Slashdot Mirror

Slashback tonight brings some updates and clarifications to previous stories, including news of the successful production of both a BBS documentary and an open-source directory. Read on for more!

I goof, therefore I am sorry. Many readers submitted rebuttals to the claim I repeated that an Israeli web portal was the first to give users 1GB email accounts; Protein Shake, for one, writes that Spymac has them beat. "Forget Google, forget Israel's web portal... 1 GB e-mail is already out there. At least a few weeks ago. From their site '1 GB e-mail account, 350 MB combined storage, personal blog, forum, gallery, auctions and more...'"

"And this was back when phone lines were just strings painted to resemble copper ..." Jason Scott writes "The BBS Documentary, announced on Slashdot nearly three years ago, has wrapped up filming. With over TWO HUNDRED interviews in the can, I've been spending a lot of my spare time (and not-so-spare time) editing, but I decided to put out the first of what will likely be a few trailers for it. Stop by and check out how I've spent the last few years. The Documentary will be released as a 3-DVD set later this year."

It's like Who's Who, only different. Another gargantuan effort completed on a different front: Tony Stanco writes with word that "The 910-page Open Source Reference Book is available for download."

The project was announced just over a year ago; considering the contents that's not a bad turnaround.

It's nearly enough to make one cynical. Alex Wolfe writes "In a move worthy of the Luddites, the New York City Council is quietly trying to ban the Segway . The Council has proposed a law that's technically a ban on motorized scooters, but Harris Siliver, founder of Citystreets, an urban improvement organization, says the NYC Department of Transportation is specifically targeting the electric, non-polluting Segway. Silver is joined in his opposition to the bill by Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak."

Get out much? If you just can't get enough random flamebait, here's a small fix to follow the anti-Linux FUD spread earlier this month by Green Hills CEO Dan O'Dowd. InfoSec writes "This morning's Security Focus page had an article about Consumer Grade *nix. The writer of the article slams Linux for not having free automated updates, enabling services in default installations, and not warning users when they are using 'root'. Uhmm, I could be wrong, but hasn't Mandrake been doing that for quite some time?"

apt-get update seems to count as free updates to me (though those folks do take donations), and root-use warnings may not be perfectly applied, but they are found in various forms (depending on distro) at OS, WM, and application levels, including notices that certain tasks can only be run as root or other superuser. (I think it's Xchat that calls me "an idiot" when I've tried to run it as root.)

BanJoota writes "Probably most useful for U.S. people, but sounds like a good deal. The story (at Newsforge) says you can list your Open Source business, non-profit group or Open Source project or whatever for free in a 'Who's Who and Who's Doing What in Open Source' book that's being distributed to government agencies on March 15. The deadline's March 1, so better act fast." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN. Remember to keep your write-up suitable for pointy-headed managers...

Slashback tonight brings you word on the less-spectacular-than-advertised solar storm earlier in the week, Mandrake's response (a good one) to the problems their new release had with LG brand CD drives, more Diebold madness, and more, including a lengthy rebuttal to Slashdot's review of Eclipse in Action. Read on for the details, and check your costume in the mirror before leaving the house.

Copies files in under 17 minutes, I bet. Eug writes "The latest supercomputer list (Oct. 26) has Apple/VT's G5 Power Mac cluster at 9555 Gflops/s, which puts it into third place overall. This list is hosted here. This new score is interesting for a number of reasons, besides placing them in third place:

1. It is now ahead of the 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 cluster, which is composed of 1936 CPUs and which achieves 8633 Gflops/s.
2. On a per CPU basis, the G5 2.0 is also ahead of the Itanium 2. The G5 2.0 scores 4.52 Gflops/s per CPU, while the Itanium 2 1.5 scores 4.46 Gflops/s per CPU.
3. If one extrapolates from the score of NetworX's Xeon 2.4 cluster (2304 CPUs at 7623 Tflops/s), a G5 2.0 would be as fast as a Xeon 3.28 GHz.
4. Efficiency of the G5 clusters is now at 57%, which is considerably higher than the IBM POWER4 clusters in the top twenty. (The G5 is a derivative of the POWER4.)
5. Virginia Tech's cluster is now in shouting distance of 10 Teraflops/s, and there are still a few weeks left to optimize the system. (They've gained over 2 Teraflops/s in the last 2 weeks.
6. They have utilized only 2112 CPUs (1056 dual Power Macs), despite having supposedly purchased 2200."

eGovOS 3 cancelled due to EC funding withdrawal jaruz writes "Due to the unexpected withdrawal of EC funding for the eGovOS conference from the University of Maastricht's MERIT's FLOSSPOLS EC contract, the conference is now cancelled."

I prefer conspiracy theories, myself. MyNameIsFred writes "Slashdot recently discussed White House Website Limits Iraq-Related Crawling. It turns out The Dead Parrot Society got an explanation for their behavior. They used the unprecedented approach of asking someone at the White House. White House spokesman Jimmy Orr stated the blocking of search engines is not an attempt to ensure future revisions will remain undetected. Rather, he explained, they "have an Iraq section [of the website] with a different template than the main site." Thus, for example, a press release on a meeting between President Bush and Special Envoy Bremer is available in the Iraq template (blocked from being indexed by search engines) or the normal White House template (available for indexing by search engines). The attempt, Mr. Orr said, was that when people search, they should not get multiple copies of the same information. It was also reported that the White House recently asked the The Internet Archive to do a thorough scan of everything on its website."

My dad can beat up your burst of solar radiation. Earth survives solar storm. kurth writes "A major solar flare unleashed Tuesday punished Earth's protective magnetic field early Wednesday, but the planet and its high-tech communication systems appear to have weathered the worst of the storm."

eggfellow writes "here's an article in the WashPost about the geomagnetic storm that pounded Earth (with little disruption) [Tuesday]. What I want to know is why the predicted pounding-time was 12 hours later than actual. Can't these scientist do their math?"

Sounds like a nice feature. News.OSDir.com is reporting that Mandrake is re-releasing it's 9.2 ISOs and CDs after the unfortunate LG CD drive incident earlier this week. "The problem was that the kernel would send a FLUSH_CACHE command to the LG CD-ROM drive which would make the drive inoperable by overwriting its firmware....A new kernel (2.4.22-21mdk) has been released that fixes this problem in the kernel, although the CD-ROM devices are still not up to specification. New CDs and ISOs will be available shortly to correct these problems; they will come with the new kernel."

Maybe they should stick with safes and such. The work of the Swarthmore rebels is paying dividends, (they now have 17 mirrors of the Diebold memos set up). Meanwhile Scoop is reporting how one of the memos deals with an incident in which a single memory card from a precinct of just 600 voters managed to subtract 16022 votes from Al Gore in Florida, nearly lead to his concession of presidency. You can read more about this in Bev Harris's "Black Bov Voting" Chapter11 (PDF) also available here & here."

More on the Diebold front: cananian writes "Two students at MIT (I'm one of them) received cease-and-desist letters from Diebold today for mirroring Diebold's incriminating internal memos, which reveal (among other things) -16,000 votes being credited to Gore in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, how the vote could have been rigged by changing the audit logs or creating a manager card, etc. Students at Amherst also received cease-and-desist letters today. Diebold claims we are infringing its copyrights, but there is good precedent for the legality of the publication. The EFF has in is support: "Wendy Seltzer, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation [...] encouraged them to defy the Diebold cease-and-desist letters.""

... because making text cross-platform is Unamerican. David H. Rothman writes "Convert Lit, the program that lets you crack Microsoft Reader to make backups as part of Fair Use, has moved to a Polish host to escape the tyrannies of the new EU-style DMCAism in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the wake of a new Copyright Office ruling on the DMCA, lawyer Robin Gross at IP Justice warns not to think that the DMCA peril has passed."

But how do you really feel? In reaction to our ealier review of Eclipse in Action, wobbet writes "I've started using Eclipse at work and consistently feel that there is more sophistication and power hiding underneath the obvious and wanted a book that would help me find and fine tune the goodies under the covers. I read a previous review of this book on Slashdot that prompted my purchase. If that review had not been as positive I probably would not have been so disappointed and moved to post my own review.

When I read a technical book I ask myself how well it stays on topic, how thoroughly it addresses the topic and whether it meets my expectations. In this instance I find that the book stays on topic about half of the time and that it is thorough about half of the time. Unfortunately that half of the time I really didn't care about and thereofre my expectations were unmet. To be honest - after reading the book and then re-reading the back cover I should have not even purchased the book because the objectives set forth on the back cover would have warned me that this book was not what I was looking for.

I found the first half of the book to be simply horrible. A supposed introduction to actually using Eclipse this section concentrates more on the "Agile" toolset that all competent, well-informed Java developers that care about the quality of their code, products and development process should already be using. Well, that's what all the books say anyway.

If I wanted a book on Agile tools for Java developers I would purchase Java Tools For Extreme Programming . Is it a great book? No, but it is honest about what it is - a survey of tools. Despite what Mr. Chappell says about Eclipse In Action, I did not find the authors' "...TDD evangelism, skillfully disguised as Eclipse usage instruction. ." Instead I found the first half of the book to be TDD Evangelism thinly disguised as poor Eclipse usage instructions. I did not learn a single thing about USING Eclipse that I hadn't already figured out from randomly selecting menu items over the past two months.

The second half of the book seemed to be a decent introduction to the development of Eclipse plug-ins. If I cared I probably would have found it interesting in its discussion of the API, the perspectives, views and even editors. Those of you that do care may find the second half of the book to be worth skipping the first half of the book."

Slashback tonight brings you word on the less-spectacular-than-advertised solar storm earlier in the week, Mandrake's response (a good one) to the problems their new release had with LG brand CD drives, more Diebold madness, and more, including a lengthy rebuttal to Slashdot's review of Eclipse in Action. Read on for the details, and check your costume in the mirror before leaving the house.

Copies files in under 17 minutes, I bet. Eug writes "The latest supercomputer list (Oct. 26) has Apple/VT's G5 Power Mac cluster at 9555 Gflops/s, which puts it into third place overall. This list is hosted here. This new score is interesting for a number of reasons, besides placing them in third place:

1. It is now ahead of the 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 cluster, which is composed of 1936 CPUs and which achieves 8633 Gflops/s.
2. On a per CPU basis, the G5 2.0 is also ahead of the Itanium 2. The G5 2.0 scores 4.52 Gflops/s per CPU, while the Itanium 2 1.5 scores 4.46 Gflops/s per CPU.
3. If one extrapolates from the score of NetworX's Xeon 2.4 cluster (2304 CPUs at 7623 Tflops/s), a G5 2.0 would be as fast as a Xeon 3.28 GHz.
4. Efficiency of the G5 clusters is now at 57%, which is considerably higher than the IBM POWER4 clusters in the top twenty. (The G5 is a derivative of the POWER4.)
5. Virginia Tech's cluster is now in shouting distance of 10 Teraflops/s, and there are still a few weeks left to optimize the system. (They've gained over 2 Teraflops/s in the last 2 weeks.
6. They have utilized only 2112 CPUs (1056 dual Power Macs), despite having supposedly purchased 2200."

eGovOS 3 cancelled due to EC funding withdrawal jaruz writes "Due to the unexpected withdrawal of EC funding for the eGovOS conference from the University of Maastricht's MERIT's FLOSSPOLS EC contract, the conference is now cancelled."

I prefer conspiracy theories, myself. MyNameIsFred writes "Slashdot recently discussed White House Website Limits Iraq-Related Crawling. It turns out The Dead Parrot Society got an explanation for their behavior. They used the unprecedented approach of asking someone at the White House. White House spokesman Jimmy Orr stated the blocking of search engines is not an attempt to ensure future revisions will remain undetected. Rather, he explained, they "have an Iraq section [of the website] with a different template than the main site." Thus, for example, a press release on a meeting between President Bush and Special Envoy Bremer is available in the Iraq template (blocked from being indexed by search engines) or the normal White House template (available for indexing by search engines). The attempt, Mr. Orr said, was that when people search, they should not get multiple copies of the same information. It was also reported that the White House recently asked the The Internet Archive to do a thorough scan of everything on its website."

My dad can beat up your burst of solar radiation. Earth survives solar storm. kurth writes "A major solar flare unleashed Tuesday punished Earth's protective magnetic field early Wednesday, but the planet and its high-tech communication systems appear to have weathered the worst of the storm."

eggfellow writes "here's an article in the WashPost about the geomagnetic storm that pounded Earth (with little disruption) [Tuesday]. What I want to know is why the predicted pounding-time was 12 hours later than actual. Can't these scientist do their math?"

Sounds like a nice feature. News.OSDir.com is reporting that Mandrake is re-releasing it's 9.2 ISOs and CDs after the unfortunate LG CD drive incident earlier this week. "The problem was that the kernel would send a FLUSH_CACHE command to the LG CD-ROM drive which would make the drive inoperable by overwriting its firmware....A new kernel (2.4.22-21mdk) has been released that fixes this problem in the kernel, although the CD-ROM devices are still not up to specification. New CDs and ISOs will be available shortly to correct these problems; they will come with the new kernel."

Maybe they should stick with safes and such. The work of the Swarthmore rebels is paying dividends, (they now have 17 mirrors of the Diebold memos set up). Meanwhile Scoop is reporting how one of the memos deals with an incident in which a single memory card from a precinct of just 600 voters managed to subtract 16022 votes from Al Gore in Florida, nearly lead to his concession of presidency. You can read more about this in Bev Harris's "Black Bov Voting" Chapter11 (PDF) also available here & here."

More on the Diebold front: cananian writes "Two students at MIT (I'm one of them) received cease-and-desist letters from Diebold today for mirroring Diebold's incriminating internal memos, which reveal (among other things) -16,000 votes being credited to Gore in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, how the vote could have been rigged by changing the audit logs or creating a manager card, etc. Students at Amherst also received cease-and-desist letters today. Diebold claims we are infringing its copyrights, but there is good precedent for the legality of the publication. The EFF has in is support: "Wendy Seltzer, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation [...] encouraged them to defy the Diebold cease-and-desist letters.""

... because making text cross-platform is Unamerican. David H. Rothman writes "Convert Lit, the program that lets you crack Microsoft Reader to make backups as part of Fair Use, has moved to a Polish host to escape the tyrannies of the new EU-style DMCAism in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the wake of a new Copyright Office ruling on the DMCA, lawyer Robin Gross at IP Justice warns not to think that the DMCA peril has passed."

But how do you really feel? In reaction to our ealier review of Eclipse in Action, wobbet writes "I've started using Eclipse at work and consistently feel that there is more sophistication and power hiding underneath the obvious and wanted a book that would help me find and fine tune the goodies under the covers. I read a previous review of this book on Slashdot that prompted my purchase. If that review had not been as positive I probably would not have been so disappointed and moved to post my own review.

When I read a technical book I ask myself how well it stays on topic, how thoroughly it addresses the topic and whether it meets my expectations. In this instance I find that the book stays on topic about half of the time and that it is thorough about half of the time. Unfortunately that half of the time I really didn't care about and thereofre my expectations were unmet. To be honest - after reading the book and then re-reading the back cover I should have not even purchased the book because the objectives set forth on the back cover would have warned me that this book was not what I was looking for.

I found the first half of the book to be simply horrible. A supposed introduction to actually using Eclipse this section concentrates more on the "Agile" toolset that all competent, well-informed Java developers that care about the quality of their code, products and development process should already be using. Well, that's what all the books say anyway.

If I wanted a book on Agile tools for Java developers I would purchase Java Tools For Extreme Programming . Is it a great book? No, but it is honest about what it is - a survey of tools. Despite what Mr. Chappell says about Eclipse In Action, I did not find the authors' "...TDD evangelism, skillfully disguised as Eclipse usage instruction. ." Instead I found the first half of the book to be TDD Evangelism thinly disguised as poor Eclipse usage instructions. I did not learn a single thing about USING Eclipse that I hadn't already figured out from randomly selecting menu items over the past two months.

The second half of the book seemed to be a decent introduction to the development of Eclipse plug-ins. If I cared I probably would have found it interesting in its discussion of the API, the perspectives, views and even editors. Those of you that do care may find the second half of the book to be worth skipping the first half of the book."

jaruz writes "MERIT is no longer organising the conference on the topic of Open Standards and Libre Software in Government at UNESCO Paris, November 24-26, 2003. Until now, MERIT was responsible for the logistics and through the FLOSSPOLS project, EC funding for the conference. This is now wholly withdrawn. They 'have taken this decision in consultation with the European Commission, whose support for this conference was earlier being provided through the proposed FLOSSPOLS project at MERIT.'"

A reader writes:"German Minister Otto Schily and at least 2 other ministers will be keynoting at EGOVOS 3: Open Standards and Libre Software in Government conference in Paris, France on November 24-26, 2003. EGOVOS 3 will bring together the largest number ever of high level government officials working in Open Source and Free Software. In addition to the national ministers, 15 senior politicians, government IT officials and representatives from the European Commission, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama and the US will being making presentations." You will find general registration is open - free, but limited seating. Additionally, press registration is open as well. I normally don't post many conference announcements, but this one should have significant impact on governmental decisions around Free/Libre/Open/Whatever Software.

A reader writes:"German Minister Otto Schily and at least 2 other ministers will be keynoting at EGOVOS 3: Open Standards and Libre Software in Government conference in Paris, France on November 24-26, 2003. EGOVOS 3 will bring together the largest number ever of high level government officials working in Open Source and Free Software. In addition to the national ministers, 15 senior politicians, government IT officials and representatives from the European Commission, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama and the US will being making presentations." You will find general registration is open - free, but limited seating. Additionally, press registration is open as well. I normally don't post many conference announcements, but this one should have significant impact on governmental decisions around Free/Libre/Open/Whatever Software.

A reader writes:"German Minister Otto Schily and at least 2 other ministers will be keynoting at EGOVOS 3: Open Standards and Libre Software in Government conference in Paris, France on November 24-26, 2003. EGOVOS 3 will bring together the largest number ever of high level government officials working in Open Source and Free Software. In addition to the national ministers, 15 senior politicians, government IT officials and representatives from the European Commission, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama and the US will being making presentations." You will find general registration is open - free, but limited seating. Additionally, press registration is open as well. I normally don't post many conference announcements, but this one should have significant impact on governmental decisions around Free/Libre/Open/Whatever Software.

TonyStanco writes "Big news. DoD issued a policy statement leveling the playing field for Open Source. We have the memo on the Center of Open Source & Government site." The requirements listed in this memo make me think of a company policy along the lines of "You can bring your baby or toddler to work, so long as it can talk, feed itself and stick effortlessly to the ceiling like a spider." See this PDF for more information about National Security Telecommunications and Information Systems Security Policy (NSTISSP) number 11.

TonyStanco writes "Big news. DoD issued a policy statement leveling the playing field for Open Source. We have the memo on the Center of Open Source & Government site." The requirements listed in this memo make me think of a company policy along the lines of "You can bring your baby or toddler to work, so long as it can talk, feed itself and stick effortlessly to the ceiling like a spider." See this PDF for more information about National Security Telecommunications and Information Systems Security Policy (NSTISSP) number 11.

Tony Stanco writes "The Center of Open Source & Government announces that it will publish The Open Source Reference Book 2003 [What Local/National Governments, the Defense Establishment, and The Global 1000 Need To Know About Open Source Software] This is an Open Source resource book targeting the 20,000 IT power users around the world. The Reference Book will provide a Who's Who and Who's Doing What in Open Source. Read on for more information about what the book will include, and how you can contribute.

Stanco continues: "The Reference Book will provide IT power users with profiles and contact information on Open Source companies, Open Source vendors, Open Source integrators, Open Source consultants, Open Source resellers, Open Source government projects/policies, Open Source corporate projects/policies, Open Source community projects, and Open Source academic/national laboratory projects.

It will also: provide a Generally Regarded As Safe (GRAS) list of Open Source software to identify mature and useable Open Source projects; list what Open Source software is NIAP or Common Criteria evaluated; summarize important government and corporate Open Source policy statements made during the year; highlight important Open Source conferences; provide an Open Source Year in Review section, cataloging Open Source milestones, including a list of published whites papers, books and other important events; The Center of Open Source and Government invites you to provide relevant information to be included in the first annual edition of the Open Source Reference Book to be published in time for our 3rd Open Source in Government Conference in Paris, France on November 24-26, 2003.

To be considered for inclusion in the Reference Book, please answer the questions at http://www.egovos.org/ref_book.html
before May 31, 2003

For more information, please go to www.egovos.org or contact us at Book@eGovOS.org

Best regards,

Tony Stanco
Founding Director
The Center of Open Source & Government
http://www.eGovOS.org

Associate Director
Open Source and eGovernment
Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute
George Washington University
[NSA Center of Excellence in Information Assurance]"

Tony Stanco writes "The Center of Open Source & Government announces that it will publish The Open Source Reference Book 2003 [What Local/National Governments, the Defense Establishment, and The Global 1000 Need To Know About Open Source Software] This is an Open Source resource book targeting the 20,000 IT power users around the world. The Reference Book will provide a Who's Who and Who's Doing What in Open Source. Read on for more information about what the book will include, and how you can contribute.

Stanco continues: "The Reference Book will provide IT power users with profiles and contact information on Open Source companies, Open Source vendors, Open Source integrators, Open Source consultants, Open Source resellers, Open Source government projects/policies, Open Source corporate projects/policies, Open Source community projects, and Open Source academic/national laboratory projects.

It will also: provide a Generally Regarded As Safe (GRAS) list of Open Source software to identify mature and useable Open Source projects; list what Open Source software is NIAP or Common Criteria evaluated; summarize important government and corporate Open Source policy statements made during the year; highlight important Open Source conferences; provide an Open Source Year in Review section, cataloging Open Source milestones, including a list of published whites papers, books and other important events; The Center of Open Source and Government invites you to provide relevant information to be included in the first annual edition of the Open Source Reference Book to be published in time for our 3rd Open Source in Government Conference in Paris, France on November 24-26, 2003.

To be considered for inclusion in the Reference Book, please answer the questions at http://www.egovos.org/ref_book.html
before May 31, 2003

For more information, please go to www.egovos.org or contact us at Book@eGovOS.org

Best regards,

Tony Stanco
Founding Director
The Center of Open Source & Government
http://www.eGovOS.org

Associate Director
Open Source and eGovernment
Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute
George Washington University
[NSA Center of Excellence in Information Assurance]"

Tony Stanco writes "The Center of Open Source & Government announces that it will publish The Open Source Reference Book 2003 [What Local/National Governments, the Defense Establishment, and The Global 1000 Need To Know About Open Source Software] This is an Open Source resource book targeting the 20,000 IT power users around the world. The Reference Book will provide a Who's Who and Who's Doing What in Open Source. Read on for more information about what the book will include, and how you can contribute.

Stanco continues: "The Reference Book will provide IT power users with profiles and contact information on Open Source companies, Open Source vendors, Open Source integrators, Open Source consultants, Open Source resellers, Open Source government projects/policies, Open Source corporate projects/policies, Open Source community projects, and Open Source academic/national laboratory projects.

It will also: provide a Generally Regarded As Safe (GRAS) list of Open Source software to identify mature and useable Open Source projects; list what Open Source software is NIAP or Common Criteria evaluated; summarize important government and corporate Open Source policy statements made during the year; highlight important Open Source conferences; provide an Open Source Year in Review section, cataloging Open Source milestones, including a list of published whites papers, books and other important events; The Center of Open Source and Government invites you to provide relevant information to be included in the first annual edition of the Open Source Reference Book to be published in time for our 3rd Open Source in Government Conference in Paris, France on November 24-26, 2003.

To be considered for inclusion in the Reference Book, please answer the questions at http://www.egovos.org/ref_book.html
before May 31, 2003

For more information, please go to www.egovos.org or contact us at Book@eGovOS.org

Best regards,

Tony Stanco
Founding Director
The Center of Open Source & Government
http://www.eGovOS.org

Associate Director
Open Source and eGovernment
Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute
George Washington University
[NSA Center of Excellence in Information Assurance]"

Tony Stanco writes "The Center of Open Source & Government announces that it will publish The Open Source Reference Book 2003 [What Local/National Governments, the Defense Establishment, and The Global 1000 Need To Know About Open Source Software] This is an Open Source resource book targeting the 20,000 IT power users around the world. The Reference Book will provide a Who's Who and Who's Doing What in Open Source. Read on for more information about what the book will include, and how you can contribute.

Stanco continues: "The Reference Book will provide IT power users with profiles and contact information on Open Source companies, Open Source vendors, Open Source integrators, Open Source consultants, Open Source resellers, Open Source government projects/policies, Open Source corporate projects/policies, Open Source community projects, and Open Source academic/national laboratory projects.

It will also: provide a Generally Regarded As Safe (GRAS) list of Open Source software to identify mature and useable Open Source projects; list what Open Source software is NIAP or Common Criteria evaluated; summarize important government and corporate Open Source policy statements made during the year; highlight important Open Source conferences; provide an Open Source Year in Review section, cataloging Open Source milestones, including a list of published whites papers, books and other important events; The Center of Open Source and Government invites you to provide relevant information to be included in the first annual edition of the Open Source Reference Book to be published in time for our 3rd Open Source in Government Conference in Paris, France on November 24-26, 2003.

To be considered for inclusion in the Reference Book, please answer the questions at http://www.egovos.org/ref_book.html
before May 31, 2003

For more information, please go to www.egovos.org or contact us at Book@eGovOS.org

Best regards,

Tony Stanco
Founding Director
The Center of Open Source & Government
http://www.eGovOS.org

Associate Director
Open Source and eGovernment
Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute
George Washington University
[NSA Center of Excellence in Information Assurance]"

Tony Stanco writes "The Center of Open Source & Government announces that it will publish The Open Source Reference Book 2003 [What Local/National Governments, the Defense Establishment, and The Global 1000 Need To Know About Open Source Software] This is an Open Source resource book targeting the 20,000 IT power users around the world. The Reference Book will provide a Who's Who and Who's Doing What in Open Source. Read on for more information about what the book will include, and how you can contribute.

Stanco continues: "The Reference Book will provide IT power users with profiles and contact information on Open Source companies, Open Source vendors, Open Source integrators, Open Source consultants, Open Source resellers, Open Source government projects/policies, Open Source corporate projects/policies, Open Source community projects, and Open Source academic/national laboratory projects.

It will also: provide a Generally Regarded As Safe (GRAS) list of Open Source software to identify mature and useable Open Source projects; list what Open Source software is NIAP or Common Criteria evaluated; summarize important government and corporate Open Source policy statements made during the year; highlight important Open Source conferences; provide an Open Source Year in Review section, cataloging Open Source milestones, including a list of published whites papers, books and other important events; The Center of Open Source and Government invites you to provide relevant information to be included in the first annual edition of the Open Source Reference Book to be published in time for our 3rd Open Source in Government Conference in Paris, France on November 24-26, 2003.

To be considered for inclusion in the Reference Book, please answer the questions at http://www.egovos.org/ref_book.html
before May 31, 2003

For more information, please go to www.egovos.org or contact us at Book@eGovOS.org

Best regards,

Tony Stanco
Founding Director
The Center of Open Source & Government
http://www.eGovOS.org

Associate Director
Open Source and eGovernment
Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute
George Washington University
[NSA Center of Excellence in Information Assurance]"

Tony Stanco, whose new eGovOS conference is starting today, has also been pushing O-STEP (Open Source Threshold Escrow Program). It's an interesting looking program for escrowing code, pending money being raised towards it - you can get more details in PPT,OpenOffice, and HTML.

Tony Stanco, whose new eGovOS conference is starting today, has also been pushing O-STEP (Open Source Threshold Escrow Program). It's an interesting looking program for escrowing code, pending money being raised towards it - you can get more details in PPT,OpenOffice, and HTML.

Tony Stanco, whose new eGovOS conference is starting today, has also been pushing O-STEP (Open Source Threshold Escrow Program). It's an interesting looking program for escrowing code, pending money being raised towards it - you can get more details in PPT,OpenOffice, and HTML.

Tony Stanco, whose new eGovOS conference is starting today, has also been pushing O-STEP (Open Source Threshold Escrow Program). It's an interesting looking program for escrowing code, pending money being raised towards it - you can get more details in PPT,OpenOffice, and HTML.

Slashback with more on open code in government, Intel's new low-power mobile chips, the nature of the engineers, craftsmen or whatchamacallims who spend their days forging software, the CD price-fixing settlement, and more -- read on for the details.

Formalization schmormalization. kaisyain's review today of Software Craftsmanship raised a spirited conversation about the nature of software, software engineering, and related disciplines. cconnell conveniently submits a great companion piece: "I wrote this article a couple years ago but it has continued to get good readership within the software engineering community. Should provoke some interesting discussion..."

The bleeding edge costs money. JeffyVernon writes with an followup to CNET's early review of Centrino laptops: "AnandTech published two articles on Centrino today, an overview of the CPU architecture (including some interesting history behind the chip) and a roundup of four notebooks including the new Dell that wasn't in CNet's roundup. It looks like the 4.9lbs IBM T40p ended up winning the roundup, it lasted over 6 hours on battery!"

What scarcity was this exactly? RadBlock writes "Lawrence Lessig is addressing the issue of radio spectrum on CIO Insight... something that was talked about on Slashdot the other day. Lessig states that the spectrum has been defined too generally as if there can only be one message per frequency, when better equipment will vastly increase the amount of 'spectrum' that is usable."

I like that phrase "general welfare." We've mentioned eGovOS several times before -- now, here's a last-minute announcement that may be of interest: free registration is still open for next week's (March 17-19) eGovOS conference in Washington D.C., "Open Standards/Open Source for National and Local eGovernment Programs in the U.S. and EU." Perhaps some folks there ought to consider the question eugene ts wong raised the other day, namely, Which North American government offices won't move to Linux? Someone needs to set up a big map with different colored countries and states!

Who's laughing and where is his bank? deelowe writes "From ars. Back in September we reported on a class action suit leveled at a number of Music industry players that accused them of anti-competitive price-fixing. Back in January, we reported that victims of said price fixing could hit this website and sign up (too late now), and eventually receive up to $20 in the settlement, provided of course that you had actually purchased a CD between January 1 1995 and December 22, 2000. 3.5 million Americans made their way to the on-line form, and it appears that victims will receive $12.60 apiece, should a judge approve it."

They still have a while to go ... sp1nl0ck writes CNet News.com.com.com are reporting that The Neo Project guys have restarted the attempt to crack the 2048-bit XBox key following advice from their lawyers. CNet are citing a link to Operation Project X, but it was a bit temperamental in loading earlier. Maybe it's been CNetted..."

I'll still think of it as the GIMP for a few years ;) Agermain writes "CinePaint has just released its first Windows build. From their website: "CinePaint is an open source painting program used by motion picture studios to retouch images in 35mm films. It was formerly called Film Gimp. It has been used in a dozen feature films including Harry Potter, Scooby-Doo, and the Fast & the Furious... This first Windows beta release is mainly intended for developers and testers.""

Slashback with more on open code in government, Intel's new low-power mobile chips, the nature of the engineers, craftsmen or whatchamacallims who spend their days forging software, the CD price-fixing settlement, and more -- read on for the details.

Formalization schmormalization. kaisyain's review today of Software Craftsmanship raised a spirited conversation about the nature of software, software engineering, and related disciplines. cconnell conveniently submits a great companion piece: "I wrote this article a couple years ago but it has continued to get good readership within the software engineering community. Should provoke some interesting discussion..."

The bleeding edge costs money. JeffyVernon writes with an followup to CNET's early review of Centrino laptops: "AnandTech published two articles on Centrino today, an overview of the CPU architecture (including some interesting history behind the chip) and a roundup of four notebooks including the new Dell that wasn't in CNet's roundup. It looks like the 4.9lbs IBM T40p ended up winning the roundup, it lasted over 6 hours on battery!"

What scarcity was this exactly? RadBlock writes "Lawrence Lessig is addressing the issue of radio spectrum on CIO Insight... something that was talked about on Slashdot the other day. Lessig states that the spectrum has been defined too generally as if there can only be one message per frequency, when better equipment will vastly increase the amount of 'spectrum' that is usable."

I like that phrase "general welfare." We've mentioned eGovOS several times before -- now, here's a last-minute announcement that may be of interest: free registration is still open for next week's (March 17-19) eGovOS conference in Washington D.C., "Open Standards/Open Source for National and Local eGovernment Programs in the U.S. and EU." Perhaps some folks there ought to consider the question eugene ts wong raised the other day, namely, Which North American government offices won't move to Linux? Someone needs to set up a big map with different colored countries and states!

Who's laughing and where is his bank? deelowe writes "From ars. Back in September we reported on a class action suit leveled at a number of Music industry players that accused them of anti-competitive price-fixing. Back in January, we reported that victims of said price fixing could hit this website and sign up (too late now), and eventually receive up to $20 in the settlement, provided of course that you had actually purchased a CD between January 1 1995 and December 22, 2000. 3.5 million Americans made their way to the on-line form, and it appears that victims will receive $12.60 apiece, should a judge approve it."

They still have a while to go ... sp1nl0ck writes CNet News.com.com.com are reporting that The Neo Project guys have restarted the attempt to crack the 2048-bit XBox key following advice from their lawyers. CNet are citing a link to Operation Project X, but it was a bit temperamental in loading earlier. Maybe it's been CNetted..."

I'll still think of it as the GIMP for a few years ;) Agermain writes "CinePaint has just released its first Windows build. From their website: "CinePaint is an open source painting program used by motion picture studios to retouch images in 35mm films. It was formerly called Film Gimp. It has been used in a dozen feature films including Harry Potter, Scooby-Doo, and the Fast & the Furious... This first Windows beta release is mainly intended for developers and testers.""

An anonymous reader writes "Open source advocate Tony Stanco, of the George Washington University Cyberspace Policy Institute has been getting flamed for allowing Microsoft reps to speak at an Open Source in government conference he's putting on next month. Today, in a commentary on NewsForge, Tony responds to the flamers. He says, "Leave it to the kooks in the community to make Microsoft look sympathetic." Is he right? Should we be willing to listen to what Microsoft has to say? Aren't open minds important to open source?" Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.

Slashback updates and clarifications regarding recent posts on CodeCon, the rumored takeover of Vivendi by Microsoft, SDF, DDoS and NWLink (and IRC and AUPs), and more. Read on for the details, I'm out of letters.

"Uhh ... isn't this the 'Slammer'?" An anonymous reader writes "According to the BBC, two people suspected of creating the Slammer worm have been arrested in a combined operation by the FBI and the UK's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. The raids in the UK resulted in the seizure of two men, aged 19 and 21, accused of being members of a hacker group that calls itself THr34t-Krew."

Gather together, hoist a few drinks. We've made a few mentions of this year's CodeCon; Len Sassaman writes "The schedule for CodeCon 2.0 is now online. CodeCon is already starting to get some media attention. There's less than two weeks left to register at the reduced rate, and conference seats are filling up quickly.If this conference is anything like its predecessor, expect to see some of the most interesting new technology of the coming year discussed."

And a slightly different type of gathering: Tony Stanco writes: "The agenda is up for the March 17-19 Open Source in Government conference and the free registration is now open. Please see www.eGovOS.org.

It promises to be another educational and exciting event with over 120 sessions and the keynote from the White House. Even Microsoft is trying to directly engage the community at this conference."

On the count of three, everyone shrug at once. In January, I posted a link ("far from confirmed") about the possibility that Microsoft would buy Vivendi. Now, Yagdrasil writes "USA today is reporting that the Microsoft buyout of Vivendi's game division (which includes Blizzard) was a hoax. It looks like the hoax originated from a student at Purdue."

But the EOLs are nearly upon us! Flee! Wister285 writes "Mandrake announced that they are going to stop updating the packages of 'legacy products.' It seems as though they took their cue from Red Hat and their continuing financial problems. I was a little surprised though about how short the support periods will be. Mandrake 9.0 will be considered obsolete September 30, 2003 (for desktop) and March 31, 2004 (for the base). This brings up two questions. First of all, do distros release too often thus creating too many versions to maintain? Secondly, how much faith do you have in the upgrade feature of install?"

I hope it features a dunk tank and some perpetrators. The ongoing war on spam continues; here's your chance to influence its direction (or at least to hear about what's going on in that sphere), even if you missed the conference at MIT. wayne writes "The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced today that they will be holding a three day public SPAM workshop in the end of April. I wonder if they will get an overflow crowd they way the MIT SPAM conference did. I hope they also make streaming video available."

Bandwidth is expensive. ndogg writes "NWLink.com has posted a response to the events that have happened in regards to SDF. In short, they say that they support SDF and what it is doing, however, the DDoS attack over the last three weeks has been costing them a lot of money."

fonixmunkee puts it differently: "The message is an interesting read, to say the least. instead of working the issue, NWLink's apparent (unofficial) solution to combating DDoS'es is to simply terminate the subscriber's connection. with all the slammer worms & Code Reds nowadays, NWLink should have no more customers left in about 2 years."

Legal liability is expensive, too. Tom Allender writes "irc-chat.net has announced a more restrictive Acceptable Use Policy after being contacted by the MPAA. They also refer to DALnets AUP changes mentioned here recently."

Tony Stanco, host of the most recent eGovOS meeting is putting together anyone. I've included the salient information below - but one thing of note is that it's going to be an opportunity for open source vendors to hook up with the government. In other conference news, I've got my plane ticket for CALU - woohoo!

The Center for Open Source in Government [www.eGovOS.org], along with The Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute (CSPRI) of The George Washington University and others, is proud to present their second Open Source in Government conference called "Open Source for National and Local eGovernment Programs in the U.S. and EU" to be held in Washington, DC, USA, March 17 - 19, 2003.

This conference is designed to discuss best practices, raise awareness and share experiences among policy makers and senior IT officials from the U.S. and Europe. The conference will draw participants from local, national and international organizations from the public, private and academic sectors.

We strongly encourage Open Source companies to submit proposals, since government officials at the last conference were particularly interested in the Open Source companies, Zope and DevIS, because they provided examples of Open Source solutions that the government could buy.

To facilitate the organization of topics and events at the conference, you are invited to submit speaking and demonstration proposals.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Citizen-Centric eGovernment
Open Source XML Solutions
Open Source and Open Standards
Open Source and Enterprise Architecture
State / Local Government using Open Source
The Role of Open Source in Government
Demonstrations of Open Source Projects
Open Source and Security
Open Source and the Critical Information Infrastructure
NIAP/Common Criteria Evaluations and Open Source
Open Source in the Military
Open Source, PKI and Standards-based Authentication
Open Source in Higher Education
Open Source in Health Care and Bioinformatics
Open Source in Training IT Computer Science Students
Business Cases: Open Source Software and Total
Cost of Ownership
Open Source Empowering People with Disabilities
Open Source and Section 508
Open Source Licenses and other Legal Issues

Dates to Remember:

Deadline for speaking proposals: January 10, 2003
Notification of acceptance: January 20, 2003
Final submissions due: January 31, 2003
Conference: March 17-19, 2003

The conference website can be found at http://www.egovos.org.

Jeremy Allison (of the Samba team) writes "Very interesting paper just published by MITRE corporation. (In PDF - they've learned not to use Microsoft Word. :-). Highlights: 'The main conclusion of the article was that FOSS software plays a more critical role in the DoD than has generally been recognised.'; 'Create a "Generally Recognised as Safe" FOSS list ... including Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Samba, Apache, Perl, GCC, GNAT, XFree86, OpenSSH, bind, and sendmail.' 'FOSS' stands for 'Free and Open-Source Software.' Looks like these people 'get it.'"

A reader writes: "There is a feature running on NF about a conference this October. More information can be found on the conference website." It's worth pointing that despite the fact that the conference is two days long, the organizers have asked for material submissions to be included in the conference handbook. So, if you've got some materials/thoughts, start polishing them up.