Slashdot Mirror

Lumpish Scholar writes ""The Sims Online" was one of the most anticipated releases of 2002; but (according to this Los Angeles Times story in the Baltimore Sun, "'The Sims Online' sold 105,000 copies, or only about a quarter of the initial shipment in December," and (as quoted in this article in the New York Times), "the company's president, John S. Riccitiello, said the number of subscribers was half what Electronic Arts expected." (Check out Google News for more articles, and a registration-free partner link to the New York Times story.) Meanwhile, the game's customer reviews at Amazon.com have an average rating of only two (out of five) stars."

Augustus De Morgan writes "Five years ago today a brainstorming session in Palo Alto led to the adoption and promotion of the "open source" label. (You can find references to the label much earlier, however.) For some, it was a dark divergence from the free software movement; for others, the beginning of the adoption of key software principles into mainstream. Here's a growing set of resources and stories about the history of free and open source software, and a lament about the decline of altruism in the open source community."

This is a man who obviously knows a lot about the Internet. I am not making this up. He wrote a book about it. He has his own blog, his own Web site, and his own online alt.fan newsgroup with its own FAQ. Not only that, he is in a band and writes a syndicated humor column that often covers matters of interest to Slashdot readers. What are you going to ask him? Up to you, as long as you hold it down to one question per post. We'll send Dave 10 of the highest-moderated questions and post his answers as soon as we get them back, after which we're sure many alert readers will have much to add even if they haven't heard about Bennett Haselton's excellent automated Dave Barry column generator.

This is a man who obviously knows a lot about the Internet. I am not making this up. He wrote a book about it. He has his own blog, his own Web site, and his own online alt.fan newsgroup with its own FAQ. Not only that, he is in a band and writes a syndicated humor column that often covers matters of interest to Slashdot readers. What are you going to ask him? Up to you, as long as you hold it down to one question per post. We'll send Dave 10 of the highest-moderated questions and post his answers as soon as we get them back, after which we're sure many alert readers will have much to add even if they haven't heard about Bennett Haselton's excellent automated Dave Barry column generator.

vaxzilla writes "At 3:31pm EST on Friday, January 31st, 2003, OpenVMS for the Intel IA64 architecture successfully booted and ran a DIR command. The Intel Itanium family of processors is the third architecture supported by OpenVMS in its 25 year history. Originally it ran on Digital Equipment Corporation VAX systems; in the early 1990s, support was added for the DEC Alpha processors. Following the acquisition of DEC by Compaq, and more recently Compaq by HP, the Itanium and Itanium2 port of OpenVMS is now being undertaken by HP. Congratulations on a job well done to the folks at ZK03 in Nashua, NH!"

fducky writes "Once again Microsoft is blasted for lax security. This CNN article cites experts denouncing the recent Microsoft security efforts as rating an 'F'. The recent MS-SQL worm got this most recent round of MS bashing going. Google News has more stories on the subject."

Telent writes "As seen in this post by Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD is getting even more secure, working on smashing script kiddies running buffer overflow exploits dead. Tightening PROT_* according to the POSIX standards and creating a non-executable stack on most architectures are just two of the recent enhancements, most of which are in -current now."

[null] asks: "Has anyone experienced problems with HP DeskJet printers (mostly 600 series) or ScanJet 4100C due to the power supply going bad? I've just got back from a friend whose scanner is currently toast as the power supply decided to put out something other than the 30VDC/400mA/14W it is spec'd for. I'm extremely suspicious because I have a DeskJet 660Cse with the same power supply brick that was working fine up until a month ago when it would go from printing fine to printing several sheets of garbage out of any given print job. I checked it with my tester and saw it giving out 37.5VDC (25% over spec). This link from HP PartSurfer lists the HP products using this power supply and has a picture. This power supply usually featuers a model number of C2175A molded on it. My friend's supply was listed as made by Lucent and mine is by NMB, causing me to wonder if the design itself is possibly defective. Google is not being very helpful in finding people with similar problems, and we are talking about pretty old hardware here that people would probably throw out rather than bother trying to order parts for. HP also has recalls on power supplies for DeskJet 800/900 series and some PhotoSmart 1x00 series printers. How about it, anyone else had problems?"

Amsterdam Vallon writes "Apple recently reported an $8 million loss, its second straight loss, compared with a $38 million profit a year ago. It seems that upbeat laptop sales weren't enough to get this company out of the Wall Street basement. Hopefully, with increasing Mac OS X and wireless-related sales, we'll see a nice increase come next quarter and after that, perhaps a jaunt toward profitability!" The back was apparently tipped into the red with one-time restructuring losses, else there would have been a modest profit; Apple expects stagnant revenues for the near future.

samgrover writes "According to this article, found on Google News, Nokia on Tuesday began offering a free, Java-based toolkit for developing mobile applications on the Linux platform, for deployment on Nokia mobile phones. The kit represents the first fully open-source offering for developing mobile applications, said Chris Preimesberger, a wireless analyst at Evans Data, in Redwood City, Calif."

scubacuda writes "Business Week has an article on some of the challenges Google faces as it gains popularity. For a while, things were looking good: unobtrusive ads, a hardware search appliance, and the fact that 'google' has become a verb (like xerox, kleenex, hoover, etc.). Now, Yahoo! has dropped the 'exclusive' part of its contract, Overture won a series of key contracts, Verity has announced a deal to purchase Inktomi's assets, and Y! announced it was buying Inktomi's web-search business. And other engines such as WiseNut, Teoma, and FAST now mimic Google's 'popularity placement technology.'"

Slashback this evening brings you a few corrections, updates, amplifications and reversals -- read on for more on the Xbox key cracking project, the new version of FireWire, and more.

Reality is just an illustrator's concept. In regards to the speculative piece about what animals will look like in the future, Ken Colangelo writes: "The author of After Man was Dougal Dixon, not Dougal Adams. He's got a pretty long track record as an amazing bio-illustrator.

He had, at one point, spoken of a book he was working on called "Man After Man" I believe. This would discuss what man would evolve into. In any case, I am probably his biggest (only?) fan and would appreciate it if you'd tell slashdot to correct his name ... This guy clearly needs to be working in speculative evolution again, now that computer graphics have caught up to his abilities. Animal Planet just doesn't seem to be that great at it."

A bit more on that secret FireWire, since it's no longer secret. cwill1004 writes "As was speculated yesterday, it turns out that Apple is indeed including a new higher-speed FireWire on its new laptops. Dubbed IEEE1394b, it appears to be primarily for external storage devices. One article on the Storage Supersite says that LaCie, Maxtor, SmartDisk, and Indigita have already hopped on board. The best part: IEEE1394b is backwards compatible, and available on both Mac and PC."

Perl undoes simplicity itself. ljb writes " I've re-written Tom Murphy's 'embed' bit-flipping program in Perl. At 76 characters (shorter than a standard 80-character width terminal line), I believe this qualifies as a Perl "one-liner". Heck, you could even fit this on an old IBM punchcard (ignoring character set limitations). Here's the Perl script --
$/=\4;map{?OS/2?|$f&&$f++==2?$c-=2+vec($_,0,32)/4: ++$c||s/../\0\0/s;print}<>"

So get distributed crackin' ... scubacuda writes "On. Off. Now it's on again? According to PC World (et al), The Neo Project again tackles the challenge of cracking Microsoft's encryption key."

murky.waters writes "The responses to this year's Edge.org question have been published; basically, people were asked to imagine they were nominated as White House science adviser and the President asked them what are some important issues in science and what we should do about them. There are 84 responses, ranging in topic from advanced nanotechnology to the psychology of foreign cultures, and lots of ideas regarding science, technology, politics, and education. The responses were written by academics (e.g. Roger Schank, Marvin Minsky), journalists (Kevin Kelly), Nobel Laureates (Eric Kandel), and others (Alan Alda). Some of responses are politically loaded but the majority has either a more specialised proposal, or general remarks about our world. Many are absolutely fascinating: funny, insightful, interesting, hell even informative. ... One of the most public supporters of the Singularity 'religion', Ray Kurzweil, is a regular at Edge, and currently discussed issues range from said transhumanism to early-universe theories, and many other kinds of exciting and novel science."

scubacuda asks: "What do techies think about the plethora of cell phone plans out there? (While accompanying a friend at the Sprint kiosk, I couldn't help but dissuade several people from signing up with Sprint.) When I told a friend about my new AT&T "minutes w/o limits" plan ($99/mo for unlimited ANYWHERE minutes), he talked to Nextel and had them match the plan. What plans do you consider to be the best, and when have you been successful in negotiating your plan down?" Ask Slashdot did a similar question during November of 2000. It's amazing how fast cell phones have been adopted by people worldwide, and I think it would be interesting to see how much more you can get for your buck now, as opposed to then.

murky.waters writes "The New York Times (free registration, profiling) has an article about the opposing views of teacher's demanding attention and students seeking distraction; the current trend toward wireless Internet access in the classroom has students surfing the web and checking their email from the backrow, while instructors are climbing up the ladder... to disconnect the Access Point." Makarand writes "University Wi-Fi networks are heavily impacting student campus life according to this article on NewsObserver.com. In addition to allowing them to keep working while not in their computer labs, the wireless networks allow them to keep in touch with their family, better organize time, complete coursework in shorter periods of time, collaborate with other students and bring computing power into classrooms not available before."

murky.waters writes "Wired News has an article with a decidedly different take on security holes in Microsoft Windows: Despite the thousands of known exploits and virii, most MS users aren't target of much harm, and the big guns such as Klez have had almost no effect on home users. An interesting read that, if true, challenges some common arguments."

nilesh writes "Yesterday, Reliance Infocomm launched one of the largest CDMA networks in the world [Google news]. This wireless network will cover 90% of India's population on a backbone of 60,000 kms of optic fibre. They have dreams of providing an Internet-enabled Java-powered CDMA2000 1x phone to almost every Indian citizen for around tariffs as low as 40 paise per minute or 0.8 cents per minute. The Samsung/LG/Kyocera phones will be replete with applications ranging from internet banking to video on demand and online gaming. Now all we need is Quake for Java and we'll have college kids playing deathmatches with each other in classroom at 144kbps. The next game revolution is in sight."

rmohr02 writes "New Jersey has just enacted legislation that would require all handguns to be able to recognize their owners and only fire when their owners grip them. Gun manufacturers will be required to implement this within three years of the NJ Attorney General's approval of an acceptable, commercially available model. One critic says 'No technology is foolproof--anyone who has a computer knows how many times it crashes.' I'm sure fellow /.ers will have something to say about that. Also on Google News"

theodp writes "Looks like Amazon's really getting back in the patent game. Today, the USPTO published Amazon's patent application for conducting electronic commerce using multiple shopping carts. Using the invention, a shopper purchasing items for five relatives can set up one shopping cart for each relative, a shopper purchasing books for Johnny can name one of his shopping carts "Johnny's books", and a shopper can add items to multiple shopping carts with only two mouse clicks." This might also be a good time to point out to those who didn't see it the first time AOL's patent claims regarding "Instant Message" technology; you may be able to think of some prior art.

theodp writes "Looks like Amazon's really getting back in the patent game. Today, the USPTO published Amazon's patent application for conducting electronic commerce using multiple shopping carts. Using the invention, a shopper purchasing items for five relatives can set up one shopping cart for each relative, a shopper purchasing books for Johnny can name one of his shopping carts "Johnny's books", and a shopper can add items to multiple shopping carts with only two mouse clicks." This might also be a good time to point out to those who didn't see it the first time AOL's patent claims regarding "Instant Message" technology; you may be able to think of some prior art.

battlemage asks: "According to this Article [heise.de; Google translation - pretty unreadable], a german court decided on 9/19/02 that the common confirmation E-Mails sent to new subscribers of newsletters could be considered unsolicited e-mail, aka SPAM, if they are sent to somebody who did not actually subscribe. According to German laws, this could actually mean fines for the site running the newsletter. They said it was the site owners obligation to prove that somebody actually requested such e-mail. The question is, how would that be possible without e-mail and without cost-intensive Passport/ID/CreditCard-Checks? I do work on a website in my free-time, and we would probably like to offer newsletters in the future, but I'm now unsure how we could do that." Mailing list and newsletter admins in other countries might do well to keep an eye on this in case such laws migrate to their area.

An anonymous reader writes "CNN has a story about Lycos and its 50 top "searched for" items of the year. After excluding "sex", "Dragonball" was #1, followed by "Kazaa", "tattoos", "Britney Spears", and the "NFL" (american football) rounding out the top 5. IRS was #7, and taxes acheived #14. "The Bible" is #21 followed by "Marijuana" at #22. It appears that pop-stars, supermodels, computer games, sports, and september 11th related words heavily dominate the rest of the top 100. How about the biggest declines? Boy bands. nSync down from 36 to 163, and Back Street Boys tumble to 250 from 58. Lycos is hosting the top 100 results this year here with some commentary. Google also has their own comprehensive lists (and cool charts) as well."

CgiJobs writes "The critics aren't much impressed with the new Star trek: "The 10th entry in the Star Trek movie franchise ... is the dullest and drabbest of the lot"; "this ship-bound and lackluster entry tells a rather harebrained story"; "suffers from a nasty case of the cutes"; More at Google News. Of course, I'll still be going to see it." Calling this movie the worst of the series is a pretty harsh criticism...

Reader NCC1701E submitted a short write-up on the movie:

"First, the executive summary: wait for the video. Now, the Gory Details, in all their splendor. I somehow received an email invitation to an advance screening to the Paramount Theater in Times Square, here in NYC. I had to wait in line for 30 minutes, and there was some confusion in swapping my email print out for a pass. But they didn't even check names against a list; it was basically first-come, first served among those who had been inveigled there through various means. In the end, there were even some empty seats. The movie itself? Basically disappointing. IMHO, the weakest entry yet in the series. Production values and special effects were excellent. And it was great to see the movie in a big theater with Dolby sound. But NEMESIS is little more than a Western type "shoot out" movie. The bad guys attack. The good guys fight back, Then, there's more attacking and more fighting back. Then it happens again. And again. You get the idea. I'm a sucker for the hokey humanism that was the hallmark of Star Trek at its best. There was very little of that on display here. In fact, there was very little in the way of a plot. Just some mildly amusing cutesy scenes, plus some murky musings about the nature vs. nuture debate re: a Picard clone. So I didn't much care for the movie. And judging by the subdued response in the theater, neither did the audience. BTW, NY audiences can be cruel. This one snickered at corny lines that weren't supposed to be funny. The phrase "derisive laughter" leaps to mind. I predict NEMESIS will be a huge box office hit. But long-time fans may be as disappointed as I was."

Google labs just released for your pleasure, some new toys to play with. The first is Google's Viewer, just type a few words to see a fully working preview of the web site. Another new idea: Google's Webquotes, View search results with quotes about them from other sites, and the last one is Google's Froogle, which aims to be the world's largest catalog.

Google labs just released for your pleasure, some new toys to play with. The first is Google's Viewer, just type a few words to see a fully working preview of the web site. Another new idea: Google's Webquotes, View search results with quotes about them from other sites, and the last one is Google's Froogle, which aims to be the world's largest catalog.

Google labs just released for your pleasure, some new toys to play with. The first is Google's Viewer, just type a few words to see a fully working preview of the web site. Another new idea: Google's Webquotes, View search results with quotes about them from other sites, and the last one is Google's Froogle, which aims to be the world's largest catalog.

hether writes "Customers of the auction site eBay have been targeted by a site called ebayupdates.com. The site attempts to steal credit card details from eBay's 55 million customers. The SANS Institute Internet Storm Center issued the warning on this one. Info about the scam can be found on the BBC site, CNN, CNet, vnunet, and more. Funny enough there's no mention of this on the eBay site..."

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm preparing a proposal to my local LUG hopefully to persuade them to incorporate a weblog into their current website. It seems to me that weblogs would be better suited to the type of communication that is generally found on LUG email lists. My questions is: Are there any LUGs out there that are currently using some type of weblog application? Are there any who are considering it, or have considered it and abandoned the idea? What are the major reasons behind your choice?"

216pi asks: "It seems that there is no good site where to post the data about my free WiFi HotSpot in Cologne / Germany. This one doesn't help (map is unusable), this looks nice but has no map, a good name is nice, but doesn't help if it doesn't contain any data and Telepolis (in English) has only blabla sites but without usable search function or map. Any suggestions, especially for Europe (and/or Germany)?"

Kaz Riprock asks: "A few months ago, I was looking for a store where I could purchase AbraCabubble, a hard candy with gum center made by Brach's. I figured most manufacturers have a website with product locator and the closest store to me with Brach's bulk candy would do. After an hour or two probing the web with Google (like you needed the link), I was only able to come up with a few stock projections. This was amazing to me, because when I set out to find even the most obscure facts on the web, I usually don't come back quite so empty-handed, especially when looking for a presence for the third largest candy manufacturer in the US. Since then, they've put up a website. It's true that a business could get by without a web presence in this day and age, but what's the likelihood? What's the largest business that you sought lately to find an official page on and came up without anything to show for your efforts? Have they since come around and put a page up? I think it'd be interesting to keep a page (or even use this article) of companies that you should not expect to find a page on, so that at the very least, you'd find that page and know to stop looking. Thoughts?"

FosterSJC asks: "I go to St. John's College, Annapolis, home of the Great Books Program, for almost 70 years. This neoclassical method of education was developed and instituted in the late '30s by Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan. We have a set syllabus that every student reads in a set order of the course of his/her four years at the college - all primary sources and in all subjects, Lab, Math, Language, Music, and Seminar. Taking a hint, partially, from the OSS CD thread a few weeks back, and this thread, I would like any and all advice about compiling a CD to give to freshman, and anyone else for that matter, containing as many of the Great Books as possible. Since most all are in the public domain (very few 20th century authors), the trick would be finding them, sorting them, organizing them, and making sure you have the highest quality translations as well (the biggest problem with the Public Domain versions of these books). Please help."

Glewtion writes "LaCie has release their "Big Disk" - a large capacity FireWire case (400 / 500GB) with decent specs. The only thing they're not clear on is the fact that there are two drives in the case...but that only seems logical. Looks like it's only available in Europe though, so here's a link to a French Hardware site's description of it (translation courtesy of Google). Pretty cool for a portable MP3 collection. Here's the LaCie page." What's not apparant is that this case has two drives in it apparantly. Very Slick.

wdavies writes "There are various news reports (see this Google search) Oldest Rocks University Quebec that are reporting the discovery of the oldest sedimentary rocks ever found. There are older rocks, but they are extra-terrestrial, and apparently these Earth-local rocks will give a lot more information about the early stages of life on our planet. IANAG so I can't judge any more, but seems significant"

In high tech time, the span between Network Associates dropping PGP, its purchase by the purpose-formed PGP Corporation and that company's release today of PGP 8.0 may not be a short stretch, but it's been a busy several months. A product which appeared moribund despite widespread acclaim a few years earlier -- a victim of skewed corporate logic -- has rebounded for another major release, and Philip Zimmermann is doing something he's never done before: actually selling PGP. And as Zimmermann had urged long before NAI forged a deal with PGP Corporation, this time around the full source code is being released, albeit with strings. Read on for the rest of the story.

Would you buy PGP from this man? Long before Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested for helping people undo e-book encryption, and before DeCSS was unlocking DVDs, Philip Zimmermann was being prosecuted for a nearly opposite endeavor: providing software which allowed ordinary people with a modicum of computer savvy to encrypt their own data in a way impractically difficult even for large government agencies to reverse. His modestly named application Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, was released in 1991 as freeware and was quickly adopted by privacy seeking computer users.

Export controls then in effect barred international trade in such software; because of PGP's inevitable spread online well past the borders of the U.S., Zimmermann was accused of violating munitions-export laws. For a while, this made Zimmermann a poster boy for the right to create software free of intrusive restraint, and ended up in a three-year battle with the government which Zimmermann eventually won.

Now, in a twist worthy of novelization, Zimmermann has joined a small number of PGP Corporation partners on North America, and will be reselling PGP Corporation's version of PGP. Outside North America, PGP Corporation has sales partners in countries from Germany to Singapore -- in a sense, Zimmermann is simply their most famous salesman. (He also serves on PGP Corporation's technical advisory board and maintains a consulting relationship with the company.)

Sales, though, is really a sideline to Zimmermann's consulting business. "I'm not really switching my career to sales," he says. Zimmermann is nonetheless enthusiastic about his new role selling the software he kick-started more than 11 years ago, though it's a switch from his role in creating it. "I don't write code anymore," he said from his Silicon Valley home office. "As you get further along in your career, you get further away from the things you like to do. I wish I could get back to it, but it's the Peter Principle, and here I am." Zimmermann downplays the Federal government's legal proceedings against him in the first half of the 90s, calling it "old news" and "years in the past."

Like any large organization, in fact, the Federal government has a need to encrypt certain documents, so it's no surprise that the government bodies of every stripe use "a ton" of PGP. It seems likely that his sales venture means that Zimmermann will soon have come full circle, from producer of verboten software to vendor selling his product to government agencies. Zimmermann admits "It would be funny, and there would be a certain irony if that happens ... I'm hoping to sell to enterprise customers, large users, and that includes the government. If the government wants to buy it from me, that would be fine with me."

Something to sell, and source code, too. PGP's present is finally catching up with its history (try this google search for a number of links): today's release of version 8.0 for Windows and Mac OS X differs not just in name from PGP as it was released under NAI's stewardship, because this time there is full source code to go along with it. (A Linux release is being investigated.)

The 8.0 release doesn't differ in basic purpose from previous versions of PGP: it's still intended as an easy-to-use approach to encryption for both business and personal use, with hooks to a wide range of network operating systems and mail systems; there are several simultaneous releases, actually, from freeware (for non-commercial use) to an Enterprise edition, and the features available vary with the price. There's also a link to download the full source, under certain conditions, from PGP Corporation's home page.

PGP Corporation director of products Stephan Somogyi says he's proud of the way the company has walked the tightrope between source code availability and securing its own interest in the product based on that code.

The license agreement it takes to download source code, however, contains clauses guaranteed to rankle some open-source advocates and security enthusiasts. For instance, part of the third section of the eight-section source code license reads: "You agree that you will not post any information about any bug, problem, deficiency, or weakness in the PGP software on any web site or electronic bulletin board, or otherwise disclose or provide any such information to anyone else, unless you have first reported it to PGP and until at least 30 days after PGP sends its email acknowledgement to you."

Another section carefully lists uses of the code which are explicitly prohibited, including a note that a downloader may not "give (meaning sell, loan, distribute, or transfer) the source code files to anyone else" (except under certain outlined circumstances). Further, those who download the source code may not "use executable code versions of PGP software programs created by compiling these source code files for any purpose or reason other than verifying that there are no unknown vulnerabilities or the like or otherwise making your own assessment of the integrity of the source code and the security features of the PGP software."

Somogyi draws a distinction here between the meaning of an End User License Agreement (EULA) and a source code license such as the one required to download the PGP source. The source code is there, he says, because "PGP [Corporation] is making it clear that we don't have anything to hide and that PGP remains a trusted brand, a trusted codebase."

With nothing more than a click-through license protecting it, there will almost certainly be rogue copies of the source code soon, but as Somogyi puts it, "the only place that anyone who cares about their security is going to get PGP is from us -- no one is going to use some randomly compiled version of PGP, because they don't know the provenance. It's all about trust, from our perspective."

Zimmermann, too, takes pains to note a distinction which sounds similar to one made by Microsoft in describing that company's "Shared Source" source code disclosure. "Publishing source code doesn't mean you've giving away the software -- if you think about it, John Grisham publishes his novels in source code form. Does that mean he's giving up his copyright in them? No. If Microsoft published the source code to Office, does that mean they wouldn't still want money for it? There's a difference between letting people look at your source code -- finding bugs, fixing problems -- and giving it away."

Reputation and Propriety. It's hard to say how much of PGP's reputation is really that of its creator.

Zimmerman's insistence on his right to create troublesome code, and on the freedom to encrypt which his software provided its users, endeared him to crypto-libertarians before most of the current battles of software freedom and philosophy had reached public consciousness.

Whereas Zimmermann famously left Network Associates, PGP Corporation seems much more interested in maintaining the integrity of Zimmermann's connection to PGP, which is if anything a tacit admission of Zimmermann's importance to the company's reputation.

"We would be foolish if we did not seek counsel from people who are the best in their fields," says Somogyi. "It's really important that Phil be involved." Zimmermann's presence on the technical advisory board from its inception will probably serve to reassure users worried about corporate machinations.

Should You Buy PGP from this man? When PGP was first released, it was cutting edge -- in the sphere of ordinary computer users, it was a runaway hit. Now there are alternatives to PGP; in the Free software world, these include notably the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), a suite of tools which aims to be a user-friendly equivalent to PGP consisting entirely of Free software.

Neither Zimmermann nor PGP Corporation's Somogyi seems worried about Free software alternatives to their own products, which can after all still be used free of charge.

"There's still a freeware version of PGP, and there's still going to be a free version of PGP, including the version that's coming out, version 8," says Zimmermann, who actually points to GPG and several other products from his sales web page. "I applaud the creation of GPG, we need to have multiple sources for this kind of technology. But you know, PGP is a good product, I think that it's easier to use."

Somogyi echos this line of reasoning. "Fundamentally I think that the people who use PGP is one group, and the people who use GPG are another, and I don't see a heck of a lot of competition between the two efforts," he says.

Zimmermann says that the prospect of selling PGP, though -- and making money from it -- is key to its prospects for success. "Look at what happened last time when nobody paid for PGP. NAI pulled the plug on the product. From February of this year until August, PGP was in limbo. ... Remember the National Lampoon from 70s, 'Buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog'? That's what happened. They shot the dog!"

"It takes money to pay the engineers, it takes money to do all this stuff. PGP is a big important product, it doesn't just happen for free." And when NAI dropped PGP development, the software "went into an intellectual property black hole. When a company pulls the plugs on a product, it just disappears. All this political posturing about saying that cryptography should be free, that's all very nice, but it doesn't pay the bills."

Nick of NSTime writes "Various sources are reporting that a Brazilian company is releasing a new version of the venerable Sega Master System, dubbed the Sega Master System III. The case is a radical departure from the old SMS and SMS II. The thing to get excited about: it will include 74 games built-in. The translated page can be found here."

Nick of NSTime writes "Various sources are reporting that a Brazilian company is releasing a new version of the venerable Sega Master System, dubbed the Sega Master System III. The case is a radical departure from the old SMS and SMS II. The thing to get excited about: it will include 74 games built-in. The translated page can be found here."

Theovon asks: "One of today's hot topics seems to be SPAM filtering. I have wanted very much to make my own contribution to this, but I have been thwarted by a patent. Probably before Paul Graham began working on his Bayesian SPAM filter, I began work on a Markov-model based filter. Things were going well until I posted to the usenet about it, and got this Google Groups response. This usenet post describes a Mitsubishi patent issued in 2000, US Patent #6,112,021. One of the key aspects of my design was that I would train the Markov model with both positive and negative examples. This patent is spot-on what I'm doing, because it deals specifically with the idea of using negative examples in Markov models to filter, among other things, 'inappropriate web content.' Well, the patent looks like a good one, assuming they really developed this idea. I mean, of course, I would think it's a good idea; I came up with it too, and it works very well. (Then again, I also thought it was 'obvious')..."

"Not too long ago, I was discussing it with a co-worker who has a degree in Electrical Engineering. She had taken an AI class in college which mentioned the idea of negative examples for Markov models, and this was well before the year 2000. The bottom line is that I think I have a great idea that could potentially add to our collective arsenal against the ever-growing SPAM problem. I would very much like to work on it and publish it under GPL, but before I can do this, I have to protect my self against the patent and the large pocketbook of Mitsubishi.

I'm not asking for legal advice. I have already consulted an attorney, and it was suggested that I should remove the SourceForge project, which I have done. I also attempted to contact the EFF (no luck so far). I'm asking for those of you out there who are familiar with this sort of thing to help me to find verifiable prior art that dates from before the 2000 patent. I would very much like to share with the world my ideas and the code I have written, but this is standing in our way."

Kagato asks: "I'm trying to make my company's Unix boxes more mission critical in the area of job scheduling. Scheduling jobs in Unix has been around since the dawn of time. On most systems you have 'cron' and 'at' to provide most of your scheduling needs. But outside the basic world of 'do this at such time' there are a slew of commercial products that handle dependencies, failure routes, monitoring, dependent notification, etc. Commercial products of this type have been around for years. Is there anything like this available in the GNU and Open Source worlds? I've been looking at Freshmeat, SourceForge and Google. I've found the pickings for advanced scheduling are pretty slim."

Greedo writes "Seems like UltraDNS was hit with a denial of service attack this weekend. Since these are the guys who are supposed to be running the .ORG DNS, and in light of recent attacks on the gTLD roots, attacks against DNS servers should be treated very seriously. What kind of protection can be had? What happens when an attack like this brings down an entire TLD? Do you want to give control of an entire gTLD to one organization? Read a follow-up discussion on comp.protoocols.dns.std."

An anonymous reader writes "Astronomers have discovered two supermassive black holes that they predict will eventually collide. As they say in bad SF, 'it could warp the fabric of space.'"

Anonymous Cowdog writes "Google News turned up a scary item today: Apparently, genetically altered corn, designed not to repel pests or withstand bad weather, but rather to grow pharmecuticals (for diabetes and diarrhea) has been accidentally mixed with soy plants in the field, resulting in 500,000 bushels of contaminated soybeans being quarantined by the US FDA. Ooops. Here's the story, and here's another story about the same case. The company who brought us this nice event is called ProdiGene. Looks like they're also working on an edible AIDS vaccine (kinda makes sense, eat Tofu, enjoy free love!) Now, I was thinking, will our government protect us from doom-by-hand-me-down-genes? and on a hunch (honest!) I did this google search for keywords ProdiGene and "george w bush". Result? A not so reassuring article."

Anonymous Cowdog writes "Google News turned up a scary item today: Apparently, genetically altered corn, designed not to repel pests or withstand bad weather, but rather to grow pharmecuticals (for diabetes and diarrhea) has been accidentally mixed with soy plants in the field, resulting in 500,000 bushels of contaminated soybeans being quarantined by the US FDA. Ooops. Here's the story, and here's another story about the same case. The company who brought us this nice event is called ProdiGene. Looks like they're also working on an edible AIDS vaccine (kinda makes sense, eat Tofu, enjoy free love!) Now, I was thinking, will our government protect us from doom-by-hand-me-down-genes? and on a hunch (honest!) I did this google search for keywords ProdiGene and "george w bush". Result? A not so reassuring article."

Anonymous writes "The SBL has added Verio's corporate mail servers to its blocklist which protects nearly 100 million mailboxes, because of the number of spam gangs on the Verio network. Verio also provides connectivity to AS26212, a collection of 9 of the most notorious spammers netblocks. AS26212 - the new spambone? - is also connected to he.net and bbnplanet.net."

linuxwrangler writes "Key3Media Group Inc. which produces the Comdex trade show may be unable to make it's debt payments and could declare bankruptcy. No decision will be made until after Fall Comdex opening on Monday. More info is available at Google News."

Slashback with more unintentionally odd clip art in Microsoft work for fire, Las Vegas monorail progress, the resolution of SonicBlue and TiVo's legal dispute, and more. Read on for the details.

Well, while we were switching things around here at the ad agency ... An anonymous reader writes "While looking around on Microsoft's site checking out the new Tablet PCs I noticed something very out of Place. In one of their Flash Demos for the Tablet PC there is an Apple Powerbook 1400! To see it for yourself, the flash is located here (then "Tablet PC Overview Demo," then "Tablet PC," then "Powerful") The first computer is really that Powerbook! Pic here."

What about to the legal brothels? Sacarino writes "Back in April, Slashdot ran a story about the Monorail project Las Vegas was embarking upon. It would appear that things are progressing nicely. "It's ugly" critics will be put to shame, the designers did a great job of making it non-obtrusive. (if that's possible in Vegas) Soon you too will pile off the airplane, trudge onto the monorail, then run into the casino to spend that money....ahh, Vegas."

Out of court, out of mind. Enry writes "SONICblue and TiVo have dropped the patent infringement lawsuits they filed against each other. The press release reads: "We believe our energies are better spent expanding the market for Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) rather than fighting each other. Both sides believe in the merits of their respective positions, but the overall success of the DVR category is what is most important to the companies at this time." Take that, AdAge!"

Sounds like a nice way to watch movies. For those intrigued by a 640x480, QWERTY-keyboard color, clamshell-case PDA as embodied by the Zaurus 5600, patrickoehlinger writes "Just found news and pictures about the new Sharp Zaurus SL-C700 released in Japan. With a 640 x 480 pixel display, a small design and a great keyboard! Golem.de has a article with pictures, but it's in German."

Would the BBC spy on you? An anonymous reader writes "The previous discussion on RedSheriff on slashdot was extremely confusing as well as mostly off-topic. The fact is, the BBC is downloading spyware to your machine when you surf their site. Very disappointing and surprising. I suggest e-mailing them to let them know what you think. The problem and remedies are covered in Google groups: "

candot writes "Remember the recent slashdot story on NASA cancelling the moon hoax book? Wonder what other weblogs are saying about the subject? Launched today (in beta), the Waypath Project is an attempt to network the weblog community, connecting weblogs that share common themes, ideas, and topics. The Waypath Project's Related Weblog Navigation engine analyzes weblog entries to determine their core conceptual makeups, compares them with one another to find out how related they are, and presents you with its best guess as to what's related to your original input. This is done all automatically. Look for the disclaimers about varying quality you'd expect from an automated classification system, such as at Google News. You're encouraged to embed WP results in your weblog pages. Be the first on your block to try it out, today -- unless it gets slashdotted, then tomorrow. Resources are limited, so pace yourselves."

jutus writes "I work for a company which creates medical simulators using off-the-shelf components (including Linux and MacOS X). We're looking for battery powered LCD VGA monitors, but can't seem to find many appealing solutions. This just happens to be one of the rare times when Google has failed me. Does anyone know of a good starting point for such monitors and other industrial PC components?"

"Zow" asks: "I've been looking into a P2P web-caching scheme and noticed that Squid already has the underpinnings for this using multicast, which seems like a reasonable way to do P2P requests. Reasonable, except for the fact that all my web searches for multicast in general and the MBone in particular mostly turn up sites more than 3 years old. Even the MBone FAQ was pulled because it was so old. MBone.com now belongs to a domain squatter. So, what happened? Did everyone give up on Multicast for all practical purposes? Is everyone who was interested in multicast now working on Internet2? Is it only being used for LAN applications? What caused this loss of interest? Cheap bandwidth? Lack of applications? Lack of network support? Unforeseen technical difficulties? Is it still a viable technology for anything?"

"Zow" asks: "I've been looking into a P2P web-caching scheme and noticed that Squid already has the underpinnings for this using multicast, which seems like a reasonable way to do P2P requests. Reasonable, except for the fact that all my web searches for multicast in general and the MBone in particular mostly turn up sites more than 3 years old. Even the MBone FAQ was pulled because it was so old. MBone.com now belongs to a domain squatter. So, what happened? Did everyone give up on Multicast for all practical purposes? Is everyone who was interested in multicast now working on Internet2? Is it only being used for LAN applications? What caused this loss of interest? Cheap bandwidth? Lack of applications? Lack of network support? Unforeseen technical difficulties? Is it still a viable technology for anything?"

zonker writes "A real, working honest to god Bayesian spam filter. I've been waiting for something like this for a while (since I first read Paul Graham's research paper on this very topic a few weeks ago). Well here's POPFile, a small but extremely effective Perl script that runs on just about any system Perl does. After just a little training was I able to get very effective filtering out of it. From what I understand the new email client that comes with OS X Jaguar has a feature similar to this, but I don't know if it is true Bayesian. Hopefully this kind of feature will become more prevalant in client software as I see the Google results for it are growing."