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AOL has been attempting to block access to AIM via Jabber, GAIM, and other open source projects based on libfaim. Both Jabber.org and Jabber.com have issued statements, and are welcoming AOL to work together with the community in creating an open server to server interoperability solution that meets their FCC Conditions."

With all of this back and forth on the issue from AOL, do we really need to use their system at all?

For entertainment companies marketing to a generation raised on the Internet--teenagers and twentysomethings who regularly comb the Web--good buzz reigns supreme.

It's a simple process: Tap into any of the big search engines, such as Yahoo or Ask Jeeves, type in the name of a favorite star or movie, and a world of possibilities pops up that includes promotional sites, movie reviews, recent articles, chat rooms and fan sites.

Because fans crave "real" or unfiltered dialogue with other fans, these unofficial sites are popular and powerful. It is a culture that is ripe for manipulation.

Diary of an AOL (l)User.

July 18 - I just tried to connect to America Online. I've heard it is the best online service I can get. They even included a free disk! I'd better hold onto it incase they don't ever send me another one! I can't connect. I don't know what is wrong.

July 19 - Some guy at the tech support center says my computer needs a modem. I don't see why. He's just trying to cheat me. How dumb does he think I am?

July 22 - I bought the modem. I couldn't figure out where it goes. It wouldn't fit in the monitor or the printer. I'm confused.

July 23 - I finally got the modem in and hooked up. that nine year old next door did it for me. But it still don't work. I cant get online.

July 25 - That nine year old kid next door hooked me up to America Online for me. He's so smart. I told the kid he was a prodigy. But he says that's just another service. What a modest kid. He's so smart and he does these services for people. Anyway he's smarter then the jerks who sold me the modem. They didn't even tell me about communications software. Bet they didn't know. And why do they put two telephone jack holes in the back of a modem when you only need one? And why do they have one labeled phone when you are not suppose to hook it to the phone jack on the wall? I thought the dial tone sounded funny! Boy, are modem makers dumb! But the kid figured it out by the sound.

July 26 - What's the internet? I thought I was on America Online. Not this internet thing. I'm confused.

July 27 - The nine year old kid next door showed me how to use this America Online stuff. I told him he must be a genius. He says that he is compared to me. Maybe he's not so modest after all.

July 28 - I tried to use chat today. I tried to talk into my computer but nothing happened. maybe I need to buy a microphone.

July 29 - I found this thing called usenet. I got out of it because I'm connected to America Online not usenet.

July 30 - These people in this usenet thing keep using capital letters. How do they do that? I never figured out how to type capital letters. Maybe they have a different type of keyboard.

JULY 31 - I CALLED THE COMPUTER MAKER I BOUGHT IT FROM TO COMPLAIN ABOUT NOT HAVING A CAPITOL LETTER KEY. THE TECH SUPPORT GUY SAID IT WAS THIS CAPS LOCK KEY. WHY DIDN'T THEY SPELL IT OUT? I TOLD HIM I GOT A CHEAP KEYBOARD AND WANTED A BETTER ONE. AND ONE OF MY SHIFT KEYS ISNT THE SAME SIZE AS THE OTHER. HE SAID THATS A STANDARD. I TOLD HIM I DIDN'T WANT A STANDARD KEYBOARD BUT ANOTHER BRAND. I MUST HAVE HAD AN IMPORTANT COMPLAINT BECAUSE I HEARD HIM TELL THE OTHER SUPPORT GUYS TO LISTEN IN ON OUR CONVERSATION.

AUGUST 1 - I FOUND THIS THING CALLED THE USENET ORACLE. IT SAYS THAT IT CAN ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS I ASK IT. I SENT IT 44 SEPARATE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE INTERNET. I HOPE IT RESPONDS SOON.

AUGUST 2 - I FOUND A GROUP CALLED REC.HUMOR. I DECIDED TO POST THIS JOKE ABOUT THE CHICKEN THAT CROSSED THE ROAD. TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE! HA! HA! I WASNT SURE I POSTED IT RIGHT SO I POSTED IT 56 MORE TIMES.

AUGUST 3 - I KEEP HEARING ABOUT THE WORLD WIDE WEB. I DON'T NOW SPIDERS GREW THAT LARGE.

AUGUST 4 - THE ORACLE RESPONDED TO MY QUESTIONS TODAY. GEEZ IT WAS RUDE. I WAS SO ANGRY THAT I POSTED AN ANGRY MESSAGE ABOUT IT TO REC.HUMOR.ORACLE. I WASNT SURE IF I POSTED RIGHT SO I POSTED IT 22 MORE TIMES.

AUGUST 5 - SOMEONE TOLD ME TO READ THE FAQ. GEEZ THEY DIDN'T HAVE TO USE PROFANITY.

AUGUST 6 - SOMEONE ELSE TOLD ME TO STOP SHOUTING IN ALL MY MESSAGES. WHAT A STUPID JERK. IM NOT SHOUTING! IM NOT EVEN TALKING! JUST TYPING! HOW CAN THEY LET THESE RUDE JERKS GO ON THE INTERNET?

August 7 - Why have a Caps Lock key if you're not suppose to use it? Its probably an extra feature that costs more money.

August 8 - I just read this post called make money fast. I'm so exited. I'm going to make lots of money. I followed his instructions and posted it to every newsgroup I could find.

August 9 - I just made my signature file. Its only 6 pages long. I will have to work on it some more.

August 10 - I just looked at a group called alt.aol.sucks. I read a few posts and I really believe that aol should be wiped off the face of the earth. I wonder what an aol is.

August 11 - I was asking where to find some information about something. Some guy told me to check out ftp.netcom.com. I've looked and looked but I can't find that group.

August 12 - I sent a post to every usenet group on the Internet asking where the ftp.netcom.com is. hopefully someone will help. I cant ask the kid next door. His parents said that when he comes back from my house he's laughing so hard he can't eat or sleep or do his homework. So they wont let him come over anymore. I do have a great sense of humor. I don't know why the rec.humor group didn't like my chicken joke. Maybe they only like dirty stuff. Some people sent me posts about my 56 posts of the joke and they used bad words.

August 13 - I sent another post to every usenet group on the Internet asking where the ftp.netcom.com is. I had forgot yesterday to include my new signature file which is only 8 pages long. I know everyone will want to read my favorite poem so I included it. I'm also going to add that short story I like.

August 14 - Some guy suspended my account because of what I was doing. I told him I don't have an account at his bank. He's so dumb.

More AOL humor

Its not a bad move by Bush to protect his personal information from being subjected to ridicule via way of the FOIA. Its the same people who passed this law that has used it against many people often abusing it and hiding under the curtain of the FOIA.

Lets be realistic here if possible about the situation, and shoot from the hip should you think its conspiracy based. We all theoretically have the right to Freedom of Speech and privacy, and many go about daily having these rights violated without even knowing. Cookies, spam resellers, telemarketers, etc., etc..

Sure we have crypto here, but let us not forget these same people who believe in a persons right to privacy tried to secretly shaft us with HR46 late last quarter.

But wait before someone rebutts with a "That was a bill for criminals who use crypto", lets take a hi tech case to a courtroom trial shall we. Jury based, in theory a jury of ones own peers. Does anyone honestly believe they will get a jury of their own peers, or rather a jury of retired computer-phobic e-misfits who sit home watching Oprah and Judge Judy? This is the sad reality is that privacy is very limited in the United States although many would love to dispute this.

Anyways I don't feel like rambling on more than I already do.

The Big Breach

Certificates provide an attractive business model. They cost almost nothing to make, and if you can convince someone to buy a certificate each year for $5, that times the population of the Internet is a big yearly income. If you can convince someone to purchase a private CA and pay you a fee for every certificate he issues, you're also in good shape. It's no wonder so many companies are trying to cash in on this potential market. With that much money at stake, it is also no wonder that almost all the literature and lobbying on the subject is produced by PKI vendors. And this literature leaves some pretty basic questions unanswered: What good are certificates anyway? Are they secure? For what? In this essay, we hope to explore some of those questions.

if [ -e bombdropping ];
then
mkdir /jail ; chroot /jail deran9ed
echo "it could happen to you too"
else
for i in `find /somewhere/over/the/rainbow -name deran9ed
do
wget -U spooks www.google.com/query?deran9ed
mv $i /jail
done
fi

German Federal Armed Forces banish Microsoft programs from fear of US secret services the Foreign Office and the German Federal Armed Forces safety gaps want to conclude. Instead of American software on the national computers in the future German programs will operate.

In computers, which are used in sensitive areas, no software from Microsoft is to be used anymore. After realizations of German security authorities the American espionage service NSA has encoded data all relevant source codes of the US firm and can read in such a way. In order to protect secrets, the Ministry of Defense sets Siemens and Telekom therefore on encoding techniques of the domestic companies.

The Foreign Office reset meanwhile its plan to introduce video conferences with its representations abroad. Undersecretary of state Gunter Pleuger experienced with a Telekom presentation in Berlin at the beginning of March that all satellite transmission ways for technical reasons run over the American city Denver in the Federal State Colorado.

Pleuger was too uncertain the detour via the USA. " then we can hold our conferences directly in Langley ", spoettelte a Pleuger coworker. In Langley (Virginia) the American secret service CIA resides.

But despite the united front against Napster, behind closed doors the relationship appears to have chilled. The argument is over what the recording industry should pay publishers for the right to stream MP3 files.

On March 9, the copyright office responded to the petitions by opening a public comment period on the question of what kind of licensing digital streaming and downloading of music files should require. Once the office settles the dispute over whether a digital stream is really the same thing as selling someone a CD, then it may arbitrate what the royalty on a digital file delivery should be.

Goldsmith thinks the industry's take-no-prisoners strategy may backfire. "They're pissing off the artists," he said. "If they piss off online radio too, what's to prevent a system that doesn't involve the recording industry at all? They're encouraging the development of an alternative relationship between producers and radio stations."

Why is it always about destruction? It seems that the only purpose people see for robots is to fight with other robots.

If aliens ever show up, we'd use battlebots (hehe)

US spends most on military (less lives lost using robots)

Inventors (students) get a grasp of teamwork and engineering skills

Funding for students is less than hiring vendors (NASA keeps the robots I think)

NASA looking to improve so it doesn't lose another MARS probe

Cons:

Waising tax payer dollars

Creating violence in schools

Isn't telecast with XFL or Survivor for ratings

So there's more pros than cons. Seriously though, we all know about violence in schools, and society as a whole, but these are engineering and science students, not the typical misfit you see shooting up his school. Sure it can have violent tendencies to show this program or even scheme it up in the name of science, but its no different than Gene Rodenberry's Star Trek shows (well its real) on television battling it out week after week.

Think for a second about the pro's involved here. Now when a student brings a bomb to school, we have robots that disengage those bombs (nice comparison huh), well picture the future, a robot who not only disarms the student's bomb, but gives then beats on him afterwards and arrests him (very true there's the LAPD for that). ;)

I find this disturbing, because as an area of research, robotics has great promise to actually contribute to the good of the human race. Robots of the potential to effectively accomplish many dangerous and difficult tasks that are today done by poorly paid overworked people.

Robots should be encouraging the formation of a classless society, where everyone has leisure time and a fulfilling creative job. Instead, robots are being developed primarily as a tool of destruction.

Unfortunately, geeks seem to thrive on violence and don't realize the massive potential that is being thrown away.

Has an automatic 'authoring tool' that allows an editor to create and store polls (claim 7), including fields for question text, numbers, and answers (claim 4).

Total votes and percentage fields for displaying poll results (claim 5). A 'votes table' to track users that have already voted, a "totals table" to contain vote tallies, a 'vote handler' that processes votes, and a 'survey index table' that displays either the poll questions, or results, depending on whether the user has voted (claim 1)."

So, is Slashdot's Poll feature enough to constitute prior art in this case?

There is always the worry that Microsoft can begin acting in the same fashion as NCR has recently (since the patent has been issued), and start throwing lawsuits at every online poll they can find on the net. Including Slashdot's.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office:

Software Patent Institute

Bustpatents.com

invalid/withdrawn/pathetic software patents.

"Software Patents Tangle the Web,"

With billions of dollars in Internet sales at stake, the proliferation of broad e-commerce patents is sowing confusion, uncertainty and a good deal of cynicism among many software developers and business leaders. Some legal experts, such as Robert Merges, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, believe the sheer number of patents now pending on business methods has "pushed the patent system into crisis."

Campbell Soup ( NYSE:CPB), is prepared to sue thousands of script kiddies worldwide for breaking the patents on their product. With the release of "Script Kiddies Soup" (which was direct marketing ploy to attract the younger, cyber generation of the world), lawyers for the Campbell Soup Corporation have denied authorizing anyone to use the replacements of numbers of altered ASCII into existing alphabets, and are looking forward to their days in court.

"Campbell soup is already a house hold name amongst mothers and on-the-go type families. As Script Kiddies became familiar with our soup which contains a form of "hacker-Ebonics" where E's are 3's, I's are 1's and so on, Script Kiddies have misused our product and must now pay for their actions."

Following this news, Campbell's has stated that its Script Kiddie Soup will be relaced with Distributed Denials of Soup v.1 which will include #,$,%,@,!, and / within the cans, as well as a MOTD on the inside label. We also are doing an AOL:Keywords spin off for those who aren't really hackers, but enjoy on-line soup-eating actives. They can expect a flood of ad's inside their labels." , Said Dan R. Morris president and chief executive officer

"DoubleClick is in the midst of providing streaming ads once their patent suit is settled, and we contend that Campbell's will be the leading e-Soup retailer in the world." "But what about security? Just how secure is a can of Script Kiddie soup? If current hacker trends run parrallel with history, we can expect that sooner or later someone will find a buffer overflow and exploit the can for root-access. I would say patches wi ll be out soon to fix the compromising areas." Said JP of antisouponline, a popular main stream security site. Others disagree stating, "it's just a can of soup. Shut up and eat it.

Officials at the Department of Justice are now asking whether or not to file an anti-trust suit against the Campbell Soup Corporation in attempts to see whether the company is acting in good faith by claiming patents on numbers replaced by letters, and ultimately the alphabet.

John Ashcroft is appointing a special prosecutor to oversee the case as he vows to spend billions in surplus tax dollars to get to the core of the latest patent war. "We're confident we will uncover the nature of this after the NSA decrypts messages retrieved from current cans of this soup, some of which may invoke proof of terrorism as an agent's child had the word 0s4m4 on his spoon. We will ensure this case is brought to justice." stated Mr. Ashcroft.

Campbell Soup ( NYSE:CPB), is prepared to sue thousands of script kiddies worldwide for breaking the patents on their product. With the release of "Script Kiddies Soup" (which was direct marketing ploy to attract the younger, cyber generation of the world), lawyers for the Campbell Soup Corporation have denied authorizing anyone to use the replacements of numbers of altered ASCII into existing alphabets, and are looking forward to their days in court.

"Campbell soup is already a house hold name amongst mothers and on-the-go type families. As Script Kiddies became familiar with our soup which contains a form of "hacker-Ebonics" where E's are 3's, I's are 1's and so on, Script Kiddies have misused our product and must now pay for their actions."

Following this news, Campbell's has stated that its Script Kiddie Soup will be relaced with Distributed Denials of Soup v.1 which will include #,$,%,@,!, and / within the cans, as well as a MOTD on the inside label. We also are doing an AOL:Keywords spin off for those who aren't really hackers, but enjoy on-line soup-eating actives. They can expect a flood of ad's inside their labels." , Said Dan R. Morris president and chief executive officer

"DoubleClick is in the midst of providing streaming ads once their patent suit is settled, and we contend that Campbell's will be the leading e-Soup retailer in the world." "But what about security? Just how secure is a can of Script Kiddie soup? If current hacker trends run parrallel with history, we can expect that sooner or later someone will find a buffer overflow and exploit the can for root-access. I would say patches wi ll be out soon to fix the compromising areas." Said JP of antisouponline, a popular main stream security site. Others disagree stating, "it's just a can of soup. Shut up and eat it.

Officials at the Department of Justice are now asking whether or not to file an anti-trust suit against the Campbell Soup Corporation in attempts to see whether the company is acting in good faith by claiming patents on numbers replaced by letters, and ultimately the alphabet.

John Ashcroft is appointing a special prosecutor to oversee the case as he vows to spend billions in surplus tax dollars to get to the core of the latest patent war. "We're confident we will uncover the nature of this after the NSA decrypts messages retrieved from current cans of this soup, some of which may invoke proof of terrorism as an agent's child had the word 0s4m4 on his spoon. We will ensure this case is brought to justice." stated Mr. Ashcroft.

NCR then sued the students for not asking permission down the chain of command while using their Palms, following the students claim of Invasion of Privacy by guards who glimpsed (unauthorized) at their screens to determine that the students indeed were playing Quake. Pending is the reaction from IDSoftware who's latest filings show the students had not sought permission to port Q3 to the AtheOS operating system.

Shakespeare in dub

The industry is rushing to wireless as it did to the Internet, and it's making the same hurried mistakes regarding security: minimizing its importance to get applications in the hands of users.

In an environment where beating the market reigns supreme and security takes second chair to proliferation, many experts predict that, much like on the wired Internet, wireless users and IT managers will end up fending off a steady stream of virus attacks, dealing with hacks into user accounts and scrambling to patch security holes. Security efforts that are under way are hampered by divergent networks and protocols and bickering over which methods are best for the wireless world.

The patents at issue, both granted in 1987, are for a ''Portable personal terminal for use in a system for handling transactions,'' and for a ``System for handling transactions including a portable personal terminal.''

NCR asked for a jury trial on its demands that Palm and Handspring be blocked from making any more of the products, and that NCR be awarded compensatory and actual damages.

Whereas, comments from the public have been received on a web-based public comment forum and at a Public Forum held on 12 March 2001;

RESOLVED [01.25] that the Board shall be notified of the complete posting of the agreement and appendices for any of the four unsponsored top-level domains (.biz, .info, .name, and .pro) and after that notification seven days shall be allowed for Board members to make any additional comments to the President and General Counsel;

In fact, only government agents and a few privileged defense contractors were able to expend meaningful resources on crypto research.

it is also the story of that wars' enemy, the National Security Agency. The cryptography bureaucracy, gaining most of its resources during the Second World War, had built quite a palace around anything that involved codes.

spooks were able to keep their lock on cryptography by invoking a mentality of "if only you knew what I know..." in classified briefings to politicians and contract negotiations with defense contractors like IBM.

4 Sun E450's (for databases) 100,000.00

Rack space at Exodus 25,000.00 monthly (mini cage)

20 Misc Servers Apache, etc. VAR501's 3,000.00

Admins for the hardware software 6,000.00 monthly

Content, programmers, etc authors, 6,000.00 monthly

Office space 6,000 monthly

Lets just guesstimate 50,000.00 monthly with the company gaining a measly even 10,000.00 in banner revenue, its a losing battle.

These figures are minute to whats out there and its hard for a company with little to no real world experience to keep up with no revenue coming in. You can talk an investors ear off, but if the investor sees himself throwing away his money he will pull out no matter what you propose. Whats happening often is these companies haven't fully understood this, and are now trying to revamp their business models which will also scare investors away, as the company does not have a solid game plan for success.

Micropayments, banner ads are the gist of it all, these companies need to overhaul and cut spending drastically and show they can compete with close to nothing in order to get more funding.

Money Talks

Typical dekstop workplace environment
Susie the secretary will not understand *Nix vs. point and click.

Too many variations of Linux
Which one is really better as they all claim one or two niches over the other.

Gnome vs. KDE vs. etc.
Why so many desktop environments, sure alternatives are good, but when work needs to be done, money is burnt by time spent figuring out whats what on Linux vs. point and click MS

And this went on for hours. We would like to think Linux would overtake MS as the most used OS, but the fact remains, most of the people jumping online, and working on the "typical" PC based application solely need simple functions out of their pc, and them having to gcc -o something something.c or ./configure --with-some-new-package ; make ; make install is just not going to cut it.

The Big Breach"

One of the toughest things to do right about now is mention words like "hurt, kill, weapon, etc.," in any school system in the United States and we all know why.

Regardless if the student was only posting information for a quote for his webpage it doesn't surprise me he was paid a visit by authorities, sure we can rant on about a scalar value of Perl or the right of free speech, but the authorities are only doing their job.

One thing I will note though is, authorities rarely take the time to dive deep into investigation when it comes to computer related crimes, as they often don't understand the full spectrum of it all (computing). Things are only going to get worse.

Trying to fight a computer based crime altogether is a nightmare in itself, as attempting to find a jury to prove your innocence while explaining what TCP/IP is, firewalls, etc., will confuse and bore the crap out of any jury sitting there, your 99% likely to lose, since as stated many won't understand whats going on, many will be bored, and many will fall for anything a DA tells them, especially if you have some circumstantial material against you.

Its a shame that things are this way, but thats the way the cookie crumbles, and theres only so much you can do to protect your rights online.

Our IRC server is up

hosting for site colo, per month 10k

writers, content people, etc., lets say 10 employees 10k

hardware 2 Sun e450's, 10 VAR501's 60k

Promotion 600,000.00

Just for a small company, thats about 30k a month. Now look at the revenues these sites generated with "click me banners". Maybe 3000 here 4000 there, which means most companies lost on these schemes as we all no.

Its simple to sit back, watch and poke around and make fun at FuckedCompany.com, but the overabundance of these sites which flourished in the late 90's are what saturated the markets with overhyped products, sites, dreams and hopes.

For those who keep up with financial info, you would know NASDAQ is taking a beating left and right and things will continue as more investors become aware of the true facts: The world is not ready to be run solely on the Internet.

Us geeks could dream, wish, hope, ponder, attempt to make it a reality but when it all comes down on paper take a quick look... There is no paper when dealing with the net its all a big risk, something investors are not going to sit back and watch eat up their money without making a profit.

Companies should seriously start revamping their business models and turn conservative for a period of time and hope this wave dies out (which isn't likely for some time now).

This is sad news but should not come as a surprise to anyone.
Use my bandwidth till I'm on FuckedCompany.com... enjoy

Capitalize on not-so-tech-savvy people

Capitalize on "that Linux groove going on

Sell people on MAXIMUM AVAILABILITY based router

Now this Maximum Availability ploy they mention is for them to reconfigure your router when a network or cable connection is down and will do little to nothing to get someone on the net, so they win with the not-so-tech-savvy people who spend their money thinking its an always redundant connection.

I probably rather take an "always on" 128k line over a dial up satellite deal like this one.

Ahh simplicity. Well the typical person will not need a fraction of a t1 connection to their homes for some time unless everything becomes bloat. People are often confused by the myriads of technology stuff so obscure and shoved down their throats they take little time to read the fine print.

More power to Helius for gaining some sort of niche on the market somehow, as for me I'll stick with my SoHo Cisco 1xxx based home DSL router which serves me fine and has throughout the years at the fraction of the cost of this product. 700.00 US a year ago on ebay ;)

True Life James Bond

After all, most American firms left the business in the 1970s not because they could not innovate but because their shareholders could not stomach the poor earnings.

Consumer-electronics devices are among the fastest to commoditise, as Asian firms quickly copy technology and drive prices down. The success of the Japanese can be partly explained by a capital structure that has allowed them to survive with little profit.

But here, too, digital may turn out to be different. As with the PC itself, most of the value turns out to be not in hardware but in software and related services.

Palm's strategy is eventually to make most of its money from licensing its technology, selling content and software to be used on its devices, and providing services such as wireless Internet access.

The new system is a wireless application which employs mobile phone technology.

Police forces, struggling to maintain patrol levels outside city centres, have welcomed the development as it will allow them to keep an eye on rural and suburban areas at low cost.

"It means that we can get cameras into more difficult and isolated areas without having to spend loads of money or digging up the neighbourhood."

"Our plan is not to tackle crime as such but to reduce the fear of crime - and to that end this system was ideal," said PC Harry Wilkinson, crime prevention officer in Hexham.

police officers to spot crimes as they ahppen

they get their Internet connection from somewhere. Whether they've laid fiber-optic under the channel or they're using a two-way satellite transmission, they have to be connecting to somebody who's selling them the bandwidth. And that somebody is most likely located in a Berne Convention nation and/or a nation where the big five record companies do business. If they thought it necessary, the big five could sue to have the Internet connection to the Fairtunes OpenNap server blocked. They may not be able to get to the server, but they can ensure that nobody gets to it. The author has most of the right points, but one thing he seems to have forgotten is that not all countries will abide by the rules especially those who have interests in simply going against others' thought process and what exactly constitutes free speech especially when dealing with American companies.

One solution for him would be to offer some sort of payment form via some banner or advertising to record companies which I haven't seen on any article. So far I've seen billion dollar promises which does little for the artist, and many record co's weren't keen on it anyway. Another method would be for him to stop specifically using Nap* to trade only MP3 based files. He could open the program up to all file sharing specs and turn a blind eye to what gets traded, this way he isn't targeted, etc.

Either way he doesn't have the money nor resources to go up against these guys and their lawyers will batter him. His intentions may seem noble to those who use the service, and free speech buffs, but he has to remember money talks, and money he doesn't have.
coming soon

Microsoft's move brought some good ideas, and bad ideas to mind.

Good Ideas
Developers can assist with bugs, assist with security issues, shows initiative from MS and their willingness to open up on their inventions (code), gives small companies opportunity to place themselves on the map (giving MS assistance).

Bad Ideas
Developers will be scared by NDA & lawsuits, MS can turn around and attempt a buyout or slander the company for making a slightly bad NDA breach, can code really be patented and or copywritten? (even if someone distorts it to an insane method and capitalizes?), competitors may gain an insight to future MS products and capitalize on it.

MS has done good on its own for many years (yes they have done good after all check their market cap), and opening up even with an NDA sounds good but NDA's out here in the US may not mean anything in a foreign market, will MS's move hurt them or will it help them? To be honest I don't think it would do much at this point, right now MS isn't even working with the Windows2000 source code any more other than fixing bugs, maybe its good for benchmarking the next release, as for W2000 in its current state, guess bug patches will have to do.

Big Breach

Shoppers have two security concerns. First, they worry that their credit-card numbers will be stolen. As a practical matter, that's a minor issue.

By law, they're liable only for the first $50 spent by a thief, and most card issuers waive even that.

The second, far greater problem is identity theft. If crooks get your name, credit card number, Social Security number and other identifiers, they can create a virtual you - open accounts in your name, charge up a storm and ignore the bills.

You'll be dunned and sued. It can take a year or more to straighten out the mess. ID thieves steal credit card numbers from many places - stores, restaurants, mail-order businesses. But the Web lets them steal wholesale, by breaking into the databases of the merchants themselves, hence the appeal of card numbers good for only one use.

The card pops onto your screen and you enter your name and password. You then get a one-time number for the single purchase you intend to make. Once used, it isn't good any more. Your real number is hidden away at the bank, where you hope hackers can't go.

If hackers broke in, they couldn't use the virtual number without your password - which the merchant doesn't have - and it couldn't be circulated to other sites.

Another problem with many crypto offerings is that they can leave you vulnerable to forensic-grade tools that can pull data from supposedly deleted files, including the temporary files that your e-mail application uses as a placeholder for the message before it's encrypted. It seems to me that the only way to get a truly secure solution is to write a mail application that has the encryption built in at the most fundamental level, so that even if temporary files are recovered, they may be rendered useless.

At the same time, I don't want to think about how many people are using weak passphrases -- a sequence that is hashed with random numbers to produce the encipherment key -- which might be easy to remember, but won't stand up under a brute-force attack.

In a 4-3 decision, Florida's high court said the Communications Decency Act gives the Internet service provider, a unit of AOL Time Warner, immunity from a lawsuit filed by a Florida woman, whose 11-year-old son appeared in a lewd videotape sold by one AOL subscriber to another.

The mother alleged that AOL violated Florida criminal law, which prohibits the distribution of pornography, and was negligent by not knowing that one of its subscribers was a seller of child pornography and for not stopping him once complaints had been made.

"The interpretation adopted today provides a foundation for far-ranging forms of illegal conduct...which (ISPs) can, very profitably and with total immunity, knowingly allow their customers to operate through their Internet services," he wrote.

He said AOL has an elaborate system to encourage members to report child pornography.

Besides, there are far, far more effective ways to compromise information than a direct technology attack. Sideband attacks, social engineering, tempest readings, bribery, etc. I am of the opinion that the reason the NSA are not as up in arms as they used to be about encryption is that they have other means of obtaining that same information.

Well it could also be an invitation to a plausible deniability should someone find anything within the coding of the OS as they've had assistance from other students. Simply stated they could point the blame elsewhere. Why in the world would the world's uptmose techie based agency need any assistance whatsoever?

Something that struck me which you pointed out is "Just because the source is available, doesn't mean that people will examine it, nor does it mean that the people who do examine it are competent to do so." one of my exact points which I should have mentioned. I highly doubt anyone will undertake the task of going through a code by code audit of the OS, since if anything IS by chance found, the OS is on the NSA's webserver anyways, so its very easy to switch up source or redirect anything they'd like.

CIA mining your data

CIA director George Tenet said individuals such as Osama bin Laden - the man alleged to have been behind the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa - are using the internet to cloak communications within their organisations. "You recruit people on internet sites and you use encryption," Tenet said. "You move your operational planning and judgements over internet sites' use of encryption. You raise money."

Bin Laden inspires particular alarm in the US. National Security Agency chief Mike Hayden says his own organisation is "behind the curve in keeping up with the global telecommunications revolution", which bin Laden is able to exploit. Hayden blamed this gap for the US's failure to prevent the 1998 embassy attacks, which killed 224 people.

Newer Stealth Arrangements

Never See Anything

Next Superpower Agency

New Snooping Applications

Nothing's Secret Anymore

while($information =~ /[a-z]['")]*[.!?]+['")]*\s/g) {
$conspiracy++;
}

print "Your $information is filled with $conspiracy theories\n";

Where in the world is SpeedyGrl

The original Iridium phones cost about $3,000 while air time ranged from $2 to $10 a minute, and only 15,000 customers signed up. The new service is expected to charge about $1.50 a minute, with phones starting at about $1,000.

Now if only they could put a rush on this and send some of these to the poor folks in California suffering by powerco induced outages ;)

CIA snoopages

In the largest criminal Internet attack to date, a group of Eastern European hackers has spent a year systematically exploiting known Windows NT vulnerabilities to steal customer data.

The FBI and Secret Service are taking the unprecedented step of releasing detailed forensic information from ongoing investigations because of the importance of the attacks.

Within a day or two, the Center for Internet Security will release a small tool that you can use to check your systems for the vulnerabilities and also to look for files the FBI has found present on many compromised systems - indicating your system may have already been compromised by the attacker group.

At this point, it is difficult to assess the exact impact that Shuster's submission will have on the online advertising world.

The DoubleClick patent, which makes exceptionally broad claims regarding the delivery, targeting and measuring of advertising over the Internet, touched off a wave of suits and counter suits between DoubleClick and ad serving rivals 24/7 and L90.

Still, Shuster's prior art points to possible problems with the validity of the DoubleClick patent. But given that the DoubleClick lawsuits are currently dormant, is the issue dead?

The existence of this prior art, together with the November settlement between DoubleClick, and rivals 24/7 and L90, could seriously impede DoubleClick's ability to assert the patent against new entrants into the online advertising realm. This could have a direct benefit for Shuster himself, who is attempting a re-entry into the online advertising field.

Personally I think the general defacement of a website is downright dumb and those responsible seem to forget its outright illegal for one.

Its nice to get a message across but hacking for a so called cause only makes things worse for the hackers, and can sometimes work to the advantage of the target, as they can turn it around and misconstrue the scenario as something of a terroristic attacks. Not only that but the media has the whole concept of hackers distorted to hell due to some of these "hackers'" actions

I've interviewed about a dozen of hackers, a virus creation group, and a script kiddiot defacer. Now the "hackers" I've interviewed are not what media considers hackers, these are professionals in the security field so don't get it distorted, however the script kiddiot defacer and others I've spoken with use the curtain of "hacktivism" to solely get attention, nothing more.

If someone really wants to get a point across I think they should start an organization and speak up on it to raise awareness. "Hacking" to promote an idea is no better than what the Chinese did at Tiananmen Square in my eyes, its painting the kettle black at any cost.

Don't get me wrong I believe in Freedom of Speech, Privacy and all that good stuff, but at the same time I hate racism, I will not condone someone from saying what they want on a racist site. I don't think double standards should apply on subjects, and while some of the older hackes from the mid - late 90's were funny as all hell, no one has the right to take away someone freedom of mind, speech.

Personally I think the general defacement of a website is downright dumb and those responsible seem to forget its outright illegal for one.

Its nice to get a message across but hacking for a so called cause only makes things worse for the hackers, and can sometimes work to the advantage of the target, as they can turn it around and misconstrue the scenario as something of a terroristic attacks. Not only that but the media has the whole concept of hackers distorted to hell due to some of these "hackers'" actions

I've interviewed about a dozen of hackers, a virus creation group, and a script kiddiot defacer. Now the "hackers" I've interviewed are not what media considers hackers, these are professionals in the security field so don't get it distorted, however the script kiddiot defacer and others I've spoken with use the curtain of "hacktivism" to solely get attention, nothing more.

If someone really wants to get a point across I think they should start an organization and speak up on it to raise awareness. "Hacking" to promote an idea is no better than what the Chinese did at Tiananmen Square in my eyes, its painting the kettle black at any cost.

Don't get me wrong I believe in Freedom of Speech, Privacy and all that good stuff, but at the same time I hate racism, I will not condone someone from saying what they want on a racist site. I don't think double standards should apply on subjects, and while some of the older hackes from the mid - late 90's were funny as all hell, no one has the right to take away someone freedom of mind, speech.

Personally I think the general defacement of a website is downright dumb and those responsible seem to forget its outright illegal for one.

Its nice to get a message across but hacking for a so called cause only makes things worse for the hackers, and can sometimes work to the advantage of the target, as they can turn it around and misconstrue the scenario as something of a terroristic attacks. Not only that but the media has the whole concept of hackers distorted to hell due to some of these "hackers'" actions

I've interviewed about a dozen of hackers, a virus creation group, and a script kiddiot defacer. Now the "hackers" I've interviewed are not what media considers hackers, these are professionals in the security field so don't get it distorted, however the script kiddiot defacer and others I've spoken with use the curtain of "hacktivism" to solely get attention, nothing more.

If someone really wants to get a point across I think they should start an organization and speak up on it to raise awareness. "Hacking" to promote an idea is no better than what the Chinese did at Tiananmen Square in my eyes, its painting the kettle black at any cost.

Don't get me wrong I believe in Freedom of Speech, Privacy and all that good stuff, but at the same time I hate racism, I will not condone someone from saying what they want on a racist site. I don't think double standards should apply on subjects, and while some of the older hackes from the mid - late 90's were funny as all hell, no one has the right to take away someone freedom of mind, speech.

I had an ex co-worker who laid down Fiber for the New York Stock Exchange, and I remember him telling me the steps they took to do this.

According to him the New York City Transit Authority was paid a hefty amount of money to blow dark fiber through its train tunnels.

He said for a few weeks he along with transit workers would begin late at night, early in the morning, and go step by step through the tunnels. I recall him saying it was a pain staking process since it carefully had to be set as to avoid any remote thought of all kinds of problems, kinks, high electrical interference etc.

Blowing fiber through the sewer sounds like a neat idea, but I wonder how exactly is it set as to avoid any acts of nature such as, chemical compounds of all sorts of crap in the sewer which can affect it. (hint acids built up from excrement)

Its an extremely expensive task, and I wouldn't want to be the one down below doing it.

CIA bullies a Jew

this is not only my fight, i'm not the only one whose work is being pirated. hundreds of writers' stories, entire books, the work of a lifetime, everyone from isaac asimov to roger zelazny: their work has been thrown onto the web by these smartass vandals who find it an imposition to have to pay for the goods.

(but gawd forbid you try to appropriate something of theirslisten to em squeal!)

the outcome of this case will affect every writer, editor, photographer, artist, musician, poet, sculptor, actor, book designer, publisher and reader.

what we're looking at is the anarchy of ignorant thieves ripping off those who labor for an honest payday, because they conveniently honor the lie that everything should be theirs for the taking.

look, this is your fight, too. if that demented, self-serving misunderstanding of the word "information" prevails, and every zero-ethic tot who wants everything for nothing, who exists in a time where e-commerce hustlers have convinced him/her that they're entitled to everything for nothing prevails, and they are permitted to believe information must be free, with no differentiation made between raw data and the creative properties that provide all artists of any kind with an annuity, to allow them to continue creating new work, then what we're looking at is the egregious inevitability of no one but amateurs getting their work exposed, while those who produce the bulk of all professional-level art find they cannot make a decent living.

The Internet is such a great thing, but one thing many seem to overlook is that it is not a neccessity. For years people have lived without the net, and while it does make live easier, it is just like a car, cell phone, etc., a novelty.

Mid to Late 90's Venture Capital firms went ballistic funding companies that were gone faster than they had came. Recent days VC is dried up as people are realizing their is no immediate ghastly halt of life for anyone without the Internet.

Keeping afloat is a hard thing to do when you have bills to pay and revenues from ads just wont cut it. Its not like television where a broadcaster can sell the rights to programs that are in syndication and make revenue off of reruns. Banner ads are not all they once claimed or hoped to be and many companies were under the impression it would last forever. Companies whose revenues fell under this scheme suffered and are suffering most, since there's much more competition meaning ads are flooded and are likely to be meaningless.

Yahoo has outlasted many dot.coms and the decision to step down as CEO was IMHO a wise move. Think about it, where else is Yahoo going to get revenue from, selling webspace, email accounts, stock quotes? There isn't much out there on the net right now, and until the next best thing comes along many other sites without a surefire business model will all end up on FuckedCompany

Free Porn (oh by the way its ad free too)

Rumors of Microsoft entering the portable gaming market have been reported in abundance for the past six months. However, when a globally respected news source such as MSNBC reports on such rumors, there's sure to be some substantial evidence to support them.

According to a report by MSNBC, Microsoft has progressed far enough along in discussions concerning the possibility of the company entering the portable gaming market (the fastest growing sector of the industry), that it has given the project a codename in "Xboy".

The article suggests that if all goes well with Xbox, Microsoft could enter the portable gaming market in 2002 or 2003, bringing to the table significant technological advances (read: 3D visuals) over Nintendo's upcoming Game Boy Advance, which is scheduled to appear in the US this summer.

The article is quick to point out, though, that Microsoft's main focus at this point and for the foreseeable future is Xbox. The company understands that it must establish a name for itself in the industry before attempting to enter multiple sectors of the market, and to do so, must make Xbox the system by which all others are judged.

Chief Xbox Officer, Robbie Bach, told MSNBC, "I'm focused on one thing and one thing only. If I take my eye off the Xbox mission for two seconds, I'll lose. I can think about [portable games] when I have time to think about those things."

Microsoft's competition in the handheld market, namely Nintendo, could be substantially more difficult to defeat than its main competition for Xbox, Sony.

Nintendo owns 97% of the portable gaming market and has seen the sector grow from $216 million in 1998 to $618 million in 1999 thanks to the introduction of Pokemon. Figures for 2000 should be even more impressive.

That kind of increase is one any company would be foolish to ignore, and Microsoft, while focused on Xbox, is surely paying at least a shrapnel of attention to the portable gaming market. It will take more than superior technology to draw the masses to a new handheld, though. We just hope that that "more" isn't comparable to 151 colorful monsters.

An estimated one-third of all shopping cart applications at Internet retailing sites have software holes that make them vulnerable to the price switching scam, said Peggy Weigle, chief executive of Sanctum, a security software company in Santa Clara, Calif.

"Thieves are coming in the front door," Weigle said. "A lot of security products have been geared to the network level, not the application level."

Here's how it works: After choosing a product and receiving pricing information, a hacker can use a standard browser's "edit page" feature to show the hidden HTML code on the page. The thief then saves the page to his computer, alters the price information and then hits the "publish" key on the browser. In many cases, that page is then accepted by the shopping cart software - and that $999 watch becomes a $3 special.

The problem isn't just in the U.S. - an estimated 40 percent of all e-commerce sites in the U.K. are susceptible to the price changing glitch, according to Saalim Chowdhury, CEO of e-commerce software development company Alphakinetic, which has been studying the flaw.

Sorry to say this to all, but if you buy a Playstation your buying it for games not for PC use to run anything other than games.

Sounds like a nice concept to be able to use Playstation as a cheap alternative to a PC, but this is more of a novelty as opposed to late breaking news of some sort. So lets trump up a scenario for /.'ers to have them conceptualize the true non geekish news here: Little Timmy saves his chore money to go out and buy Playstation so he could play Zelda or some other games. Little Timmy is an avid game afficionado who will spend some thousands of dollars throughout his life on games.

Along come the techies with some new over the counter remedy for Timmy to be able to use his Playstation for something other than games. Does Timmy go out and get this new over the counter remedy? NO! Timmy continues playing GAMES.

With a bombarding of what Linux or BSD will now run on popping up left and right, factorize the completeness of the story with true life experience, do you think one of the distros such as Redhat, or Slackware, will start coding installment ports taking a gamble on the notion that it can be done? How big of a market is it in reality? Just because it may make our mouths salivate at the thought, doesn't mean it will live to see the light of day.

American Concentration Camps?!?! you be the judge.

Members of the underclass -- especially minorities -- continue to lag behind when it comes to access to computing.

Which minority would this be, according to statistics, Latins outnumber whites, and blacks are just slightly under whites as well. I guess you meant the Chinese, or something.

Anyways just think about what the snippet posted said and look from another angle, so poorer classes are online now (or Wired). This does not mean they will be purchasing anything online at any time soon, in fact the way I took this article, I'm thinking too poor to have a credit card, so bye bye e-commerce.

Now on a downside to having a slew of newer users, yuo have higher bandwidth, so it'll cost you more, more people in these lower classes will likely look along the lines of, "Where can I get this for free", which means they still won't be spending. Incidents such as cybercrimes will likely go up as more and more people who've watched movies like The Net, Enemy of the State, The Matrix, will be attempting to act out some of these things, which could at some point force the government to propose strict rules as there are in China, and recently Australia's new non forwarding mail rule.

EOF

Framing Private Ryan

Well IMHO I would go with Oracle on a Sun machine before I'd spend money configuring an i386 based machine to run SQL. Some of the issues that should come to mind are simple, cost, effectiveness, easy of use, scalability, etc.

Costs:
Oracle programmers almost always earn more than other DBA's but Oracle is a bit more stabler and easier to maintain than the SQL's. Sun machines are more expensive than i386's but some of the neccessary upgrades to get a stable machine would likely equalize those costs. Oracle offers great support, while SQL offers mailing list questions you have to hope get responded to.

Scalability:
Sun clusters using Oracle are good for scaling when thinking about 100's of thousands into the millions. At a company I worked for recently we had about 4 million users on an SQL based DB which would choke, distort tables, you name it. At yet another company I worked for, we had a cluster of Sun e450's running Oracle without issues.

Ease of use:
Well I've touched on MS's products lightly and I was not impressed and was quite pissed off at their "issues", which are too many to name. Being familiar with Nix based systems seem to fit my criteria, and although I am not a DBA, I have found troubleshooting Oracle based DB's easier than SQL based DB's, SELECT FROM FOO WHERE NAME LIKE HUH?

my two sek's

AO's DB of chicks

"In the Internet space, time to market is much more important than it was ten years ago. What we end up doing is, we start to ratchet down," Prabhu said. "'How low can I go and still get away with it?'"

In some cases, vendors don't even need to ratchet down. The protocols being implemented in the wireless world simply don't lend themselves to high security.

WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), set to become the default standard for getting Internet data to cell phones, has a known security hole: the point where the data goes from the wires to the air for wireless transmission.

Might as well get rid of that whole pesky fair use provision of copyright law, right?

Not neccessarily so, see most corporations will always want a scapegoat to fall back unto should their corporation lose funds somewhere down the line (overpaid exec's, bad artists, etc.), which is where claiming the loss of millions is stemming from others pirating music.

Now, according to that press release there isn't much said on what steps the program takes to ensure nothing is used, so who's to say this even works for one, and who's to say someone won't circumvent it down the line. Personally I feel those in the industry could, and can create an industry standard which wouldn't allow this to happen, but won't, because once again, they can't come back later and cry losses, thereby creating stinkers (legal mumbo jumbo) in order to create disinformation abroad to hide the fact that sometimes their losses aren't always those pirating, etc. (e.g. Record execs vs. Napster)

The complete press release once again seems to focus on a product and all its greatness with no real detail other than supporting paragraphs referencing how great this product is. How does it work though, is it an encryption based program, steganographic based product? What about some of these CD's with enhanced videos on them, these cannot be copied, and yet they didn't need any special program such as Safecopy to make them, why not use these schemes? Well more power to Macrovision for blindly capitalizing on an idea.

Fidel Castro -- My kind of hacker

The illegality stems from breaching the copyright held by the person who originally wrote the e-mail.

So does this pertain to someone who has included a copyright clause in their email or will the Australian government just conclude on their own the thoughts of the people whose email is in question.

"It's quite possible that the forwarding of an e-mail could be a technical infringement of copyright," Mr Williams' legal adviser told The Sunday Telegraph.

Again, this seems to be a broad law created possibly in hopes of deterring people from forwarding an email and delves into perhaps placing a link on a website. The people of Australia should do something against their politicias who seem to want to take away their right to free speech. Suppose your a reporter and have some very good information regarding an article, will you get sued or thrown in jail for quoting something, or linking to a site to prove a point, or make a statement?

The new measures cover material which already has copyright protection -- such as excerpts from books or song lyrics -- as well as personal messages.

I guess I can no longer email my friends down under with any links or quotes to something I've seen or read, or heard, since they can face time for looking at it should they innocently reply back with the copy of the message I originally sent them.

This means a simple message about office gossip, holiday plans or a new romance carries personal copyright and the recipient has no right to forward it without permission.

Bill Clinton would have liked this law ;)

Internet Industry Association executive director Peter Coroneos said forwarding e-mail had probably always involved a technical breach of copyright, adding: "It's a matter of whether the authors themselves are likely to be concerned.

He urged people sending e-mail to spell out whether they gave permission for the content to be forwarded to others. Well, someone shed some light on this, it is of a concern of the author not government in this matter, however a law is a law is a law.

(c) 2001 ANY DIRECT QUOTES, LINKS, ASSUMPTIONS, THOUGHTS, FANTASIES, MISCONTRUCTION OF THIS POST IS PUNISHABLE BY UP TO FIVE YEARS IN JAIL DOWN UNDER

down under

If anyone cares to remember the Chinese government passed a law stating "Pornographic images of any kind are illegal and punishable", this is a variation of sorts from another country.

With all the attacks on the Internet coming from all different places (hacks on Microsoft, script kiddies defacements, script kiddie DoS attacks), officials are not technologically savvy enough to differentiate any underlying factors when assessing laws to create to assess the bad stuff from the good, hence the UK's law making hacking a crime.

By creating such vague laws officials may feel these methods do not describe any specifics, but an entire slew of incidents which can occur which would make it easier to prosecute crimes. Sure it sounds scary, but the prospect of someone taking you to court because you forward a mail in my opinion is slim.

We have some pretty odd laws over here in the United States which can fall into that category as is seen with some of these companies fighting over patents, and copyright laws, some are as outrageous and nondescript as possible, certainly untested in courts, so there easier to use and reflect upon when making charges against a criminal.

My two cents on this issue, my two hot chicks posing on my site.