Slashdot Mirror

Slashdot tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including a few thoughts on the McKinnon situation, New Zealand revises their views on OSS, Korean cloners facing possible jail time, the fight for .xxx continues, more details on Diebold problems, the Supreme Court sides with eBay, AT&T denied a closed hearing, and Sony's Blu-Ray demo on the level. -- Read on for details.

Mathew Bevan speaks out on McKinnon case. mrkuji writes "Ex military hacker Mathew Bevan AKA Kuji has released his comments and thoughts about the goings on of the McKinnon hacker extradition trial."

New Zealand revises their view of OSS. sam_vilain writes "As previously noted here on Slashdot, the New Zealand State Services Commission has some problems with open source software. The new version of their legal guidelines document for OSS in NZ government, however, is a breath of fresh air."

Korean cloners facing possible jail time. reporter writes "In a stunning conclusion to the saga of the Korean cloning scientist who fabricated his results, the Korean government wants to throw him in prison. The BBC reports, "The South Korean cloning scientist who faked his stem cell research has been charged with fraud and embezzlement. [...] Prosecutors claim he [, using grant funds,] bought a car and paid contributions to politicians and company officials who helped to arrange his grants. [...] The misuse of state funds carries a jail term of up to 10 years, while a violation of bio-ethics laws can mean up to three years in prison.'"

The fight for .xxx to continue? Robert writes "ICANN has played down the role that the conservative US government had in its decision to reject a plan to launch a porn-only internet domain, while the company backing the .xxx proposal said it was considering an appeal. From the article: 'Stuart Lawley, president of ICM, after spending at least two years and over $2m on campaigning for .xxx to be approved, told us he thought the deal was shot down for political reasons, and said he was weighing a response. [...] The reason people suspect that US concerns were key, and the reason that the media keeps harping on about it, is because ICANN's powers are granted under a contract with the US Department of Commerce. That contract ends in four months, and so far nobody seems to know what happens after it expires.'"

More details on the Diebold problem. An anonymous reader writes "SecurityFocus' Rob Lemos has published an article with many more details on the critical Diebold problems, implications for upcoming state elections next week, and quotes from key scientists who have detailed knowledge of how easily the flaws can be exploited." Relatedly eldavojohn writes "USA Today is reporting that Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell has resigned. From the article: "The board of directors and Wally mutually agreed that his decision to resign at this time for personal reasons was in the best interest of all parties," said John Lauer, Diebold's non-executive chairman of the board."

Supreme Court sides with eBay in patent suit. theodp writes "In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court sided with eBay in a fight over the use of its 'Buy It Now' feature, which will make it easier for companies to avoid court injunctions barring the continued use of technology after a patent infringement finding, such as the one used by Amazon against Barnes & Noble in the midst of the Christmas holiday season over its soon-to-be-reexamined 1-Click patent."

AT&T denied a closed hearing. guygee writes "According to the San Francisco Chronicle, AT&T has lost its '11th hour bid' to force closed hearings on unsealing critical documents in EFF's class-action lawsuit alleging AT&T's illegal transfer of its customer's telephone and Internet records and communications to the National Security Agency. According to the report, 'An AT&T lawyer sent a letter by fax to Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker on Tuesday asking that the courtroom be closed during any discussion of its trade secrets or confidential information.' EFF is also reporting the breaking news on the case." Relatedly DarkAudit writes "A commissioner for the FCC wants an investigation into whether or not phone companies broke the law by handing over their records to the NSA."

Sony's Blu-Ray demo on the level. eaglebtc writes "Gearlog.com has retracted a previous accusation against Sony regarding their alleged use of a DVD+R instead of a Blu-Ray disc in a demonstration. In the original announcement, Gearlog.com claimed that Sony was using a DVD+R to demonstrate Blu-Ray technology, in an attempt to show that Sony was not ready to market the product."

Evoluder writes to tell us that scientists at Wake Forest University have found a "cancer resistant mouse" and bred it to make a small army of cancer resistant mice. When transplanting blood from one of these mice to a normal non-resistant mouse they are able to provide "lifetime cancer protection". From the article: "The cancer-resistant mice all stem from a single mouse discovered in 1999. "The cancer resistance trait so far has been passed to more than 2,000 descendants in 14 generations," said Cui, associate professor of pathology. It also has been bred into three additional mouse strains. About 40 percent of each generation inherits the protection from cancer."

rchapman writes "Generally, file systems are not considered "sexy." When a young programmer wants to do something really cool, his or her first thought is generally not "Dude, two words... File System." However, I am what is politely termed "different." I find file systems very interesting and they have seldom been more so than they are right now. Hans Reiser is working on getting Reiser4 integrated into the Linux kernel, the BSD's are working on getting a journaled file system together, and Sun Microsystems just recently released a beta of ZFS into OpenSolaris. "

xerid writes "The Associated Press is running an article about the increasing costs of government secrecy. The information stems from a report (PDF Warning) posted at OpenTheGovernment.org. From the article: 'The government is withholding more information than ever from the public and expanding ways of shrouding data. Last year, federal agencies spent a record $148 creating and storing new secrets for each $1 spent declassifying old secrets, a coalition of watchdog groups reported Saturday. That's a $28 jump from 2003 when $120 was spent to keep secrets for every $1 spent revealing them.'"

Evoluder writes "Just saw this over on worldofwar.net as it appears to apply to WoW as well. A story at interfax.com says China just passed a law prohibiting minors from playing games that allow players to kill each other (i.e., player killing)." From the article: "Minors should not be allowed to play online games that have PK content, that allow players to increase the power of their own online game characters by killing other players...Online games that have PK content usually also contain acts of violence and leads to players spending too much time trying to increase the power of their characters. They are harmful to young people."

It's pre-pre-Christmas season, and ThePrinceofWands writes "OMG! It's official, 25% more unbelievable greatness in this version." The linked description (on the official LotR site) starts "DISCS 1-2: The Feature FEATURE (approx. 250 minutes) - A new version of the final installment in the epic trilogy! The Academy-Award winning film now has 50 minutes of never-before-seen footage incorporated into the film for this highly-anticipated video release." The extended version can be ordered starting on Oct 1st.

phycoman writes "900,000 HP and Compaq laptops have potential memory issues and are being recalled. The RAM chips from four manufacturers can possibly lead to system corruption and lockups. The affected notebooks are Compaq Evo Notebook N610c, Compaq Evo Notebook N610v, Compaq Evo Notebook N620c, Compaq Evo Notebook N800c, Compaq Evo Notebook N800v, Compaq Evo Notebook N800w, Compaq Evo Notebook N1000c, Compaq Evo Notebook N1000v, Compaq Presario 1500, Compaq Presario 2800, Compaq Presario x1000, Compaq Presario x1200, HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7000 and HP Pavilion zt3000. As a result, HP has created a website whick allows users to download a program to test for faulty RAM chips."

PunkerTFC writes "I'm sure most of you remember the movie Back To The Future. Well, now you have a chance to own your very own 1982 Delorean, fully equipped for time travel. It has a "Flux Capacitor", "Time Circuits" and "exterior Flux Dispersion Banding". This thing is clearly a chick magnet, and if you can't get them on the first pass, you can always crank it up to 88 mph and go back in time to try it again! Seriously though, this car is amazing, definitely worth a look to see the details. Nothing has been missed, and my hat goes off to the builder."

Deven "Epicenter" Gallo writes "I've recently been working on a project to alleviate the slowdown inherent in older game systems. How you ask? By overclocking them! I've managed to perfect overclocking the Sega Genesis / MegaDrive. The processor (a Motorola 68000, running at a stock speed of 7.6 MHz) can be pushed to 16.0 MHz in my experience, and I am still working on higher. The machine doesn't overheat and is entirely stable at these higher speeds."

ScottKin writes "CSULB announced that on September 21st they achieved a milestone in aerospace engineering when they successfully launched their 'Prospector 2' rocket powered by an 'Aerospike' engine. What makes this remarkable is that even NASA had trouble with testing their incarnation of an Aerospike engine - but the Linear Aerospike Engine is quite a different beast. More info on this definitely-newsworthy even can be found at the California Space Authority website."

Cildar writes "In the 'oops' category, the RIAA was forced to withdraw its suit against a 66 year old computer neophyte (read Apple User for god's sake) when they discovered she thought 'Kazaa' was a magician playing at local kids' birthday parties. The story is as reported in the Boston Globe." Update: 09/24 15:19 GMT by T : Note, the magician crack is a joke ;)

An'Desha Danin writes "It appears that SNK is returning to the US market for the first time since they closed down its offices in June 2000. GameDaily has the scoop. The article mentions SNK will be showing at E3 with playable versions of Metal Slug Advance and King of Fighters 2001 for Gameboy Advance. Sweetness." Also mentioned are a new version of Samurai Shodown and a 3D version (!) of Metal Slug, so, needless to say, the messageboards on Neo Geo fansites are lighting up over this news.

14ghz writes "Microsoft gave out copies of .NET Visual Studio Pro to attendees of the Microsoft .NET Student Tour. Despite the discs saying "UNLICENSED SOFTWARE -- Illegal without separate license from Microsoft", the freebie didn't contain any license document, and one guy decided to ask the MS conference rep about it. Read the in-progress story."

texus writes "The Adelphia PowerLink Cable Modem Internet Service Provider, that serves 5.5 million customers nation wide, was found to be vulnerable of a major security flaw that allows cable modem subscribers to spy on each others traffic, as well as the ability to modify other users internet packets in realtime. The severity of a potential attack could allow a malicious subscriber to gain access to the customers private activity on the net, as well as the capabilities to hijack connections, intercept SSL/SSH/VPN encrypted sessions, hijack and poison dns servers, and perform a Denial of Service on the entire subnet. The advisory on BugTraq officially states that it didn't seem like Unix machines that logged onto the network were affected, but reports from other Adelphia subscribers indicate that this was inaccurate and Unix users are vulnerable as well."

JSC writes "Looks like the Secret Service is taking a page from the WarDriving handbook. Your tax dollars at work includes springing for the Pringles can for the antenna."

Stewart Rosenberger has written an interesting piece about what the success of Linux means for the users out there who are currently using it. Will it mean that the pioneers will move on to other places? Is this already starting-rather then Linux fragmenting, the user base fragmenting? Click below to read more-it's well worth it.

This is not about Open Source. The Open Source movement has taken a once-ridiculed development model and hammered it into a commercially viable bandwagon that the entire industry is just now scrambling to get onto. Open Source is to be praised for the control and flexibility it has brought to programmers and users alike. This is not about Open Source - it's about Linux. I make this distinction now because, while at the moment they are seen as something of a package deal, one is a revolution and the other is nothing more than a twinkling fad in the eyes of the computer industry.

The Linux community has done what only a handful of other organizations can lay claim to. It has posed a genuine threat to Microsoft's near monopoly over the desktop market. And those other organizations, like IBM, Apple and Netscape? They had hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal and they still failed. Well, it looks like the Linux community may just succeed, and for good reason too - they have more developers and testers than any single platform has ever had behind it. And more importantly, those developers and testers enjoy what they do. They enjoy what they do to such an extent that most of them are doing it for free. Microsoft cannot, and has never been able to, say that about its Windows platform.

To these millions of developers, testers, and users, Linux is far more than just a simple operating system. It's a way of life. It's a religion. It 's a holy crusade against the enemy in Redmond. However, on top of all that, and even underneath it, the people who use Linux do so because it's theirs. Linux is theirs, not in the Open Source sense that they are free to change and distribute it as they see fit, but in the sense that no one else is using it. Even with the community's millions of members, they are still a very small minority in the larger scheme of things and, although most will fiercely deny it, that's the way they like it.

This is meant for all the "world-domination" types who want to see Linux on every desktop in the world: You don't know what you're asking for. The day that 51% of the world's PCs run Linux is the day that you start running OpenBSD or some other, lesser-popular, OS.

And why will they abandon ship? They will blame companies like RedHat, SuSE, and Caldera for commercializing their precious operating system. They' ll claim that Linux's architecture is inherently inferior. They'll say it's not as scalable, not as portable, and not as secure as the latest-and-greatest OS. But while the reasons they give may have some merit, they won't be the truth. The truth is they'll abandon Linux because in their eyes, it will have joined the ranks of Windows as a sell-out. They'll leave because Linux isn't theirs anymore.

No one will notice either. The change will be gradual as more and more members of the Linux community move on to greener pastures. And as the tide begins to swell up against the old majority, a new community will spring up with it's own culture and icons. The elite will poke fun at "Linux Lusers" and their monolithic operating system. And why shouldn't they? Anyone who's serious about computing will be using the super-portable Hurd microkernel, right?

This doesn't have anything to do with Linux as an operating system. Linux could be the most perfectly stable, portable, scalable piece of code ever imagined and what I've predicted would still be inevitable. The Linux community isn't about using Linux - it's about feeling special. I know that sounds trite, but it's accurate. When Linux (and in particular its desktop environments, such as KDE and GNOME) have matured to a point where they are useable by the average joe, today's Linux users aren't going to feel as unique. They will seek other venues of being better than average. Some will call themselves "power users". Others will become sysadmins professionally. The rest will leave.

It bears repeating, so I will say it again: This is not about Open Source. Just because Linux is GPL'ed, doesn't mean it's immune to the sell-out syndrome that I've described above. People claim that because Linux is held under the GNU Public License that no one company can dominate it. This is true. They say that hackers like Alan Cox, Mandrake, and Linus Torvalds will continue to improve upon Linux at their own pace, regardless of what outside media and industry influences are saying. This is also probably true. The point, however, is that the Linux community, as a whole, will not stick around to watch. They won't want any part in the corporate-sponsored demographic-pandering mainstream beast that Linux will have become. GPL'ed or not, they're going to hate Linux.

This is not to say that Linux hasn't already revolutionized the computer world, because it has. What the Linux community has accomplished in the past few years can only be called "amazing" - It has been a watershed in the history of Free Software and an overall Good Thing (tm). Regardless, Linux is transient. The OS itself may continue on for some time, but the people who made it what it is won't.

It happens in art. It happens in music. And now it's happening in software. What was once an underground alternative is now becoming mainstream and commercial. The masses are coming for your kernel and you're calling them on. Once the door is open, it cannot be closed again and the Camelot of Linux will fall.

Stewart Rosenberger

foogle@adelphia.net

Foogle on Slashdot