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The worm had "PGP" in its name and everyone was thinking their data was lost forever.

However, the stupid worm author only used some very lame encryption that was broken shortly after.

The decryption routine is here.

According to heise.de:

-new PSP firmware 2.0 on July 27th

-including a webbrowser, HTML 4.01 compatible, flash not yet supported, for surfing over WLAN

-support of WPA security

-photo browser now supports tiff, gif, png & bmp in addition to jpg

-support of AAC and WAV in addition to MP3

-videos from memory stick now also in H.264 encoded format in addition to MPEG4 (previously only from UMD)

-"Personal TV": streaming of videos, with ability to save them on the memory stick, support of 4:3 screen format

-of course, "better" security against hacks - we'll see how long this lasts ;)

Thumpmobile Zapper looks as if it'd be the perfect solution for you:

http://www.heise.de/ct/Redaktion/cm/Thumpmobile_Za pper.html

(Babelfished translation: http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr?lp=de_ en&url=http%3A//www.heise.de/ct/Redaktion/cm/Thump mobile_Zapper.html , although I don't know if the original or the translation is more difficult to grok. ;)

English news section of heise exists. Not carrying all articles, but here: http://www.heise.de/english/ anyway.

a site that is more up to date and read daily by myself (but not in English)

http://www.heise.de/

it even has a discussion system, not the same format as slashdot, but it exists nonetheless.

Then there are things that are less known...the NSA used to "grep" for certain 800 numbers from machines it had "sniffing" the Internet, that were in very good locations to do such a thing. Once I myself was reading a web site in Australia about CIA involvement in a sort-of coup d'etat they had there (the prime minister, who wanted to get Australia out of the Vietnam war, and who was beginning to establish relations with "Red" China was thrown out by an antiquated dominion law by a man who had CIA conenctions). Shortly after doing so I received an odd SNMP query to my IP address requesting information about my machine. If I didn't have my machine especially set up to log everything coming in, I never would have seen it (my machine did not respond witht he asked for information). The requesting machine was some US army information intelligence outfit in Quantico, Virginia, I suppose it was the Army equivalent of the Air Force OSI or something. One odd aspect was I was doing this from the US, so the Army would have been spying on me, as a US citizen, which it shouldn't be doing, although there are loopholes out of this I guess. It's unfortunate I have to go to other countries web sites to read about stuff like this, but that's how it is, the USSR had it's samizdat as well, and its KGB trying to track down who was distributing and reading it.

The 2000 tickets for the game music symphony concert of the FILMharmonic Orchestra of Prague at the Games Convention in Leipzig were sold out in under two hours, according to heise.de.

If you like AllofMp3, you'll probably be interested in the latest attempt by the music industry to sue people who link to it.

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/61571

Come to think of it, they are probably going to sue you since you linked to it as well.

The tech has been used by the competition for a long time. According to heise, this move by HP is a reaction to significant losses of market share to Canon during the last months.

Experten sehen als eine Ursache dafür die bisherige Strategie HPs, die Druckköpfe in die Tintentanks zu integrieren und damit zu Wegwerfprodukten zu deklassieren.
"Experts see the reason in HP's previous strategy to integrate the ink jets into the ink tanks, thereby classifying the jets as throw-away products."

In höchster Qualität benötigt der PhotoSmart für ein 10×15-Foto 80 Sekunden. Das ist verglichen mit bisherigen HP-Modellen nur noch etwa ein Viertel [..], im Vergleich mit einem entsprechenden Canon-Drucker aber immer noch um zehn Sekunden hinterher.
"At maximum quality, the PhotoSmart takes 80 seconds for a 10×15 photo. That's a quarter compared to previous HP models [..], but ten seconds slower than corresponding models by Canon"

Look how the german IT people go nuts over this: already over 2500 comments in under 4 hours in the heise.de forums!

(And here's the detailed article (in German).)

Look how the german IT people go nuts over this: already over 2500 comments in under 4 hours in the heise.de forums!

(And here's the detailed article (in German).)

According to this article (in German), 648 of 680 MEPs voted for striking it down, albeight for different reasons:

Some of them because they have always been against the European Commission's draft and prefered the proposal the EP made some time ago.

Others voted for striking it down although they were in favour of the EC's version, but the former group was gaining momentum, so they prefered no directive to a - for them - bad directive.

This site lists the positions of the German MEPs, maybe there is such a site for your country, too.

Parent post is a flamebait and I wonder what moderators are smoking today.
Debian is much more than a distribution. And there is unfortunately nothing better than Debian (as in the distro) to move on to. There is a reason why many distributions are build on Debian.
Please point me to a distro that can manage version upgrades even half as gracefully as Debian.
There was a discussion about Ubuntu on Slashdot and it was argued that if Ubuntu continues to be diverge further from sid and stay incompatible it will eventually dissolve, because the team will never be able to support the huge package base.

I am a desktop Linux user that started out with Debian 2.1 Slink and I also have the feeling that Debian has had some major issues lately.

About the security issue:
Heise security published it first 10 days ago:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/61076

As a result of this a discussion on the Debian security mailing list ensued:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2005/06/ms g00142.html

Heise Online then reported on that as a result of that discussion:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/61125

For those that can't read German the article says that of the five members that should make up the security team four are not active at the moment if they ever were. The only remain one is Martin Schulze aka Joey. He has been pretty busy with the organisation of the Linuxtag. So he was cut off from the action. Debian people are working on the problem.

Everyone that is not satiesfied with the current state of affairs should get their hand dirty helping instead of complaining. After all Debian forms the bases of "plenty of well-managed, technically sweet linux distributions out there".

Like Knoppis, Ubuntu or Xandros. Full list here:
http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros

Parent post is a flamebait and I wonder what moderators are smoking today.
Debian is much more than a distribution. And there is unfortunately nothing better than Debian (as in the distro) to move on to. There is a reason why many distributions are build on Debian.
Please point me to a distro that can manage version upgrades even half as gracefully as Debian.
There was a discussion about Ubuntu on Slashdot and it was argued that if Ubuntu continues to be diverge further from sid and stay incompatible it will eventually dissolve, because the team will never be able to support the huge package base.

I am a desktop Linux user that started out with Debian 2.1 Slink and I also have the feeling that Debian has had some major issues lately.

About the security issue:
Heise security published it first 10 days ago:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/61076

As a result of this a discussion on the Debian security mailing list ensued:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2005/06/ms g00142.html

Heise Online then reported on that as a result of that discussion:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/61125

For those that can't read German the article says that of the five members that should make up the security team four are not active at the moment if they ever were. The only remain one is Martin Schulze aka Joey. He has been pretty busy with the organisation of the Linuxtag. So he was cut off from the action. Debian people are working on the problem.

Everyone that is not satiesfied with the current state of affairs should get their hand dirty helping instead of complaining. After all Debian forms the bases of "plenty of well-managed, technically sweet linux distributions out there".

Like Knoppis, Ubuntu or Xandros. Full list here:
http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros

The only magazine after Byte, that I felt was in the same league of broad IT coverage, is the german Heise C't magazine. http://www.heise.de/

And only because of the T-Name. Deutsche Telekom "T-Com" (german previously state-owned telecom company) will most likely sue them.

Hopefully they don't use magenta in their official announcement. :-)

And only because of the T-Name. Deutsche Telekom "T-Com" (german previously state-owned telecom company) will most likely sue them.

Hopefully they don't use magenta in their official announcement. :-)

And only because of the T-Name. Deutsche Telekom "T-Com" (german previously state-owned telecom company) will most likely sue them.

Hopefully they don't use magenta in their official announcement. :-)

druckerchannel.de, part 1
druckerchannel.de, part 2

heise.de (those are meant primarily for scanner tests, but they also come in handy for printer comparisons)
heise.de, older version (unfortunately, they offer only a 300 dpi version, not the original)

And while you're at heise.de, check out those cool backgrounds, each available in several resolutions. OK for individual use, no redistribution allowed.

druckerchannel.de, part 1
druckerchannel.de, part 2

heise.de (those are meant primarily for scanner tests, but they also come in handy for printer comparisons)
heise.de, older version (unfortunately, they offer only a 300 dpi version, not the original)

And while you're at heise.de, check out those cool backgrounds, each available in several resolutions. OK for individual use, no redistribution allowed.

druckerchannel.de, part 1
druckerchannel.de, part 2

heise.de (those are meant primarily for scanner tests, but they also come in handy for printer comparisons)
heise.de, older version (unfortunately, they offer only a 300 dpi version, not the original)

And while you're at heise.de, check out those cool backgrounds, each available in several resolutions. OK for individual use, no redistribution allowed.

Please name one serious, high-profile hacking case (to include authoring viriii & worms) in which the perpetrator was caught and didn't turn out to be a teenager or a still adolescent 20 something.

Nice, placing the burden of proof on the other party makes the argument much easier, doesn't it?

Anyway, consider "dialers", programs that reconfigure your Windows internet setting to dial in via the equivalent of a very expensive 1-900 number. These programs have a "tendency" to install through some security holes in Internet Explorer against the will of the PC's owner. They caused enough financial damage to warrant a federal regulation. Today a legal "dialer" has to explicitly ask for permission to install itself, thereby presenting the incurred cost. Guess what, there is JavaScript in circulation which clicks OK in this dialog without the user even noticing.

None of this crap has been written by teenage hackers, this is paid for by shady corporations, and they are not caught, because chains of subcontractors have to be tracked through countries you have never heard of.

Second example: in Feb 2004 german computer magazine c't reported a connection between virus authors and spam senders. Basically spammers paid for the ip-adresses of "owned" PCs and used them as spam drones. (German article)

Don't tell me all this happens for fun. It happens for profit.

Strange, the usually well informed German IT news site www.heise.de has very different numbers.

They talk about 5 years in jail and a 250.000$ fine.
Sounds more reasonable (but too little for the Biggest Hacker, eh?)

Strange, the usually well informed German IT news site www.heise.de has very different numbers.

They talk about 5 years in jail and a 250.000$ fine.
Sounds more reasonable (but too little for the Biggest Hacker, eh?)

>the popular consensus WAS that PPC's WERE better than anything in the x86 camp. That is, during the G4 era.
And, as usual, popular concensus turns out to be wrong.
The x86 still dominates any other processor available today in raw speed, though not on throughput. If you want to program in assembly, it's easier for a beginner to pickup risc because of its regularity, but I highly doubt most that the people complianing about the ISA actually used it and were just complaining that it seemed to them to be unelegant, and today it's pretty much a non-issue, as evidenced by the fact that special instructions like SSE2 are automatically used by compilers, making it unnecessary and actually more harmful sometimes to code assembly due to the way modern CPUs schedule instructions.

>it pushed more numbers with far less power
I'll give you that it required less power per flop, but check the results about to see how the mythical power of the g4 was all apple hype.

>AltiVec showed a ton of promise
According to wiki, Altivec has been around since the late-1990s, while SSE2, comparable in power to it, debuted in 2001. Any chance that Altivec would improve performance would've happened, and IBM and Motorola even had a falling out over whether to include it, according to the register.

The PPC has not been comparable in performance to anything offered by x86 for years. It added no competition to the market. I bid it good riddence so Apple might actually do some innovation that is actually about usability, instead of blatent lies about performance.

As for petty whining about Microsoft having a monopoly - guess what, Windows and x86 have succeeded where Apple failed because they understood what the market, and engineered it to be good enough, as opposed to being control freaks about the purity of their products.

In a brillant marketing sting, Steve Jobs of Apple, the Debian Developement Team and 3DRealms united and tried to get the attention of the world today by confirming the long rumored news of the release of their respective flagship products, the Intel-microprocessor based "Macintosh Computer", the linux operating sytem "Debian 3.1" and the so called first person shooter game "Duke Nukem Forever" within hours and by doing so slashdotting the website "Slashdot.Org" - the only thing of the whole internet thought to be unslashdottable.

Free Software is too content with simply reverse-engineering or mimicking the cramped sensoriums of proprietary software. Copying Microsoft Word feature by feature and opening up the source code is not freedom. Mimesis is misery.

Whilst there is at least the beginnings of a move to collaborate with designers and other users to produce replica DTP packages ... there is a need to go further. Where it seems open or free approaches are most fruitful at present is in small software, making specific interventions to precise technical, economic and social problematics. ... Geek drives to innovation must, as awkwardly and confusingly as it will happen, be coupled with the drive to make language, to cut the word up, open, and into process.

That said, I don't think McVoy is necessarily coming from the right place, and I am not convinced that Free Software is inherently imitative. Certainly RMS started with a project to create free alternatives to useful software, and such an objective seems useful in many fields. And it has also been proven time and time again that open source can match and exceed the quality of proprietary products... I tend to agree with RMS that until we can do our daily work using free tools, innovation (at least radical innovation) maybe needs to take a back seat - not that it is in any way excluded!

Take Subversion for example. It's easy to see it as a "cvs clone" - although it adds substantial value. Sometimes a free work-alike is a very valuable thing in itself (probably the best example of this is Linux).

Everything I've heard from McVoy makes him sound like an avaricious, self-interested twit, and this latest serving of hyperbole seems very well timed to boost interest in his product right at the moment when his destructive antics are leading a lot of smart people might have second thoughts about a product with such capricious licensing.

According to this article, Netscape was not aware of any security problems and had to release the update when German computer magazine c't pointed them to the "browser security check" webpage demonstrating the vulnerability. It is also interesting to know that Netscape 8.0 is based on Firefox 1.0.3 and was released when 1.0.4 was already available.

According to this article, Netscape was not aware of any security problems and had to release the update when German computer magazine c't pointed them to the "browser security check" webpage demonstrating the vulnerability. It is also interesting to know that Netscape 8.0 is based on Firefox 1.0.3 and was released when 1.0.4 was already available.

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/20/20165/1.html

and

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/59819

payment should be made with e-gold account. so paypal was a good guess after all

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/20/20165/1.html

and

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/59819

payment should be made with e-gold account. so paypal was a good guess after all

If this IP block is known to be safe from identification,

Which bakka said that? The Law is that ISPs are not allowed to store data collected for billing longer than needed for billing (the Principle of Data Avoidance), and you don't need to store IP adresses for flat rates for it. T-Com says otherwise and are now in court because of that. Heise

That doesn't change the fact that ISPs will need the IP for billing for non-flat rates until so many days after the bill that there can't be any complaints against it anymore. It also doesn't change the fact that EU law will probably require to store IP adresses for a loooong period of time soon anyway. It also doesn't change the fact that ISPs will store the IP for a while to go after spammers etc.

That's pretty far from "safe from identification".

There was a special offer for readers of the german magazine Ct which gave you an immediate Opera 7.54 license and a 8(11$) upgrade offer for Opera 8 (that is, a full all-OS client license!).

11 $ almost like for free when it comes to software.

I think Opera offers the best and fastest browsing experience (look here)

Speed, UI and Mail Client for me. Moreover its a hell lot more stable (for me). I had to spend only 8 (10$) for my Opera 8 all-OS license (thanks to Ct). I need very little value for that :-) (although I got plenty)

I'm the first, although it was in the wrong discussion :)

You can find more infomrations on pro-linux and heise (both german).

A short summary of the German texts: The notebooks will be shipped with FreeDOS pre-installed and a Ubuntu installation CD. Only the kernel on the Ubuntu CD will be modified: it contains HP specific patches to supports all features of the notebook, including full ACPI support, accelerated 3D graphics and two monitors. The rest of the distribution remains unmodified, you can update from the usual Ubuntu sources.

Heise reports a funny detail:

"In the past SCO complained they could not read the data IBM sent. The data was tar.gz-files."

This is supposed to be some kind of business-Hoax thought up by a bunch of hedge-fonds-managers to fool investors, as heise.de pointed out already yesterday.

http://www.heise.de/ct/motive/05/05/

Inflated clicks are not the only problem PPC concepts have lately. It's a pretty challenging problem to prevent click-fraud; open-proxies/botnets and so on make this even harder.

A bunch of interesting links:

• Adwords DOS flaw
• A c't magazine testing how well Google found their own fraudulent clicks
• Some guy claiming that Overture is negligent with their click-fraud protection
• Some other link-collection about the topic

First mention of Longhorn: (2001-07-26) The planned successor to the upcomming XP (codenamed "Blackcomb", centered around .NET) won't come out in 2002/03, instead something called Longhorn will come in that timeframe.

First mention of Tiger OR 10.4: (2004-06-25) Steve Jobs will present a preview of MacOS X 10.4 alias "Tiger" at the WWDC next Monday. Before, Apple was tight-lipped about the new version.

The Register articles: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/07/27/microsoft_ reshuffles_windows_roadmap_full/ / http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/21/apple_osx_ schedule/

First mention of Longhorn: (2001-07-26) The planned successor to the upcomming XP (codenamed "Blackcomb", centered around .NET) won't come out in 2002/03, instead something called Longhorn will come in that timeframe.

First mention of Tiger OR 10.4: (2004-06-25) Steve Jobs will present a preview of MacOS X 10.4 alias "Tiger" at the WWDC next Monday. Before, Apple was tight-lipped about the new version.

The Register articles: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/07/27/microsoft_ reshuffles_windows_roadmap_full/ / http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/21/apple_osx_ schedule/

The funny thing is: Kingston, while being relatively expensive, can be quite crappy at times. I prefer to buy brands that score well in c't's lab tests. Usually, that is Infineon or Samsung.

But also true for the opposition. If you read, for instance, the forum at http://www.heise.de/ (german IT publisher) you will find plenty of Linux extremists but even more Windows fanboys.

The resulting flamewars range from halfway funny to utterly stupid. Frequently, the standard of the discussion is even lower than on Slashdot, and the Windows fans are just as responsible for the mud-slinging as the Linux crowd.

apple quotes their g5s at 55W.

however AMD is now producing low power opterons which match this.

Wrong. You need to know the password to reset it.
RTFA.

http://www.heise.de/ct/english/05/08/172/

Heise has just released a dire warning (and temporary treatment) from c't regarding ATA hard disk security passwords: There may be a gaping security hole in millions of computers that allows malware to lock the hard drives from their legitimate users. Some will remember what this means from extortionate trojan horses as early as 1989 (search for "Panama" - judicial outcome in 1995). Now factor in how some similar disaster, "supported" by firmware, could spread over the Internet rather than by postal mail today...

Also, keep in mind that there is an 80K portion of memory that memtest stays resident in, and cannot be tested

From the fun-things-to-do-with-all-that-video-ram-nowadays- department:
A couple of years ago, someone at the German c't magazine wrote a little more-or-less-stable memory test program
that used the memory of the graphics card to run from.

I think it is this tool and needs to be unpacked to a bootable floppy disc.

Back a few years, IBM sold a laptop where you could detach the back cover of the lid, exposing the screen so that it could be placed on an overhead projector. I worked with Ted Selker who invented it, so I had a homemade prototype version. When I presented at conferences and everyone else struggled with F7 and video formats, I just whipped the back off my Thinkpad and put it on top of the overhead projector. I don't think anyone listened to my talk because they were all craning their necks to see what I had done with the display. All of the questions afterward were about where to buy such a nifty device rather than anything about my talk!

The removable back was also useful for working outdoors. You could put a white reflective surface behind the screen and backlight with sunlight, making it usable no matter how bright it was.

It's a pre-release version that's not yet intended for the public, though it's not marked as beta or pre-release. According to http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/57616 (german) it's been put online for a customer in the netherlands. The final version can be expected around mid 2005. The acrobat files mentioned on heise.de and this /. article are the same, so i guess the real final will still take some time.