the white list, but is usually used to allow those emails through without any of the troubles an unidentified email gets. The only problem with the use of this is the fact that a lot of times, the emails I get are from unknown sources, ones I could not possibly foresee, and therefore I would likely lose a good number of emails. This might work for some users, those who know all of their senders, but for most it will fail.

Ok, not sure how it happened, but I count no less than 40 links in my news folder, and no hopes of blogging it all. I am not saure where my time has been dwindling to, but it is very, truly frustrating. So, here goes a real long news link list:

• Cryptome Hacked
• Ethical wireless hacker is innocent
• Experts: Copyright law hurts technology
• Crypto attack against SSL outlined
• Experts discredit e-mail security cracks
• Disabled war veteran hosts Disabled RIAA website
• RIAA website now routable and public
• Bloomberg hacker convicted of extortion
• DoJ seizes ISOnews site over Xbox mod chip sales
• Brits! Play the PayPal currency speculation game
• PayPal: How many Brits were robbed today?
• Beijing signs MS deal with Gates, Linux deal with IBM
• The Beast, MS Office 2003, and the Big Nada
• Microsoft quits OpenGL board
• Microsoft approval sought for Xbox Linux project
• Future fuzzier for Mac, Linux as MS buys Connectix tech
• A "Perfect Marriage" for Microsoft?
• Microsoft Urged to Innovate
• SQL Server developers face huge royalty bills. How many, how much?
• XP Hole Plagues All Similar Apps
• Microsoft, EA may make bid for Sega
• Google in paedo censorship debacle
• Google pulls sick site, following Chester protests
• FCC to Testify Before Congress
• Will FCC Split on Media Rules?
• DSL customers brace for higher prices
• Hollyblog
• To Trap a Superworm
• Protesters Take Capitol by Phone
• Big Brother is watching you - and documenting
• Get a hot date on KaZaA!
• How to get an ATM PIN in 15 guesses
• Nintendo seeks US trade sanctions to fight piracy
• Now Bloggers Can Hit the Road
• Rep. Berman May Not Revive Internet Piracy Bill
• Schoolgirl turns tables on email credit card fraudster
• Unions fight call centre crossed legs

It was announced last week while Zeus was going through his troubles that a vulnerability that Adrian Lamo, well known WiFi pirate and hacker noted for his hacks of the New York Times and other sites on the net, has now been fixed in the Blogger site by it's new owner, Google. What has become affectionately known as the Bloogle service was informed Pyra Labs co founder Evan Williams in January, and the hole was apparently not able to be closed until now. The Register reports 'he resisted the temptation to replace any of the high profile journals hosted on the site - one is operated by humorist Dave Barry, another by CNET Radio - out of respect for the company. "I was tempted to do both of them," says Lamo. "Had Pyra been a less wholesome operation, I might have shown less restraint."'

The Register takes a fun look at a technological urban myth that has found a resurgence from it's original iteration in 1991, that the US used a technique, they vary with each version, to take out the US air defenses. This is, of course, making a come back due to the doubtless forthcoming third round of war on Iraq. It is interesting to see how this has evolved, the original being an April Fool's joke saying that they used a Virus in a printer to take out the Iraq air defenses in the opening of the first war. Also not surprising that no one in the major news outlet's was around back when that happened. Gotta love this stuff!

In an uncharacteristically anti user move, the site Neowin.net, a pro WIndows site with a large fan base was shut down, possibly temporarily for reporting a hole in the system Microsoft uses for it's beta tester's, which allowed, and as of the 9th still does, anyone who wanted to to download beta software for free and with disregard for any price or process. While the original reporting of the incident did not link to a direct cause of the cease and desist order that Neowin's host got, the follow up on the 9th said The Register had been contacted by the person who has posted about the software, an undisclosed 'Windows XP Peer to Peer SDK' on MSDN, as well as the person claiming to have reported Neowin for NDA violations. Can you say tech soap opera? Geez!

Though neither he nor Groove have said it as forthrightly, I have no doubt that Mitch Kapor, co founder of Lotus and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation likely quit when he discovered that Groove Networks had provided materials and support to the Bush administration's new Total Information Awareness initiative, which is their attempt to move closer to a police state much like Nazi Germany world free of terrorism by restricting the rights of everyone on US soil and abroad until there is no such thing as privacy anymore ensuring a clear ability to report suspicious actions of loved ones and neighbors potential terrorists.

This Wired article explicitly says that Kapor quit over TIA, while this piece by The Register barely covers it, but follows the original excuse of Kapor having lost his taste for commercial software, instead focusing on Open Source Software and the EFF movement. The article on Wired has this to say on the topic od TIA:

The Total Information Office, led by former Reagan administration national security adviser John Poindexter, is attempting to develop a terrorist-identification system that could sift through financial, telephone, travel and medical records of citizens. A figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, Poindexter was convicted on charges of lying to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing a congressional investigation. The verdicts were overturned on appeal. Last month, the TIA effort ran into resistance in Congress because of privacy concerns. Congress passed an amendment barring the system from gathering information on Americans without prior authorization from Congress.

Kapor said he is troubled by the project.

As should any lover of freedom and liberty, neither of which this system will perpetuate. I want to remind everyone that the order for the Bush administration to go to Congress in order to spy on American's is a waste of ink, for the same reason that it is a wasted rule for Bush to have to go to Congress to approve his little war. He has a majority in the Congress, and Senate. Who's going to stand up to him and actually win? No one. Yes, there will be some who will vote no, to save their political careers, the newer politicians who have a lot to lose, but the older ones, more established and all, they will vote yes for both. I warn you, if Bush is elected again, I am seriously concerned about the future of my Southern neighbors, for they are going too far.

Is it me or are a lot of the better known viruses of late making a resurgence by clearly unimaginative programmers? First I read reports that a new variant of Code Red is in the wild, this time without the coded kill switch, but now there appears to be an India based variant of the Yaha worm floating around. Sadly, this new virus seems to be a salvo in a hacker versus virus writer war between Pakistan and India, who are at odds over the land of Kashmir. Can;t these people come up with original stuff?

In an ultimate twist of irony, Wired reported last week that a recently revealed victim of the Nigerian 419 scam was in fact not using all of his own money, he actually stole from several friends or family, and has now been arrested for it. How anyone can still fall for this even though it is heavily publicized on all of the major news networks, I don't know. I guess this person has shown how big of a fool he is, increasingly s by scamming others only to be scammed himself.

In an attempt to move on from the constant coverage of no apparent ongoing bombing in Iraq, and the apparently unharmed Iraq president Saddam Hussein, I will try to move on to some tech stuff on my blog. Outgoing RIAA head Hillary Rosen at a meeting of monopoly beneficiaries in Florida made a reference to civil rights leader Martin Luther King and compared his battle to the battle of King against the prejudice and racism that was then blatant and rampant across the USA.

She mentioned in an acceptance speech for the 'Harry Chapin Humanitarian Award' from the US T-shirt-sellers and record shops' guild, the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, or NARM, Rosen quoted King saying "Social change cannot come overnight, but we must always act as though it were a possibility the very next morning." which applied well to the time it was written and spoken by King, but is highly inappropriate in the RIAA's battle against file sharer's. How Rosen, who is stepping down as head of the RIAA, can dare to equate the battle for equal rights for african americans to the battle against audio piracy is unknown, but is still quite appalling. this does not even go into whether she actually deserves an award for human rights.

"Apple's original iMac passed away last night quietly in a home for retired computers aka the AppleStore for Education. It was nearly five years old." begins the obituary over at The Register, saying good bye to a style of computer that revitalized the fortunes of the company that Steve and Steve built. The 'bondi blue' iMac, the first of that series of all in one iMac's, was a revolution, and spawned a great number of look alike's, though none were nearly as popular. I don't own one, but I must say it was one hell of a computer.

The Register reported late Thursday that the Ganda-A worm had been discovered, and this virus uses the now active Gulf war 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' as it's social engineering method, most likely as the writer knew by now that the whole world would be focused on that region, and anything coming from it. "The Ganda-A worm uses a variety of different email subject lines (including 'Spy pics', 'G.W Bush animation' and 'GO USA !!!!') and message bodies to try and encourage computer users to run its viral attachment." Sarc has little info yet, but does say that the worm uses the .scr file type for infection. Beware!

Just days after Cisco bought SignalWorks, an IP telephony company, for $13.5 million, Cisco announced today that they had bought home networking leader Linksys for $500 million in stock. This makes the company the leader in the networking equipment market, and gives them an auto in for the home networking market. Now, I hope, they will make all of their networking stuff a lot easier to use.

I have long been worried about the idea of an MS auto update service that is forced on users, now that Windows Update is not being updated, and a news story on Thursday has made my point better than anything I could, as well as a story coming out of work has simply made my point of MS distrust. The news story is that a patch that Microsoft put out early last week, meriting a major alert, is causing problems for select users with a certain level of patches, and the only solution is an upgrade to the much despised SP3, which again forces auto update on the users, desired or not. The patch shows why anything that does do an unauthorized, unresearched patching of a system is a very bad idea, and should be avoided as if it were infected with every known form of disease.

As for what has occurred at work, I was informed today that there is an apparently unpatched, actively exploited hole in Windows XP that a crashing of the RPC(Remote Procedure Call) service causes a 60 second countdown to shutdown of the PC. This is for sure being tried on at least 3 friends with Shaw internet service, and based on the information I have gathered at work today it is a network wide scanning for PC's with the service, and this seems to be usually followed by the attacker sending the necessary signals to the target machine, in the hopes of forcing it to reboot. This is not dangerous to the system, does not apparently grant the attacker access to the system, but none the less it will be greatly frustrating to XP users. The solution is apparently to change the crash reaction from reboot system to restart service. XP? Ha!

I must say I really do wish that Michael Robertson would stop speaking as if he represents the entire Linux community. In his latest Michael's Minutes piece Robertson says that Intel is increasingly becoming more and more pro Microsoft, and less and less cooperative with those responsible for making processors work well with Linux. Robertson uses the fact that Intel pulled out of the Lindows sales summit Desktop Linux Summit as an example of why Intel is being mean to big old Mike Robertson. He forgets that pretty much everyone else pulled out of it to, not only Intel, and just because Robertson does not get a sample of Centrino, does not mean that Intel is not sharing, only that they are not sharing with Lindows. Keep whining, Mike, we expect it by now.

On Friday the tech world was hit hard when it was announced that embattled TiVo competitor SonicBlue was filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy, with D&M Holdings buying up the ReplayTV and Rio product lines for $40 million plus assuming $5 million in liabilities. Opta Systems will acquire the GoVideo DVD player division for $12.5 million. So, there now appears to be just one. This is not surprising with all of the lawsuits and trouble facing the ReplayTV digital video recorder line, which allows people to record and pause live TV, as well as skipping commercials in recorded shows.

Over the weekend many sites, including the site for the British government and supposedly the one for the White House, were hacked, or claimed to have been, in a form of digital activism. The Register also reports that "Separately, defacement group Carders defaced 3,000 (seemingly random) Web sites, again over the weekend. Its motives in this attack remain unclear, though it likely that these sites were also attacked as part of an anti-war protest." I fully expect such actions, and those like Michael Moore's Oscar acceptance speech, will continue endlessly and will likely increase as the coalition and Iraqi people keep dying.

In response to Canada's rightful protest and inaction in the improper and unilateral war by the US and Britain on Iraq, one eBay seller has decided to refuse any Canadian buyers. "David Ingram, a tax consultant from Vancouver, received notification that his winning bid of $24.50 had been canceled, along with this message: 'At the present time, we do not ship to, or accept bids from, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany or any other country that does not support the United States in our efforts to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. If you are not with us, you are against us.'" This is the ultimate degradation of the bidding process, and the moronic decisions by American's and really goes to show what the people who 'elected' in George Bush will do to further embarrass themselves.

In response to this, and the other bad business moves by Americans, including canceling contracts with German, French, or Canadian companies, as well as their own public boycott of anyone who disagrees with them, I feel it would only be prudent for all those who do not support this war, in the US and in the rest of the countries being discriminated against, to boycott companies being prejudiced and almost racist in their actions, and refuse to buy things made in and sold from the USA, in an attempt to show them that they are a country on the brink of personal collapse, and that if they continue to be the world's bully, they will find themselves in the same position as Hitler. The world against them, having pushed too far, and with no way to recover from the nose dive.

Wired and The Register both reported yesterday that the Swedish writer of the Ganda worm had been questioned and arrested, after having admitted during questioning that he was responsible for it, though he has not been named as of yet. The Ganda worm inched it's way across the internet last week with a war themed subject and body, tricking people into executing the attachment for war coverage.

In a good attempt to reduce the amount of spam coming from it's accounts, Microsoft annouced recently that they were limited the number of messages a user can send per day to 100, though there appears to be some confusion if that is email to 100 email addresses, or if it is a total of 100 emails. The first can be gotten around quite easily, while the second n9ot quite so easy, but still not incredibly difficult. The first would be easily defeated by sending dozens if not hundreds of messages to those 100 addresses, the second would be to just sign up for more addresses. Not a great prevention method, but still a fairly good attempt by a major source of spam.

The first Windows story of note yesterday was that while Windows Server 2003 will soon be released, a lot of the stuff that may at first be missing will come along in something that Microsoft once claimed would make the OS harder to use, that being modular additions to the OS. Back in the days of the Antitrust lawsuit, it was suggested by several states that MS could just leave out stuff like IE, OE, WMP and the other pieces of crap. MS replied that making those modular bits added on to the OS later, and the thing you buy in stores would only be the base kernel just like Linux, would cost too much and force them to sell thousands of different versions of Windows. Odd, this seems to prove that they can, indeed, make a modular OS that is not dependant on all but a few apps.

In other news today, Microsoft is admitting that Windows NT 4.0 is too broken to be fixed, and that a recent DoS vulnerability is not likely to be patched. While 2000 and XP users have access to a patch for the hole, those who still stubbornly run NT 4 are advised to just toss the machine behind a firewall. The vulnerability is involving RPC, a service involved in an issue I mentioned a while back, one where co worker's PC was rebooting due to the default reaction to RPC crashing was set to reboot machine. I still recommend people change that to restart service, even if they do patch their system for this vulnerability. NT 4.0 users should find a seller of used 2K
Pro licenses.

Yesterday The Register ran a story that sad that Network Associates was forced to postpone it's financial filing for three past years. "NAI said today it will restate financial results for 1998, 1999 and 2000 to iron out revenue accounting irregularities. The move comes in the midst of a previously announced, ongoing Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice investigation into NAI's books." NAI admitted that those investigations has forced it to restate it's finances, and it is quite possible they are being given a chance to restate their books instead of undergoing deep scrutiny and possible scandal.

It was announced today by IDG World Expo, the organizer of MacWorld, that the summer show will now be called Create. This is a major move due likely to the ingoing problems between IDG and Apple over the importance of quarterly big shows and frequent small ones, and the need to have Apple at all of them. "Originally held in Boston, the summer Macworld was moved to New York in 1998, in order to attract a bigger, broader audience. "Staging the show in New York will provide our exhibitors a greater reach to those core Mac markets and, at the same time, serve as a significant draw for potential attendees from other East Coast cities and international markets," said IDG's then chief, David Egan, in September 1997, announcing the move." the name is odd, but it fits with the Apple theme.

In an attempt to plug the hole that is AOL, the AOL Time Warner group is restricting access to the web sites of it's paper publication to those who subscribe to the publication and those who are AOL subscribers. The restrictions initially apply to People and Entertainment Weekly magazines, a dozen other Time publications, including Real Simple and In Style, are expected to follow suit by mid-May. Sports Illustrated and Time magazines are not on the initial list.

In the same piece the roundup mentions that WorldCom is once again profitable, but the honesty of this is in serious question. the reported profit is a small but noticeable $188 million, the first since the scandal involving their restatement of earnings and filing for bankruptcy nearly a year ago.

Ed Felten reported on his blog, Freedom to Tinker, two days ago that Texas and Massachusetts are both considering legislation that would, on the state level, greatly extend the DMCA to the point of making it illegal to use a NAT firewall or public key encryption like PGP. He then reported that night that similar legislation was being proposed in South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Tennessee, and Colorado. The Register reports an angle that any MS hater will love, the ability to send Bill Gates to jail for putting out ICS.

Felten also reported yesterday that the MPAA may be the group behind this spate of bills, which would not be surprising as they learned well from the RIAA in what they can and cannot do about copyright protection. As well, he posted that the problem with the NAT outlawing part of the bills is that it makes no mention of intent, and those parts that do make very vague references to being harmful, which can be used in many different ways. Open Source is intent to make harm to those who make closed source software for exorbitant prices, but should not be made illegal based on this intent. It's called competition.

[Update: Felten posted today that one such law has already passed in Michigan which will come into effect in just a few days, and Felten has created a Super DMCA page for all those looking for more info.

Sun Systems finally realized that no one wants a Sun branded Linux distro, and have canceled their plans for their own version of Linux, stating "that customers do not really want a Sun crafted version of Linux when more than ample OSes already exist." to The Register. Being a member of the Geeks mail list on Sunhelp.org, I can say that those who are die hard supporters of Sun hardware have been skeptical and more than a little humored by this attempt, and I am sure they will be happy to hear that Sun will focus on Solaris, where they have the market monopolized for Sun hardware.

In relation to the post of earlier this morning, the english language web site for the Al-Jazeera arab language TV channel in the middle east was hacked likely as part of the cross philosophy hacks that have been going around. The site was only launched on Monday. The Register reported that almost as soon as it was brought up, the site was brought crashing down again likely due to a good number of hackers trying to teach the arabs a lesson, though they do surmise the site may have been taken offline to prevent such attacks. I have to wonder why someone would put a site up, just to take it down to prevent hack attacks.

Meanwhile, Wired chronicles what has happened with the site, from the first hack all the way through the later ones in the seeming never ending troubles of the site that has been up less time than the war has been ongoing. 'Certainly, it has been hacked,' acknowledged Jihad Ali Ballout, a spokesman for Al-Jazeera. He described the attack as 'a frontal, vicious attack on freedom of the press' and urged anyone with information about the hackers to contact authorities' is the line from Al Jazeera, and while the hackers were likely not trying to inhibit freedom of the press, instead simply making a point at the nearest available target.

Accused superhacker Jerome Heckenkamp, accused of sophisticated hack attacks against telecom equipment-maker Qualcomm, has received approval to have his trial on the 10 counts for the attack to o be moved from San Diego to San Jose, "where Heckenkamp is already facing a weightier indictment accusing him of penetrating computers belonging to Lycos, Exodus Communications, Juniper Networks and Cygnus Support Solutions, and defacing online auction site eBay under the hacker handle 'MagicFX.'" Why the hacker would want the trials in the same place, I have no idea, clearly a tactic I am not familiar with, but the judge does admit he will likely have both trials included into one.

CNet reported today that a major problem in the quest to make Linux a more usable and useful OS on the desktop, that is the problem of a lack of hardware maker software and drivers for running hardware in Linux, has been solved at least on the video side. The story is that nVidia, currently the #2 maker of video cards, has updated it's Linux software and made it easier to fund and run on Linux. "The new installation software detects relevant details about the system it's running on and automatically installs the correct drivers. The goal is to make it as easy to keep a Linux installation up-to-date as it is a Windows-based PC" I run an ATI based card, but this is good news for anyone running an nVidia card, and this is a template for other hardware vendors.

The Register made this report following the arrest of Intel Engineer Maher Mofied 'Mike' Hawash who is accused... well, wait, he isn't accused of anything, just detained without charges or legitimate reason for... giving to a charity. Yeah. So, who has no problem with the Patriot Act? A law that allows the government to hold a person without trial, without charges, for no reason other than giving to a charity. 'O' Canada, Our home and..' ahem, sorry. I was saying. The article goes on to warn others, like Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison and Carly Fiorina that they might find themselves equally detained due to their gifts to another charity which has equal accusation leveled against it and to whom the three have suspended support, but the past is unavoidable.

The Customer Respect Group released a study on Tuesday that they concluded that one third of tech firms, or 4 out of 10, do not respond to customer inquiries within a respectable 48 hours, and one in ten does not respond at all. That still seems like a lot of businesses, and while The Register says that one third never responded, I saw no data to confirm this conclusion. The best-performing companies were Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Xerox, IBM and Microsoft. The worst offenders were EMC, Ingram Micro, and Tech Data. Seeing as I am told as of Wednesday that I will be doing MS support, I am certain there will be good support for that MS department.

In a not so surprising announcement, The Register reported today that the Norwegian known as DVD Jon, after his feat of creating the DeCSS code at the young age of 15, is being put through a retrial after the MPAA ass kissing section of the Norwegian government filed an appeal over the victory for Jon over obscure charges brought by the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit. The appeal hearing has been set for early December, and is scheduled to last 8 days. This is a case that has been going on for over 3 years, and seeing as how the MPAA hopes to use this as a basis in the European markets, it is not likely to end anytime soon. The Register suggests that if he were tried in the US, the double jeopardy rule would prevent retrial, but if this were in the US, he would be in jail.

Minnesota business owner John Fraser, a 21-year-old engineer from Chanhassen, Minnesota, has announced his plans to begin work on and selling of a new Macintosh known in the media as the iBox. "I always wanted to build Macs," said Fraser, who runs a part-time PC customization business, 2khappyware. "But I want to get Apple's full support. I want to make sure I'm on the up and up. I'm an Apple supporter. It's not something I want to clash with them about. I want to make sure what I'm doing is legal." This will be the first time in 6 years that someone will sell a non Apple produced Mac, and there are a number of legal and Intellectual Property issues that have yet to be addressed by Apple, but this is destined to be a showdown.

In a rather confusing announcement for me, ATI announced the Radeon 9600. "The 9600 is essentially a 0.13 micron die-shrink of the 0.15 micron 9500, with updated SmartShader and SmoothVision technology. It also runs faster than its predecessor. The mid-range part supports up to 128MB of DDR frame buffer memory via a 128-bit memory bus. It features four parallel rendering pipelines and two parallel geometry engines. It will ship in standard and "enhanced performance" Pro versions." The reason it is confusing is because I thought they were already at the 9700, and I have ot wonder why they are moving numerically back-wards. Very odd.

Yesterday, Abit leaked word that they are working on an Athlon with a 400 MHZ Front Side Bus for AMD, also saying the company has unveiled "the 400MHz FSB Barton 3000+ and 3200+". Abit also mentioned that their AT7 Max 2, KD7 and NF7 mobo families are ready to support the new chips. Interesting info, but AMD really needs to step up it's CPU's or Intel will quickly leave them in the digital dust.

On Wednesday The Register reported that the already under suspicion Network Associates Inc. had purchased IntruVert for $100 M, a privately held company that has created an architecture designed to offer real-time network intrusion detection and prevention systems for enterprise and government networks. Then, today, we read they bought Entercept, a company that provides host-based intrusion protection products designed to detect and stop security attacks before they cause damage, for $120m. This leads one to think they plan to get into IDS as a new business, but they just got out of that not to long back. A change of heart?

Wired reported 2 days ago that The Honest Thief, announced in February as a new service from PGR BV, a Dutch Internet services company, was a complete hoax made simply to pull a prank and to sell more copies of the book by the same name. Pieter Plass, founder of PGR BV and president of CBB, a Dutch construction company, said he cooked up the lie as a joke and publicity stunt. "The service promised to take advantage of a recent Dutch court decision that "paved the way for the Netherlands to become the world's first legal haven for file-sharing companies," according to a February press release."

Wired reported earlier this week that an hour long hearing of appeal of the injunction against Microsoft over the inclusion of Java, and which version should be used, was dominated by a judge that was quite clearly in the favor/pocket of Microsoft, asking mocking questions of Sun lawyers and ridiculing the deciding of the lower court. Judge Paul Niemeyer, one of the three judges hearing Microsoft's appeal, questioned the logic behind the injunction, and it's link to the Windows OS monopoly that MS holds. Judge Roger Gregory, another judge on the panel had a clear understanding of the need for the injunction, and the damage that could have been done. The third judge asked no questions.

As Voice over IP gains ground due to the increased availability of broadband internet access from Cable and DSL providers, the FBI has problems that it had not expected to have when the 1994 law requiring phone companies to build in surveillance capabilities was passed, in that it exempts information carriers from the requirement, but those same info carriers are now also providing phone access through their internet services. "Now, as the Federal Communications Commission considers the extent that high-speed Internet services through cable and DSL should be free of regulation, the FBI and the Justice Department want assurances that those services also build in surveillance functions. Privacy pundits are very much against this, due to the possibility of email and other communication interception at the same time.

In a surprising twist of the gator's jaw, The Register twice in the same week slammed Google, the first inadvertent, the second quite intentional. The first was an article of how an anti war idea, of world opinion being the second super power, went from anti war slogan, to online and offline meme, to the topic of an revolution promoting article, and how quickly the last became # 1 in the google searches within 42 days of it's first utterance. The second article is a slam of Google for their inclusion of press releases in their Google News section, which The Reg thinks are not nearly as news worthy. Either way, it seems the once rabid supporter of Google has turned it's sights on the service.

So the reaction ot the article last week at The Register has been massive and very bitter, with several folks saying they will not be going near Google at all, and others saying their boycott will be limited to the Google News portion. With a total of 13 emails mentioned in the piece, and likely a good number more that were not included, the reaction has, based on those posted emails, been very angry. I personally find it is fine, as long as the service marks them on the front page as Press Releases, so that when one sees the link, they know that they will be getting the companies(or lobby groups) side of things, not official news. Other than that, posting PR from sources is useful to know exactly how a company put stuff, which is rarely done at 'real news' sites.

In a surprising article yesterday, The Register revealed that the Seti@Home project has a couple of vulnerabilities in it's clients, applying to all versions for all platforms. One, a problem if information leakage when downloading new units, allows a malicious person to see a users OS and processor type. The second is a remotely exploitable buffer overflow flaw, and while both the locater of the flaws and the project themselves admit this is a vague vulnerability that would take a lot of work, and Seti states that they know of no one who has fallen prey to this, it has prompted version 3.08, the first in a very long time. Download, and keep up the search.

Security firm ISS, who released their quarterly Internet Risk Impact Summary Report (IRIS), written about in an article from The Register yesterday, there was significant increases in security attacks over the last 6 months. "According to security tool firm ISS' quarterly Internet Risk Impact Summary Report (IRIS) security attacks rose by a third from Q4 2002 to Q1 2003. Security attacks are up 84 per cent from Q3 2002 to Q1 2003, according to revised figures released by the company last night. This increase was coupled with a ten-fold jump in overall security events (automatic probes, scans for vulnerabilities etc.) in the first three months of 2003 compared to the last quarter of 2002. " This is a no brainer, hactivism is increasing quickly.

On April 4th, I referred to an article by Wired saying that Microsoft had plans to make it's MSN searches more of a competitor to Google. Not overly odd. Then, 2 days ago, Yahoo put out this press release. They say that their search service, Google, will now be a more tempting target, and while their new search page is pretty clean, their front page still sucks and is far too cluttered. If you compare google.com to yahoo.com, the winner is clear. There is still no word on The B0rgs entry in this battle, but it is just as likely to give bad code to users of the Google Toolbar as anything.

Almost 3 weeks before Windows 2003 Server has experienced a typical reaction to the intrusive and demanding licensing of the Windows product, it has had a activation key leak, and it has already shipped to manufacturer's, very likely the source of the problem. "According to discussion at Neowin, this key is for three versions of 2003 Server, i.e. Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter editions; it does not however apply to the retail edition of the software, which is similar to the case of the fabled XP corporate key leak, which did not work with XP Home."(The Register). I have no plans to go anywhere near this product, but it is clear that Microsoft's plans to license their product out or piracy circles has failed miserably once again. Boohoohoo.

The Register puts this better than I can, so I will let them. "Privacy International today announced the results of its competition to find the world's most pointless security measures. The competition, launched in February, attracted almost 5000 nominations from 35 countries. While airlines and airports dominated the competition, nominations arose from almost all areas of private and public sector activity. The winners include JFK Airport, T-Mobile (UK), Michigan Correctional Facilities and the Australian government. The Stupid Security Awards were judged by a distinguished international panel of security and privacy experts, and intended to highlight the absurdities of the security industry. "

The LA Times, and The Register, reported today that Apple computers, the maker of the world renowned iPod, has been in talks for quite awhile with that Vivendi Universal to buy the music giant's Universal Music. and the many universal is more than happy to sell the that riddled part of the company in order to eliminate $7 billion in debt. "Universal is the world's largest music label, accounting for around 25 per cent of world CD sales. But last year its profits shrank 23 per cent to $510 million - rather more than Apple's $65 million - on the back of a worldwide downturn in music sales. That downturn has been largely blamed on Internet music piracy." Whether this will simply be another tech company getting into the tech unfriendly music business, no one knows.

Wired, meanwhile, reported that due to the speculation Apple may make a bid on 29 April, when Vivendi's board is next due to meet, Apple and Vivendi's stock prices dropped, Apple's more than a dollar, and Vivendi's only 4 cents. Universal, the world's top record company, has been in trouble for some time, since well before Vivendi bought it from Seagram's, and there is no word yet on the price that the division will bring in. The reasons for the deal are clear, that Apple will bring to life it's much desired and long rumored online service to work with it's best selling iPod's. The end of this month could be very big for both companies.

Paul Mockapetris, one of the co founders of the DNS protocol, is calling for the elimination of the protocol in favor of the more safe and secure DNSSec. After several high profile sites where hijacked by DNS trickery, as well as a denial of service attack last October which took out seven of the Internet's 13 DNS root-name servers, highlighted the fragility of the Internet's addressing system, and raised the fears of many webmaster's, myself including. "The Internet Engineering Task Force has yet to ratify DNSSec, designed to underpin the system with security keys and certificates to create a "chain of trust" in some ways similar to extranet systems. According to Mockapetris, ratification of the standard, which has been in development for years, is still at least six months off."

In what had the potential to crack open the DMCA, the ACLU lost it's case in support of a harvard law student trying to get a peek of some filtering software for a school study on the effectiveness of the filtering packages. "Ben Edelman, a Harvard Law student and well-known online activist, had sought permission to reverse-engineer the list of Web sites blocked by N2H2, a process in possible violation of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A lawsuit brought on Edelman's behalf last July by the American Civil Liberties Union's challenged this aspect of the DMCA." Maybe next time.

A wannabe business woman in Massachusetts was sentenced to more than 4 years in jail after ripping off $880,000 from almost 350 victims. "Teresa Smith, 25, of Massachusetts, USA, posed as legitimate businesswoman selling Apple computers on auction sites such as eBay for 18 months before she was busted. The Hartford Courant explains the numerous rouses Smith (AKA Teresa Iaconi) used to stay one step ahead of the people she was ripping off. hen customers complained, Smith offered a variety of false excuses, blaming shipping delays, problems with her computer supplier and unreliable employees, prosecutors said. By the time the fraud was exposed, they said, the money was gone, used by Smith for living expenses and to finance the start-up of her own advertising business, which ultimately failed."

Think Secret revealed(and The Register reported) that Apple will soon be releasing a 30GB iPod, and it's own online music service(likely after the request to buy Universal Music is finalized) which may or may not win them back Dell, who the same site recently revealed was no longer selling the windows iPod due to issue it had with the new terms and conditions Apple released. "The new model, to be offered in 15GB and 30GB incarnations, not only sports a redesigned control system that adds QuickTime Player-style, fast forward, and track skip (forward and backward) buttons, removing them from around the scroll wheel, but will ship with a music transfer/recharge cradle."