Slashdot Mirror

Jacco de Leeuw writes "Windows Mobile developers have enjoyed free development tools like the eMbedded Visual Tools and that in turn has helped popularize Windows Mobile devices and a number of free or cheap applications. But now the SDK for the upcoming Windows Mobile 5.0 has a number of 'technical (not political) dependencies' on Visual Studio 2005, which starts at $299. Is it time for an open source Windows Mobile toolchain?"

Jacco de Leeuw writes "SecurityFocus published an article by Michael Ossmann that discusses the new generation of WEP cracking tools for 802.11 wireless networks. These are much faster as they perform passive statistical analysis. In many cases, a WEP key can be determined in minutes or even seconds. For those who have switched to PPTP for securing their wireless nets: Joshua Wright released a new version of his Cisco LEAP cracker called Asleap which can now also recover weak PPTP passwords. Both LEAP and PPTP employ MS-CHAPv2 authentication." Update: 12/22 00:14 GMT by T : Michael Ossmann wrote to point out his last name has two Ns, rather than one.

wdebruij writes "According to this source (unfortunately in dutch), a number of dutch ISPs are bundling their forces to fight the spread of worms. The technology, called virbl, blocks all accesses from IP addresses from which at least 2 worms were sent for 24 hours, naturally excluding known large email servers. Background info on the project can be found at the developers' project site. So, does anyone have useful remarks on why this may succeed or fail? It appears to me as a simple to implement yet powerful, albeit stopgap, solution."

Jacco de Leeuw writes "Remember those postcards that showed different pictures depending on the angle you looked at them? Royal Dutch Mint has placed a new 10 Euro coin into circulation today that exhibits a similar effect. They invented a new minting technique called MultiView Minting. One side of the coin shows photos of the Dutch heir to the throne, his wife and their newborn daughter Amalia. The three pictures were lasered onto 46 ribs, which is the number of chromosomes in a human cell. This clip shows the effect."

Jacco de Leeuw writes "I was checking the website of anti-virus vendor Sophos when I noticed a press release: " Sophos Acquires Anti-Spam Specialist ActiveState for $23 million in cash". I didn't even know ActiveState was into anti-spam! What will this mean for their ActivePerl or ActivePython products?"

wfberg writes: "This Philips VCR records and reads normal VHS tapes, but also records MPEG 2 video digitally on tape. You need 'special' tape for this though (presumably to boost philips tape sales). It sports digital-input and since it's RW and digital, this should piss off the DVD people. Since Philips owns a stake in TiVo, maybe TiVos will make tape-backups in the future? ;-)" The flip-down edit panel looks cool. I wonder how hard it would be to get FireWire out as well as in ...

sirch wrote to us with the latest research from Forrester Reports. The report alleges that this year's massive hyping of Linux will fade in 2000, as well as stating that it's not probable that CIOs will be switching over in massive numbers to Linux. However, the report than goes on to say that Linux will probably see continued growth, through "dominating new application segments." Not really that surprising of a report. One of the interesting points is the prediction that by 2004, the other Unices and Linux will have converged to the point that binaries for any one will probably run on all the others.

Mark Wielaard writes "Lat week the Linux Weekly News had an editorial on "How do we come to terms with Richard M. Stallman?". This week a lot of readers wrote letters to the editor about this matter. I for one think it is a good thing for our community to discuss the similarities and differences between Open Source and Free Software. "

Mark Wielaard writes "The following message just hit the LinuxPPC mailing list. Paul Mackerras has released a new development kernel (2.1.121) that can be used in combination with the graphical MacOS booter BootX from Benjamin Herrenschmidt. This is great because switching between MacOS and Linux is now as simple as clicking a button during startup. Read the full message in the archives. And here is a screenshot. "

Bart Smit writes "jkh just sent out an announcement of a contest meant to make people think about making FreeBSD easier to use and more attractive 'out of the box'. See the contest page. There's some cool prizes (how about a 12Gb disk...). "

Michel sent us this story where you can read an interesting formalization of something we already know:Some email domains are just 'cool'. @well.com is cool, @aol.com isn't. It's interesting to see the mainstream press trying to explain that sort of thing. (Note:Please do not beg for @slashdot.org addresses! The server is too slow, and I don't have time to administer accounts!)

Bart Smit writes " The current antitrust case against Microsoft pales next to what's at issue in this article about the company's real direction on the Internet. According to their plans, Microsoft Start will tap into a vast percentage of online transactions. This is about monopolizing e-commerce... At link"