Slashdot Mirror

sil points to an article at Wired which says that Attorney General John Ashcroft told Congress (specifically, the House Judiciary Committee) this week that "Justice Department prosecutors would help state officials imprison sex-site operators that feature obscene images." "I wonder how one would be affected on the international level. So much for freedom of speech, and expression." says sil. Full article on Wired.

joq writes "Just when you thought you'd heard it all... RSA Security Inc. announced it will market a development tool to equip software for a PlayStation2 game console developed by Sony with Netscape and SSL. The new development tool will allow game developers to equip online games for PS2 with SSL or other encryption means to prevent such games from being copied. Sony will sell a PS2 compatible hard disk drive unit with a broadband communications capability and is expected to sport Netscape equipped with SSL. The browser would not be necessary, however, for using game software with SSL because such game software itself processes an amount of money charged with users of networked games through a credit card number securely. Full story is on NikkeiBP and also the RSA press release"

deran9ed writes: "Rocky Mountain News just posted an decent article regarding Jabber. "That makes Jabber the "best candidate for becoming the de facto standard" of the instant-messaging industry, Kobielus said, in much the same way Linux has been to the Unix operating system and Apache has been to Web servers." Article is written rather well for a change with comments on concerns of companies, and their employees use of other IM protocols (AIM, Yahoo), a brief history of Jabber, and its authors, etc. Read on" One thing's for sure -- AOL hasn't made any friends by periodically kicking off all non-official clients from AIM, and companies would like to know that won't happen to them with a custom client.

pra9ma writes "Browsing through and found a nice article on setting up NetBSD and DSL connections as a gateway, the article gives an overview of ways to use your DSL machine as gateway for your home or office network, and goes through the basic steps to setup and maintain security to machines connected directly to the Internet." Nice reading material for those new to the BSD operating system."

Whaddya wanna hear? a) Microsoft's licensing practices, while never to everyone's taste, perhaps, seem to have mellowed at least a bit from the projected future of pay-per-reinstall. 2) The SDMI boycott you read about here lately has lost a key proponent; the reasons are unclear and so is the eventual outcome. iii) If Linux is too cool, BSD too smug, Windows too ridiculous, perhaps you need ... a truly infernal OS. N) Yet more proof that Carnivore and its ilk may be annoying and a threat to the average user, but hardly a sting to a wired criminal worth his salt. All below.

Frankly, this would have been just too silly. steveha writes: "Microsoft just changed their 're-imaging' payment policy. Companies buying computers that come with Windows installed can once again re-image the system hard disk without Microsoft demanding an extra license payment. Here is the official Microsoft document. Computer Reseller News had the story."

Burn baby burn. rpeppe writes: "briefly, you can download Inferno here, for free.

you might remember from a month or so back that the UK firm Vita Nuova obtained rights to Inferno, a next-generation virtual/embedded OS created by the likes of Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Inferno uses many of the ideas from Plan9 but, unlike Plan 9, there are no restrictive hardware requirements - it runs as a "virtual OS" under Linux, Windows, Plan 9 and others, mapping the resources provided by the host OS into a standard form for programs running within Inferno, which will run without change on any platform running it (including on bare hardware, such as SA1100 or MIPS)

we've just made free downloads available (for any use) for Linux, Windows and Plan 9. the actual kernel is not open source, but the download includes open source for all the user-level code in the system (applications, libraries, etc), plus unix-style documentation so there's plenty to tinker with.

this is a system that is genuinely trying to address the problems that are "too deep for unix to fix" and includes all sorts of interesting takes on some of the original unix philosophy (after all, it represents 30 years of evolution from the unix original). plus it's a really nice environment in which to write genuinely (and elegantly) portable programs."

Taking the meat from the jaws of Carnivore. An unnamed correspondent writes "Found a nice article on the circumvention of Carnivore which details steps one can take to avoid big brother. Article is nicely written which has a strange reference to the NSA's Verona project of World War II."

Nothing here may be all that new or surprizing to those already interested in online privacy or cryptography in general, but if you ever need ammunition in an argument about the nice government versus slithering heroin-dealing kiddie-porn terrorists, it'd be nice to point out how accessable these methods are to all involved.

OK, who has what up their sleeves, and why? Fervent writes "Interesting twist in the SDMI boycott -- Don Marti's backing down a bit. Apparently he and Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director of the SDMI, talked and found ways to get along about secure music. The article is here."

I'll be impressed if the music industry or anyone else can come up with a high-quality music format which can't be effectively copied with a modicum of hassle. "Anything that can be read," etc. Thta's not about to stop them from trying on both technological and legal fronts. Of the two, I'll take technological any day.