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Dell offers Linux laptop in France
Features in the last RC
Reviews of 2005: Playreaction vnunet
Distrowatch

One can presume to "take control" of the DNS "root servers," but there's nothing preventing someone else from creating their own set. Who wins depends strictly upon which set the individual networks point to, and no one has control over that decision except the individual network admins.

REALLY NOTHING to control?!

I can imagine that bought law makers will enact something that will:

- centralise RFC and standards writing. A single body like the ITU will do it that can be lobbied for 'certain changes', e.g. patented protocols. Not that the ITU is inherently evil, they do good things, too...
- force certain protocol types, 'good internet behaviour' (think: DRM 'enabled' IP)
- force 'standard applications', 'certified applications'
- make monitoring all internet traffic mandatory (They're already working on this; see e.g. this article).

- I'm an european, a supporter of the EU idea and, in this context, usually pro-government in the sense that some competition rules and standards should be set (e.g. telcos should serve rural areas etc).
But:
1. My support for the EU organization as it is faded alot as I watched the SWPAT issues progress. Even if the directive did not succeed, I saw very undemocratic, lobbied law making detached from the population, something that should not be possible would the EU be truly democratic.
2. The UN, EU and US seem to be equally corrupted in this area.
3. The internet works as it is. Surely some quirks exist, but I don't see anything that could not be resolved by the people/engineers. I find it highly suspect that there are people trying to push for changes without any real need.

"Even better (for me) would be to see Sunbird / Thunderbird merged"

You Mean Like This ?

Thats right. It would not make much sense to be able to save a document in ODF, but not read the document you just saved. Here is another source.

JOhn

...According to the makers of the Operating System it installs on.

I think I'll take the opinion of an uninterested 3rd party that has billions of dollars to risk over your company's opinions on its own software, TYVM.

Let's not forget the history of your company and it's ties with the some of the worst spyware in history, like Gator. As it stands your software presently by default bundles and installs 3rd party components that clearly are spyware, but the WeatherBug executables themselves are not, when copied to another system and run individually, spyware.

That makes your software nothing more than a fence for spyware. Most people in the world call fences for what they do: theive. In your case you are a fence for spyware, so your software is called spyware, capice?

The moment WeatherBug is available as a standalone application with no extra software bundled with it or reccomended for installation it could be classified as purely spyware free.

I'll be waiting until that day. Hell shall freeze over first.

I was quoted in the eWeek article for this launch. We have been testing this for a few weeks now, and like what we see so far. There is no way in Hell I am letting MS Exchange in here.

The really cool part we see in Zimbra is the possibilities to program our own magic phrases, so everytime someone puts in an Order#, SKU, Invoice# or some other keyword, Zimbra will pick up on it, and link it directly into our ERP.

Zimbra shows a lot of promise--

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1846635,00.as p

You may care to note that the MySQL backers weren't alone in forming links to SCO. Does this mean that we should boycott Postgresql as well? Or just continue to generate FUD about MySQL because you have a chip on your shoulder?

"Unix" failed because of the following:

1. Most Unix operating systems ran on proprietary hardware only. NT could be installed on cheap hardware you could buy from a store.
2. The exception was SCO Unix. But SCO treated it exclusively as a high-end product, so it didn't end up on desktops.

No, you obviously weren't around during the Unix wars, and you (and the mods who moderated you to +5) didn't even read TFA which mentions the fact that there were a dozen PC SysV Unixes available at the time, some of them popular. If you RTFA you'd have seen this:

"Twelve years ago, I oversaw a PC Magazine feature on Unix on Intel. My team and I reviewed at Unixes from Consensys, Dell, Interactive, SCO, Univel, Sun, and NeXT.

We also looked at, but didn't review, Unixes from UHC, Microport and other companies most of you have never heard of.

Yes, I bought Linux Game Programming (by Nurgle, not JRH's unfortunately) and he was adamant on that point, but it'd be nice to have AvP & other old games fully portable.

If Carmageddon uses Direct Play then I think it's in the best interests for all of us discerning gamers!

I don't seem to see anyone point out that Mirosoft's License for interoperability (also here and here ) that was created for Open Source access to otherwise DRM'ed information was a sham. They put "Per installation Licensing Fee's" in it!

This was demanded by the EU on the grounds of Open Source being deliberately disempowered BTW. IMHO they deserve all they get from this (which will be very little no doubt).

I'm glad to hear that game developers have wised-up and stopped using Direct Play, it seems fairly trivial to build your own network code anyhow.

And, I might mention, I think it matters A Lot.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1861272,00.as p

From where I sit, Red Hat's Drepper

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/19/ 1128201

wants to throw the baby of open standardization out with the bathwater of LSB standardization testing, which could still stand a lot of improvement.

With open standardization, Linux could go the way of Intel Unix--shudder!

Steven

Formerly Netscape Directory Server, also the base for iPlanet/SunOne Directory server , Fedora Directory Server is the best OSS directory service out there today. Check These links for reviews.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Microsoft calls OSS viral

You have it wrong. Microsoft has said that they consider the GPL viral, not OSS in general and have used BSD-licensed code plenty of times in the past as well as releasing a few things from their software repository under open source licenses.

In fact Microsoft is still distributing their incompatable 1.1.4 JVM as part of Windows XP SP1

Umm.. no. They're not. XP SP1 is no longer being distributed by MS (and hasn't for a few years), instead they ship XP SP1a, which doesn't include their JVM.

Further, as part of their settlement with Sun, they had to remove all MS JVM support from a ton of other products as well. See:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1405300,00.as p

And, btw, all of those third party products have agreements with Sun, and are using their IP.

Huh? This story is about a new line of servers and youq uestion if sone is selling mostly software!?!?! And you get modded interesting. I think it's pretty interesting that someone thinks it's a valid question.

These boxes are completely designed by Sun. Though the CPU is not manufactured by them they work together closely with AMD on the chip.

There's a good interview with Andy Bechtolsheim that includes some of the details between the AMD/Sun relationship concerning opteron.

If you hop in to the wayback machine they did the same thing to Borland, hiring all their top people just to put them out to pasture.

You mean people like Paul Gross and Anders Hejlsberg? Seriously, what have they done lately?

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1478523,00.as p

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Cisco Issues Fixes for Vulnerable Web Routershttp://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,185649 7,00.asp/
Seeing as it the patch was issued yesterday, or even the day before.

For the record, here's what I said about IBM's 500 patents in January:
NOSOFTWAREPATENTS.COM CRITICIZES IBM FOR "DIVERSIONARY TACTICS"
By the time I issued those comments, I didn't even know that those 500 IBM patents were mostly patents on the verge of expiration, and included many patents that had little to do with software, including various medical (!) technology patents.

Like Bruce Perens, I also criticized the recent OSDL announcement:
eWeek: OSDL Begins Open-Source Patent Commons

What's the point in those patent pledges? The only "value" in it is minimal. It's that some companies which are friendly toward OSS anyway make some formal promise not to use certain patents against certain open-source programs under certain open-source licenses, if not under certain circumstances. Companies either give away patents of hardly any value (like IBM did) or they tie their pledge to an open-source license that hardly anybody uses (like SUN did). Some of those pledges are legally pretty meaningless because of some loopholes that leave lots of room for interpretation.

The only meaningful contributions of patents to OSS would be donations of patents that serve the purpose mutually assured destruction, i.e.
(i) they are irrecovably made available for use by open-source developers or a trusted open-source entity against potential aggressors;
(ii) they constitute monopolies on technical features that would really be hurtful to a company like Microsoft; and
(iii) are not already subject to cross-licensing agreements between large corporations.

Anything less than that is of very little value and on the bottom line even negative because it diverts attention from what really needs to be done. Let's face it: No OSS developer is really going to look up something like an OSDL patent pledge database to find out which patents one is allowed to use. That's not practical. The problem is that too many critical patents are held by entities that are hostile toward OSS and are never ever going to pledge even a single patent.

An HP executive actually made a suggestion that potentially meets the criteria I outlined:
Moving on With Patents and Open-Source Software

I don't want to count any chickens before they're hatched, and with a highly complex legal issue like this it always depends upon a careful analysis of the specific terms an conditions, but HP's proposal to build up a patent arsenal that OSS can use for retaliatory purposes is infinitely more compelling that all of those patent pledges combined. It deserves further discussion and thought.

Since when is the EULA law? Since a court ruled in its favor.

Here is an alternate article on the issue.

From the article (bolded emphasis is mine) :
One option that the FSF is considering, Moglen said, will make it necessary for companies that distribute GPL software to pledge that they're also explicitly giving the right to use the patents found in their code.

The MSNBC article is based on the first version of the Reuters report, which misquotes the FSF on the provisions concerning software patents. Reuters has meanwhile updated the story. Here's a few links to the new and corrected version of the story:
Washington Post
eWeek
Reuters.com

So what exactly is the difference between the MySQL-SCO relationship and the PostgreSQL-SCO realtionship that were announced at about the same time?

MySQL has only one commercial vendor, who helpfully call themselves MySQL AB, so even Slashdot readers can understand what they sell. So SCO made a deal with them to compile and test a certified MySQL binary for SCO.

PostgreSQL has had a number of failed commercial vendors over the years, but one current one is EnterpriseDB. Maybe not having the word PostgreSQL in the company name confused slashdot readers who think Walmart sell Wals?

eWeek report it as the same deal. "SCO has added open source database vendors MySQL and EnterpriseDB to its partner list, said SCO President and CEO Darl McBride"

What is the difference?

Oh, I forgot. This is slashdot where MySQL is evil because they charge for some things and where we all sit around and pretend that MySQL does not have transactions and that PostgreSQL vacuum is a good thing.

Yay for Postgres/Perl. Boo for MySQL/PHP. Can I have mod points now?

So what exactly is the difference between the MySQL-SCO relationship and the PostgreSQL-SCO realtionship that were announced at about the same time?

MySQL has only one commercial vendor, who helpfully call themselves MySQL AB, so even Slashdot readers can understand what they sell. So SCO made a deal with them to compile and test a certified MySQL binary for SCO.

PostgreSQL has had a number of failed commercial vendors over the years, but one current one is EnterpriseDB. Maybe not having the word PostgreSQL in the company name confused slashdot readers who think Walmart sell Wals?

eWeek report it as the same deal. "SCO has added open source database vendors MySQL and EnterpriseDB to its partner list, said SCO President and CEO Darl McBride"

What is the difference?

Oh, I forgot. This is slashdot where MySQL is evil because they charge for some things and where we all sit around and pretend that MySQL does not have transactions and that PostgreSQL vacuum is a good thing.

Yay for Postgres/Perl. Boo for MySQL/PHP. Can I have mod points now?

Addendum: apparently PostgreSQL is also partnering with SCO so now there is added incentive to choose Firebird or something else.

PS: I found the Andreessen FOSS database, it's called Derby and it's not as impressive as I'd hoped. Still, it's an option.

Oh, look: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1846635,00.as p
SCO also partners with EnterpriseDB (PostgreSQL), Borland (InterBase), Computer Associates (Ingres), IBM (Informix).

Where will you go, what will you do? Ah, but wait! The article gives a pointer there, too... Oracle. They don't want to support users on that platform. So, go for it. This could be your ultimate "put your money where ...."

Darn pity it's not open source. Hmm actually, that gives you another option also: you could go for Microsoft.

Additional: the reason I think it's good for OpenOffice is that dual licensing is a messy business. It confuses both users and developers... now the situation is a lot clearer. Plus Michael Meeks (a OO and GNOME developer) believes that it will help stop certain abuses that have been happening under the SISSL. I don't see how this can't be good for OpenOffice.

You're wrong. Sorry for creating yet another followup thread, but the general consensus (which is all we have, barring a court ruling on the matter) is that the MS license is wholly incompatible with any Free Software licenses, meaning that not just anyone can write a parser for their files.

Check it out...note the comment that points to this EWeek article that says the license for the new formats is incompatible with the GPL...

Right. You won't *have* to buy new hardware for Vista either, provided you don't intend to use many of Vista's features. This has been documented several times already.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

1. Google talk is windows only!! Blah! No Linux support even planned! (At least yahoo has a text messenger for un*x.) 2. Yahoo has had a voice messenger since may. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1817029,00.as p http://messenger.yahoo.com/feat_voice.php 3. Someone had you guys pegged two weeks ago!! http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159339&cid=133 44524

The on-die L2 cache will be shared between the two cores, and Intel says the relative bandwidth per core will be higher than its current chips. L2 cache size is widely scalable to different sizes for different products. The L1 caches will remain separate and tied to a specific core, but the CPU will be able to transfer data directly from one core's L1 cache to another.

So in other words, they haven't learned at all, it seems. With the major security flaws in Hyperthreading (including the flaws in the L1/L2 cache design), I'm not surprised they've pulled it from the chips for now.

When things don't work and you can't fix them, pull it out. Microsoft should take a tip here and start pulling out the insecure parts of their OS. Oh wait, that might leave a blank drive instead.

Remember the rumors about Google getting into VOIP? Eweek is reporting that it will be a text and voice chat.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1851272,00.as p?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

It's working it's way through the IETF, if I understand right.

The Atom Syndication Format - the feed format - got signed off as a Proposed Standard last week. That means the RFC number is on the way. Its here. The publishing protocol still has some way to go yet.

from both sides see:

Mambo Executives, Developers Fight for Project Control

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1850298,00.as p

Steven

First, yes there is "a small, independent media company founded and run by journalists." The key though is that you need to run it like a businessman, not as a journalist.

I know hundreds of people who want to be freelance writers or journalists. Some of them quite well. But, for every one I know who makes a living at it, I know two dozen who don't.

The secret? Treat it like a business first.

What's your business plan? You describe several tried, true and _lame_ ways of making money from journalism. Online advertising and newsletter subscriptions are the only ones that have a proven track record of working.

How many online publications do you see making living money from the methods you describe? I can't think of any.

Google ads by themselves though, won't cut it. You need someone who spends all their time looking for advertisers.

If you go the newsletter route, you typically have to become the Expert in one area that people with money want insider information on.

Now, that can be pretty broad. Fred Langa does very well with his personal computing newsletter, the Langa List (http://www.langa.com/), but Fred, former editor of chief in Byte in the good old days of print tech. journalism, already had a lot of fans.

OK, so those models can work, but you also have to content people value and want to read.

200K unique readers a month is good, but it's not good enough.

Still, with 200K, and aggressive, non-intrustive advertising, you should be able to generate enough cash to survive on.

But, income is only part of the equation. In a real business, yoy must learn how to manage your money. This isn't a skill that for some reason many writers or journalist have, but learning how to keep costs as low as possible while maximizing revenue is a must.

That sounds simple. It's not. It's a skill your group must master though.

I've made more money in journalism years ago than I am now, but I'm doing much better overall. My secret? I finally learned finance 101.

Finally, you really aren't staffed up enough to "deeper understanding of the wide swath of research discoveries poised to affect the technologies driving day-to-day life and business."

Pick a narrow area of technology, stick with it, and you can probably provide the "deeper understanding," you're striving to cover. Once people learn that your site is The site for nano-engineering, which seems a reasonable goal based on your existing coverage, you can probably make a go of it.

Good luck.

Steven,
Senior Editor, Ziff Davis Internet (http://www.eweek.com/
Editor, Practical Technology (http://www.practical-tech.com/
Chairman, Internet Press Guild (http://www.netpress.org/

Next article right here.

Linux: Exchange Alternatives Round-up
Linux Business
Posted by Hemos in The Mysterious Future!
from the good-news-for-the-it-set dept.
richi writes "eWEEK has a review of Linux-based alternatives to MS Exchange: Group Where? Almost Anywhere. Focusing on how well they integrate with Outlook, it looks at Bynari Insight 4.2, CommuniGate Pro 4.2, Gordano 11 and Scalix Server 9.2.1."

See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor.

( Read More... | linux.slashdot.org )

Another usefull article from eweek with even more info:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1847756,00.as p?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

"Making it easier for companies and communities that have patents to make those patents available in a common pool for people to use is one way to try to help developers deal with the threat," Torvalds continued.

http://linuxbusinessnews.sys-con.com/read/117730.h tm

"The software patent game is like the Cold War: The only thing that protects you is the concept of mutually assured destruction."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1846948,00.as p

OSDL Announcement:

"OSDL is the ideal steward for such an important legal initiative as the patent commons project," said Eben Moglen, chair of the Software Freedom Law Center. "No matter what your stand on software patents, and I oppose them, I call on developers to contribute to the OSDL patent commons project because there is strength in numbers and when individual contributions are collected together it creates a protective haven where developers can innovate without fear."

http://www.osdl.org/newsroom/press_releases/2005/2 005_08_09_beaverton.html

Long Announcement with more detailed information:

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2005-08-10-a.html

There we go...now maybe we can have an intelligent conversation :-D

From: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1566318,00.as p
According to Microsoft's Kaefer, "We'll make our IP available to all comers, open-source or not." Kaefer added that Microsoft isn't focused on what garage-shop developers are doing but that if a major corporation is using its IP, "We would need to look at it."

So Microsoft will decide when and where to enforce patents. Yeah, that makes me feel better about the whole thing.

Opinion: Now if only SCO wasn't such a loser. There are two real reasons that OpenServer can't win a recommendation.

The broadband providers are already putting a stop to it. They have the money to grease the politicians and they already did it in Philadelphia: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1735342,00.as p

We've known for over a month that Monad wasn't going to make it in Longhorn, aka Vista.

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,182 6007,00.asp?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535

The real reason is that MS hasn't been able to get it to work well enough to put in there.

The fact that it's insecure is well... since when has Microsoft products ever been secure?? Like releasing insecure program has ever been a problem for them? in the past? I think not!

It's too bad in a way. If they had gotten to work, if it could be secure, well, I rather liked the ideas behind it. It certainly would have more useful than WinFS or a fancy-dancy new interface.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1826153,00.as p

Steven

Will this do?

Nice to see not all /.'s jumped on the bashing bandwagon this time. Still, a lot did the blind bashing.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1844239,00.as p

Monad is not a part of Vista. It is a Beta scripting language (due in a couple of years) on a beta OS. (that it will not be a part of)

But, to continue the car analogy, one could say Windows is like the Model T of operating systems. Not the best, but the first one that started making it feasible to get one in everybody's house.

A timely case in point is how it broke into and gained dominance in the web browser market: it is a fact well documented in court records that this was purely because of being able to leverage it's desktop monopoly into control of the newly established web browser market. Yeah, both MSIE and Netscape sucked, but MSIE wouldn't have gone anywhere without the desktop monopoly and, oh yeah, ripping code from Mosaic.

Then there has been the strong arm tactics it has used, and still uses, with OEMs and partners. BeOS fell to that one. It won the right to distribution, but MS ensured that even when it came on OEM machines, it was not in the boot loader.

There has been sabotage. The AARD code against DR-DOS was one, but broken implementations of HTTP, TCP/IP and Kerberos make problems, too.

There have been smear campaigns spreading misinformation about competitors and their products (esp. Novel Netware) MS has also used its partner the BSA to raid businesses using competing products and negotiate contracts with an MS-only infrastructure in their place. There have been forged video evidence in US courts, but no charges of perjury. There were cases where the executives either perjured themselves or committed treason, no middle ground: they did this by swearing in court that their products were so shoddy that national security would be threatened by releasing the source code, yet they turned around and showed the source code to China.

Currently, there are problems with MS trying to use the WMA and WMP formats to break into the audio and video market. The EU has found them guilty of illegal, anti-competitive behaviour, but has been waffling on actually enforcing any punishment.

Currently, the licenses for 2000 SP3, XP SP 2 and later even give MS administrative rights to the machine. That's a back door by another name.

The list of ethical / legal problems could go on for pages. Why is Slashdot suddenly pushing so much stuff from MS apologists? How about more article about companies with a future, like Opera, Apple, IBM, etc. Or tools like OpenOffice, or codecs like Vorbis, Dirac, or Theora, which anyone could use. Shoot, such a big deal was made about Greasemonkey having some minor flaws, yet nothing has been said about greasemonkey being patched. How about an article on that and a moratorium on doing marketing for MS?

From: Kim Christensen (kichrist) [mailto:kichrist@cisco.com%5D
Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2005 11:58 AM
Subject: CISCO - CCO Passwords

Dear Cisco Partner,

I'd like to bring your attention to an issue thatmay cause minor inconvenience for customers and partners.

You may experience issues with yourlogin to www.cisco.com

You will be required to reset your password, please send an email to cco-locksmith@cisco.com from the same email address that is associated with your CCO userid. Within a few minutes you should receive a new working password back to that same email address.

Please note that when you send an email to cco-locksmith@cisco.com - the only requirement is that the email is sent from the same email address associated with your userid to receive the return email with the new password. Once this is received you should be able to reset your password to one of your own choosing.

It ispossible that you are not impacted by this issue but I wanted to ensure you are aware of this in the event you have a problem logging into CCO today.

Your Cisco Channel Team

And Mike Lynn already settled with Cisco, but I suppose it's par for the course to get in one more jab.

Also, the "major flaws" could only be referring to two things:

- flaws that have already been long fixed (six months before Black Hat), that Lynn, in his opinion, didn't believe Cisco identified as "critical enough" to its customers, but nonetheless, as I already said, are fixed; or

- general IOS flaws that will only materialize for architectural reasons in the next major iteration of Cisco's routers that Lynn felt it was important enough to have a frank discussion about, but are not yet shipping.

In other words, Cisco's technical response was such that the vulnerabilities in shipping products are already fixed, and the vulnerability Lynn claims is a real killer allegedly exists in products that aren't even shipping yet and won't be for some time; it flies in the face of logic to believe that Cisco would ignore such vulnerabilities in yet-to-ship products, once identified. Yes, Cisco didn't believe it at first, but it sent engineering staff, and were proven wrong. One can only assume the engineer Cisco sent for the very purpose of confirming this general issue in turn confirmed to Cisco that the problem was indeed real.

Furthermore, it's likely that Lynn broke no law (save possible civil violations of contract and/or trade secret provisions), so any FBI investigation, if not over already, is moot. Ironically, several members of the government, including possibly Air Force OSI and/or NSA congratulated Lynn after his talk at Black Hat, even giving him a challenge coin for his work. Don't worry: Lynn's work isn't lost on those who value security, but don't presume that there is a huge conspiracy just because someone was willing to quit his job to reveal the secrets of a sometime-competitor. A little more of the Cisco/ISS background in this issue - including what I would consider fairly questionably motivated references by ISS about this flaw being Cisco's "Witty" - is provided in the earlier Wired interview.

See:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1843097,00.as p

Steven

If I'd seen this before it went public I would have e-mailed the on-duty editor saying that there's a major problem with the headline. So let's clear the air and get the announcement right --

Novell's announcement was not that they're open sourcing SUSE. SUSE is already GPL. Novell is essentially announcing this:

The goal of OpenSUSE is to create a community-supported distribution similar to Fedora. Also, like Fedora, this becomes a code base that the developers of the commercially-supported distributions can pull from.