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Though I'm feeling all full of myself for having guessed right.

It might please you to know this info from a norwegian article:

Not only did they use "Big IP" from "F5 Networks", but it seems to have been a previously unknown bug in the cache system. They reportedly managed to reproduce it in the lab, and have worked with Altinn to solve the problem. Right now they're running without caching, with the extra load problems that causes.

It also seems like they applied a hotfix to OpenSSO (which they also use) that made it less prone to garbage collection, which increased the overall performance to a level slightly above what it was earlier with caching.

According to this article (in Norwegian), they sometimes use transfer data via the internet, but they use dedicated connections for communication, and as such it should not be possible to hack into the satellites using an internet connection, according to the president of Kongsberg Satellite Services, which runs SvalSat. They heard about this when the commission contacted them, but they didn't find anything which could indicate the systems had been hacked when they checked the systems (article in Norwegian). Apparently, the source of the hacking claim is the USAF.

Yeah, except more and more you expect software to work with each other. Suddenly you find there's lots of maintenance shops and accessory shops and fleet management shops and driver training shops and whatnot that don't deal with motorcycles. Of course we know that vendors only play nice with themselves, but even when you put all open source software in one bin you will find there's specialized software you miss. And that software is likely to be made to work with the most common solution.

Just recently I've heard on the news OpenOffice lost 4000 (norwegian) and 20000 (norwegian) users in the public sector here, moving to MS Office. That's 3-4% of all public employees and a huge win for Microsoft which is creeping back up towards 100%. One seems to focus on Thunderbird as a poor alternative to Outlook/Exchange mostly - they probably got a better deal on MS Office than just Outlook, which is like waving a huge red flag to MS that they're going with another office suite. The other mostly focused on integration to pedagogical and administrative tools, citing a lot of custom work needed.

It's not cheap to be the one paving the road, paying for additional features or custom development. If open source already did everything you want it to do and integrates with everything you need it to integrate with then sure, but that's a dream world. Open source lives off the idea that software is almost good enough and that a bunch of continuous improvements will move it forward. But quite often you come to a gap, there is no open source solution to do X and writing a solution from scratch is just too much to bear. Very often someone has really cornered the marked on some niche and they only wotk with MS, you can't just pretend that doesn't happen and is a real problem that costs money.

Yeah, except more and more you expect software to work with each other. Suddenly you find there's lots of maintenance shops and accessory shops and fleet management shops and driver training shops and whatnot that don't deal with motorcycles. Of course we know that vendors only play nice with themselves, but even when you put all open source software in one bin you will find there's specialized software you miss. And that software is likely to be made to work with the most common solution.

Just recently I've heard on the news OpenOffice lost 4000 (norwegian) and 20000 (norwegian) users in the public sector here, moving to MS Office. That's 3-4% of all public employees and a huge win for Microsoft which is creeping back up towards 100%. One seems to focus on Thunderbird as a poor alternative to Outlook/Exchange mostly - they probably got a better deal on MS Office than just Outlook, which is like waving a huge red flag to MS that they're going with another office suite. The other mostly focused on integration to pedagogical and administrative tools, citing a lot of custom work needed.

It's not cheap to be the one paving the road, paying for additional features or custom development. If open source already did everything you want it to do and integrates with everything you need it to integrate with then sure, but that's a dream world. Open source lives off the idea that software is almost good enough and that a bunch of continuous improvements will move it forward. But quite often you come to a gap, there is no open source solution to do X and writing a solution from scratch is just too much to bear. Very often someone has really cornered the marked on some niche and they only wotk with MS, you can't just pretend that doesn't happen and is a real problem that costs money.

http://www.digi.no/504306/her-kjores-egentlig-opera-mini&bid=5

Notice anything odd about the large 48v DC power cables? Like the '+' and '-'... on the wrong lines...

Forget a javascript issue, that there is a pretty huge installation issue.

-Rick

Are those the useless applets that will make my internet banking actually work on 64 bit, without crappy workarounds? Not very useless to me... BankID, is the name of the "service". It is, afaik, used by all major banks in Norway. I'm sure we are not alone going through this stuff.
The Java browser plugin and Flash was the main obstacles, that made me go back to 32 bit Ubuntu. Now, all I need is Mozilla Weave for 64 bit. (Actually, for it to actually work at all, these days)

I'll give these apps half a year to mature and I'm back on 64.

Today, I also read that Adobe Air will be out of beta for linux in short time. Article in Norwegian, no source, I'm afraid If that also comes in 64 bit, these are good times for 64 bit.

Interesting, in the discussion following, Steve Pepper compares the vice director of the norwegian national board to Robert Mugabe, the corrupt dictator of Zimbabwe....

http://www.digi.no/php/debatt.php?iid=543415&side=2 (in norwegian)

'nuff said!

IBAS in Norway released a list recently, with the 10 worst dataloss accidents.

http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=499065http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=499065

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find an english version of this list, but it fetaures among other things a guy on a fishing trip who accidently dropped his laptop into the lake, and a scientist who spills acid on his external hardrive.

But the first place is probably the most spectacular.
A heavy snowfall gave a woman in Østfold(county in Norway) troubles driving up the steep hill up to her house. She begins to walk up the last bit, dragging her laptop, shopping bags, and training bag. Then comes along the local farmer's helpful son, driving a tractor towing a snowblower. He offers her a helping hand, and asks her to put everything she is carrying into the front loader on the tractor. The farmer's son drives ahead, blowing all the snow away, and woman walks behind without anything to carry. She suspects nothing until, the tractor suddenly stops. There's some strange smoke coming out of the snowblower. It turns out that source of the smoke are the woman's belongings, laptop included. On the way uphill everything had fallen out of the front loader and straight into the snow blower. All the other of her belongings went straight through, but not the laptop which got stuck. The experts managed to retrieve the data, even though the laptop suffered heavy damages.

Actually, I don't think it is. Just read the report that Telenor is moving to IP from ATM here

• it has lots of money, and
• the Government controls much more than it does in the U.S. -- for example, private schools, universities/colleges and hospitals are nearly nonexistant. Heck, even the largest ISP in Norway is largely owned by the Government!

I just read today that they are expecting a wave of OpenOffice use in local governance here. source in Norwegian How many people are that? About 430.000 of a workforce of 2.4mio. Linux OTOH is used on servers, but no real plans of Linux desktops yet (except in schools where we have the "School Linux" software).

Norwegian site http://digi.no/php/art.php?id=213982 does not give sources, but claims the units have XScale processors running 200 or 400 Mhz and 128 MB Ram, 6 hours battery.

For $200, I want one!

I'd like to add that the actual cause of this is Norways association with EU and their directives, specifically the "InfoSoc" (mentioned in a previous comment). However, reading various articles (like this one) indicates that this is indeed a law that has been practically forced upon Norway, and the actual enforcement of it is not likely to happen on any substansial scale.

...Sorry next time I'll double-check before posting - they are moving to SuSE.

Seems like lots of European companies are moving over. Norwegian Postal Service is moving to Linux from Windows on the desktop.

[Digi.no is interviewing Håkon Wium Lie from Opera]

Digi.no reverses the question and asks whether Opera and Microsoft have had any contact on the coding of MSN. This ordinary question should give Lie no reason to be silent, but he refuses to answer.

He only says cryptically: "Microsoft has fixed a lot, but there are still some versions of Opera that won't work".

When digi.no asks "Can we expect that this is solved in the near future?", Lie says that he "unfortunately cannot comment on this."

The concept of rebranding the distribution to the new company will probably make some lawyers scratch their heads for a while.

However, most of Trustix' products are standard software (standard as in "you pay for the software but you actually only have a license to use it, blablabla" - just like in the Windoze world), and these products still belong to the bancrupt Trustix and will be part of the assets potentially to be sold on.

Actually, this is precisely the reason they were struggling, they had problems selling software the old fashion way to Linux users. Also, the one's that were willing to pay preferred standard stuff like Checkpoint.

IMHO the problem for Trustix was that the number of linux users willing to pay for SW is/was not big enough to sustain them, no matter how good the products.

Really? Yikes!

I must immediatelly print the artistic gene on a T-shirt then! I mean... That trick always works!

...closely following those in Norwegian here with my comments as well. Of course as most have noted, this is only the first legal trial and can be appealed, and I wouldn't be surprised if the prosecution appeals directly to the Supreme court. This is because it's very much about the legal interpretations of the laws, as the facts are very much clear. Given the same definitions as presented here, I'm sure another test of the case itself would lead to the same conclusion

"Access to the movie:
The court finds that the one who buys a DVD movie that is produced in a legal manner, has authorized access to watch the movie. The case would be different if the DVD movie has been produced in violation of copyright law. The owner of a pirate copy is thus not legally entitled to see the movie."

Pretty basic, but establishes that I have a *right* to see the movie, which is far more than simply not being illegal. That goes a long way, because in order to have that right, the DVD must be decoded.

"As previously mentioned (yadda yadda about various laws, things like fair use and personal copies). There will be different opinions about how beneficial (being able to DeCSS a movie) is to society, but that this is legal must from this be clear. The court therefore finds that DeCSS has legal as well as illegal uses."

The core of the case. They state that there exist legal uses secured in law. Also it establishes a rather nice cause and effect that I like. Since those rights are secured by law, I can. Could be grounds for a battle after EUCD is introduced into law, if these paragraphs are still around, do they take precedence over any DMCAish paragraphs? Film at 11.

Essencially it goes downhill from the prosecution from here. As the only illegal use would be to decrypt an already illegal copy (that is, 1:1 pirate copies like found in Asia), they have no proof of any such activity.

This paragraph is a gem though:

"...the court finds it not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Johansen's intent with the development and publishing of the program was to contribute to illegal copying and distribution of DVD movies.

The court is after this arrived at the conclusion that Johansen can not be sentenced for accessory to (obtain unauthorized access) to the movies. This is true even if Johansen was aware that the program could be misused. This will be equally valid for everyone trading in goods that can be used legally as well as illegally.

That one is very important. If I create a decryption algorithm for anything else, even with the best of intentions, I'll know that it can be misused. But that's not illegal, at least not just yet.

Kjella

You didn't read the story very carefully, did you? Quoting from above: "Norway has introduced legislation similar to the European Unions directive on copyright, making it illegal to circumvent any copyright protection".

Ok, I forgive you, since that quote is as far as I know not quite correct. But Norway is obliged to implement the EU directive by the EEA (European Economic Area) agreement between Norway and the EU.

Here is a Norwegian article about how the ruling in the case against DVD-Jon will not affect similar cases in the future, because of these new laws, according to renowned Norwegian law professor Jon Bing. The article also mentions that the implementation of the EU directive will be done within about 6 months.

It is interesting to notice that in a recent survey done in Norway (see here in Norwegian, sorry), 6 of 10 Nokia phones must undergo repair during its first six months.

This would indicate that it is becoming increasingly more difficult and expensive to (among other things) develop sophisticated software for new phones. Symbian may be seen as a response to this. However, we won't see the share of Symbian enabled phones hit 30-40% until 2005+ or so.

EEF information on the Jon Johansen case.

Read the indictment. in Norwegian.

Linux World interview with Johansen.

Swedish coverage of the case.

EEF campaign to free Johansen.

Old slashdot article about original indictment.

MS has not been the only choice for some time.
A project called Skolelinux (Linux for schools) has been underway for some time. (based on Debian with KDE/Gnome). This project has been in the news on several occasions and has also received a grant from the Norwegian ministry for Research and Education (nov/2001)

Personally I think it will take some time before any changes are noticable.
Desktops will not change much, maybe a few new competing window apps.
(StarOffice or Opera maybe?)
Servers are the biggest bet, where you don't have to re-educate the entire staff.

mork
a .no /. reader

digi.no has an article about the slashdot effect on Norway Post, sadly only in Norwegian.

Here's an attempt to translate the most interessting in the interview with Carl Eric Fuglesang of Norway Post:

After the article was posted on Slashdot Wednesday morning, Norwegian Post went down. Mr. Fuglesang tried to restart the NT server - unsuccessfully. This has happened before by server overload. It seems like it get's "corrupted" after beeing overloaded, says Fuglesang, that also states that he sat up until midnight with representatives from Microsoft trying to get the site up and running...unsuccessfully.

Now he's tired of the problems and want to change webserver.

Yes, we have to get new equipment. Normaly we don't have more than 20.000 hits per day, but we have old equipment and can't afford to upgrade.

Hmmm. It seems like he needs a _software_ upgrade if you ask me. Someone should send them a linux distribution.

According to digi.no (norwegian article), the (encrypted DBaseIV) files will be published Thursday 6th on the museums homepage, Ivar Aasen-tunet.

Ottar Grepstad at the museum have received more than 100 e-mails and phone calls after the problem went public.

The article note the huge interrest in this case and give links to Slashdot and NewScientist.

According to the norwegian site digi.no (link to story in norwegian) it's just a hoax. The movies was packaged and had the appereance of the new movie. Closer inspection showed the VCD's to be the old animated version. Some detective (Spencer Mott) was quoted.

//EssJay

Im a journalist working for norwegian IT outfit digi.no and I just talked to an investigator at FACT. He said the whole thang was a scam - the "pirate" had packaged the old LOTR fantasy animation film in "Fellowship..."-looking covers. So false alarm there. And a New Line Cinema representative told me they still hadnt seen conclusive proof of any complete pirate copies out there (as she would...). But neither have I. Lotsa ppl say they have it and have seen it, but show us the money, will ya? Submit any links to the real movie to pcs at digi dot no. All info treated with discretion etc.

According to one of Norway's most respected computer gurus, Gisle Hannemyr, this isn't correct; Email is older than 30 years. There is an article about this in the Norwegian computer magazine digi.no. I'll try to translate the most important bits of the article to English:

"- When we talk about e-mail being 30 years old (ie. it was invented in October 1971), it might be because Tomlinson also made an e-mail solution called SENDMSG and CPYNET for BBN's proprietary Tenex network in 1971."

Hannemyr further says that this is pretty irrelevant when it comes to e-mail over the ARPAnet (and Internet); "- It is e-mail we send over the today's Internet which is 30 years old. E-mail itself is much older, and have been around since the MIT-developed Compatible Time Sharing System in the sixties."

Whatever is right, I guess we all can conclude that without e-mail, we would have had time to live a normal life. All of us... :-)

--
No, I didn't write this signature

The norwegian site Digi published an article today pointing to this interesting article about CAVEAT CLICKER: Adobe PDF and Trojan Horses - published by Gisle Hannemyr back in 1998...

Sincerely, Rune

Micropayments in some form or another are a necessity, aren't they?
Take small, recurring payments for, say, access to some information service.

The alternative to making these small payments would be subscription, right? But if the service is sufficiently cheap (like 0.10$), how much would we be willing to pay for a subscription? For how long?
First, the price for a subscription must be high enough to justify wasting transaction fees on. I'm not entirely sure that this price would be proportionate to the amount of usage expected. If one changes the payment model (to micropayments) transaction fees would have to almost vanish. (This is one thing that makes it hard to get going, of course.) However, if we stick to "old" models, like a subscription, the rules of that game is less likely to change, and we will be stuck with the transaction fees after all. (My guess anyway..)

A norwegian company, called Subclearing (no web page) now want to offer micropayments through your phonebill. You enter your mobile phone number on the merchant website, they SMS you the password. Of course, that SMS will be more expensive than a regular SMS-message. Here's the article (in norwegian, sorry) from a norwegian news site.

It isn't mentioned in the article, but it reached the headlines here in Norway yesterday when Eidos announced the sale of 1.14 million shares in Opticom for about 170$ million. (About 10% below current valuation of the Opticom stock.)

The Norwegian article about the sale can be found here .

I did a search on some Norwegian websistes, and according to digi.no (a leading norwegian web-based newspaper), the price will be somewhere around 5000 NOK (approximatly 625 USD). It will have 16MB RAM, and a touch-screen with a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels (beware of smudgy fingers!).

Also, it will have a DECT-based basestation (connected to a phoneline [regular, ISDN, ADSL, whatever]), and it will be possible to share this basestation with a total of eight FreePads. The DECT-DMAP protocol will enable speeds up to 500 Kbit/second, something that will be quadrupled over time (the article does not say how/when).

According to the article, the people behind the idea, are former employees at Alcatel (french-owned multi-national telecoms corporation) and Telenor (largest norwegian telecommunications company).

reference: article at digi.no (in norwegian)

I did a search on some Norwegian websistes, and according to digi.no (a leading norwegian web-based newspaper), the price will be somewhere around 5000 NOK (approximatly 625 USD). It will have 16MB RAM, and a touch-screen with a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels (beware of smudgy fingers!).

Also, it will have a DECT-based basestation (connected to a phoneline [regular, ISDN, ADSL, whatever]), and it will be possible to share this basestation with a total of eight FreePads. The DECT-DMAP protocol will enable speeds up to 500 Kbit/second, something that will be quadrupled over time (the article does not say how/when).

According to the article, the people behind the idea, are former employees at Alcatel (french-owned multi-national telecoms corporation) and Telenor (largest norwegian telecommunications company).

reference: article at digi.no (in norwegian)