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Heise have also dropped the ball on their April's Fools joke this year when they recycled a story that ran on Segfault about a month ago (ROT-26 encryption)...

Seems like it's a sad year for April's Fools... *sigh*

Then again, the day's still young over here, so there's still hope... >:)

(Oh, and of course said "article" is in German, so remember to use the fish... ;)

np: Jeswa - Poema Singled (Lily Of The Valley comp.)

As always under permanent deconstruction.

It is Firts of April in Germany

No, not yet. (99 minutes to go.)

This is actually real but rarely news: There was an article in c't 5/2000. The current issue (and the one which contains the April fool's jokes) is 07/2000.

No, according to this article from the German Heise Newsticker, the PSN has been disabled by default in the new Celeron.

------------------

Executive Software is not only run by a Scientologist; it is a member of WISE, the World Institute of Scientology Enterprises. WISE member corporations are operated for the benefit of the Church of Scientology, even though the CoS is supposedly a "nonprofit religious organization" and the WISE orgs are for-profit corporations.

here is the correct link to c't
http://www.heise.de/ct

Althought you could have guessed :-)
Check it out! It is the best German computer magazine.

Not that it really matters, but it is also german (with the same meaning). I believe that tesa is a german company (Beiersdorf AG tesa).
Earlier postings in german are available at heise's news archive:
"Tesa-ROM" wird kommerziell entwickelt
Klebriger Speicher: die tesa-ROM
Uni Mannheim zeigt "Tesa-ROM"

Not that it really matters, but it is also german (with the same meaning). I believe that tesa is a german company (Beiersdorf AG tesa).
Earlier postings in german are available at heise's news archive:
"Tesa-ROM" wird kommerziell entwickelt
Klebriger Speicher: die tesa-ROM
Uni Mannheim zeigt "Tesa-ROM"

Not that it really matters, but it is also german (with the same meaning). I believe that tesa is a german company (Beiersdorf AG tesa).
Earlier postings in german are available at heise's news archive:
"Tesa-ROM" wird kommerziell entwickelt
Klebriger Speicher: die tesa-ROM
Uni Mannheim zeigt "Tesa-ROM"

Not that it really matters, but it is also german (with the same meaning). I believe that tesa is a german company (Beiersdorf AG tesa).
Earlier postings in german are available at heise's news archive:
"Tesa-ROM" wird kommerziell entwickelt
Klebriger Speicher: die tesa-ROM
Uni Mannheim zeigt "Tesa-ROM"

The ruling Social Democratic Party is against it, the co-ruling Greens of course too. It's just a proposal from record industry representatives.

Link in German
Babelfish translation

It wouldn't work and they know that. In Germany everybody remembers the XS4all case that lead to the world-wide mirroring of the far-left texts they wanted to block.

First of all, others here on /. have been saying (as you and I both did) that many countries are involved in industrial espionage. This is true, and here's a 1998 report from the National Counterintelligence Center that lists some of the countries that perform industrial or economic espionage here in the U.S.

Second, under U.S. law, no member of the U.S. intelligence community is permitted to pass secrets on to private businesses. That is not allowed. If it is happening, it must (by law) be stopped, and the people doing it must (by law) be punished.

Now, let's take a moment to consider the sources. First, the person quoted in the article is former DCI James Woolsey. He left the CIA after two years on the job (1993-95), which were remarkable because they demonstrated huge clashes with Congress - and the worst spy scandal in recent history, the Aldrich Ames case, which he completely mishandled. I think it would not be too difficult to say he's not the best source for revelations. His time away from the job have probably led him to be imprecise with words, and he likely said things he didn't quite mean.

Second, who is the other source? The author of the article is Duncan Campbell, the man responsible - almost singlehandedly - for creating the furore over Echelon. He authored a few of the reports about Echelon, and seems to have something against the practice of collecting intelligence. He seems to enjoy fanning the flames of paranoia of the intelligence community, and sowing the seeds of discord between the U.S. and Europe. That is why, when you read the article we're discussing, he conflates and confuses economic and industrial espionage, two things which should be kept separate, and stresses Woolsey's remarks about Europe.

In fact, the only line in the entire article where Woolsey says anything controversial - that the U.S. commits industrial espionage - is brief and offhand, and it sounds more like a confused ramble than a straightforward, direct admission: "Would [...] somebody do a technological analysis of something from a friendly country, which had no importance, other than a commercial use, and then let it sit on the shelf because it couldn't be given to the American company? I think that would be a misuse of the [intelligence] community's resources. I don't think it would be done."

Finally, how is the intelligence community supposed to defend itself? They say they don't commit industrial espionage, but their critics will not accept that, nor any other level of assurance.

A. Keiper

More people are looking at the sendmail source for bugs than any other MTA.

More people are running it in production environments than any other MTA.

In fact, most sites that run something else are *ALSO* running sendmail.

sendmail's bugs tend to get found very quickly, publicized immediately, and fixed very quickly.

Compare to, say, Exchange or Domino. Especially with the recent renewed attention to the old revelations that Lotus cripples their encryption to make it easier for the NSA to break messages.

Incidentally, the german computer magazine c't has a long and very interesting article on precisely this matter in their current edition. Check out the online version here if you speak german (I dare not imagine what garbage babelfish would spit out ;)

There also is an interview with the author of the article (a lawyer) and a representative of the IFPI ("Internationale Föderation der Phonographischen Industrie") on the same page.

Here's a brief interpretation of the linked article (as usual, IANAL etc.): there is no unanimous position on that matter, but traditionnaly, it has been considered legal to create any kind of copy of copyrighted work for oneself. It even seems that you are allowed to give those copies to people you have a personal relationship with (no more than 7, according to the lawyer... don't know where this comes from).

Altough they refer to german law, it corresponds well whith the situation in Switzerland (where I live), as a law student explained to me.

Now, I have no idea what it is like in the US, but judging from the previous posts it seems that either you have stricter laws on copying, or the record companies are trying to convince people that it's forbidden to do ANY kind of copying.

I suspect that what we are seeing here is an attempt to seriously limit the concept of fair use. This is very disturbing...

Rabenwol f

Is it really "worth a try"? In it's short history (18 months), ICANN has shown at every turn that it prefers vacuous PR about "transparency," "bottom-up governance," and "consensus" to the messy facts of actually functioning according to those ideals. By signing up for At-large Membership -- a body that has no direct power whatsoever within ICANN's policy-defining structure -- you give ICANN grounds for claiming that it's listening to netizens. ICANN has managed to outmaneuver and circumvent hundreds of people who've been involved in net-governance processes for decades; what makes you think it won't be able to diddle thousands of ill-informed newbies?

For some history of ICANN's hijinks, take a look at the long essays by Gordon Cook, an expert on telecom issues: What's Behind ICANN (Sept 1999) and ICANN Internet Takeover" (June 1999). "ICANN Watch" is another good resource for learning about ICANN's dubious dealings, though it hasn't been updated much lately. For an explanation of the strange circumstances under which ICANN passed the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy before its board was elected, see this short "roving reporter" column and Keith Dawson's excellent chronology of the DNS debates. And here's a summary of some critical views of ICANN from a conference last fall.

There are lots more resources. If you plan to "get involved," you'd do well to know what you're getting involved with. But if you think your voice will be heard, you've got another thing coming. Don't believe me? Here's ICANN's organizational chart.

You can read more about it on WIRED.

France has also complained about PROMIS.

Bill Hamilton of Inslaw Corporation who was going after the government for stealing PROMIS gave this document to each member of the House Judicary Committee.

and we must not forget that Crypto AG supplied encryption machines to over 120 countries. Officials from Iran, Iraq, and the Vatican, to name a few, relied on Crypto's tech for top secret dispatches and the NSA had a deal with Crypto, which gave them a backdoor that made those encrypted messages easy to decipher and they were not even a US company.

Also what about Lotus Notes' NSA backdoor that is in international versions of the software.

Noel

RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

> Italics means BabelFish blew it so thoroughly I couldn't make sense of it.

Well huh. I looked said stuff up in a German dictionary (just Ask Jeeves where you can find a German dictionary) and here's what I got:

• Digitalausgang = Digital, so it's SPDIF Digital. I guess that means that if you have SPDIF outputs, this technology defeats them. Problem might be that the CD player uses SPDIF internally. My sound card (SB Live!) has SPDIF in and out. Thing is though: SPDIF streams can be flagged "copyrighted". I guess this is to make absolutely sure that you can't somehow defeat that flag.
• "c't": c't is Heise.de's "Magazine of Computer Technology" (a rough translation of the magazine's subtitle by someone who doesn't know German, but it sounds right). It's not a German word!
• The part of the sentence in question with "concomitantly" is:
  
  • und - and
  • damit - with it
  • auch - likewise
  • the
• Digitalsignal - guess...

What a difference a human makes!

Kenneth

Disclaimer: This is an educated choice from the possible translations of a German dictionary (Foreign Language Master). I know no German besides that which sounds a lot like English (according to one of my friends who is taking German, this is about 50%).

I realize that this message may be misplaced in its delivery to one or more of the people who have received it, but I am sending it to any and all addresses for BMG employees that appear to be potentially applicable (or who may know where it should be forwarded).

It has come to light that recently BMG has begun releasing copy-protected music CDs to the general public. Due to the fact that these CD's are not Red Book compliant, they do not play on many conventional CD players, nor do they play on computer CD drives. They do not bear a label or message anywhere on them that states this. Now, I don't know if you're aware or not, but many retail outlets do not accept returns of opened CD's (after all, someone might have copied it). This means that I, as a consumer of music, stand an indefinite chance of purchasing a useless plastic coaster anytime I purchase a CD from BMG Entertainment or its subsidiary companies. I also am a significant user of the MP3 music format. I have a household network with computers in many rooms of my home, including one hooked up to my stereo system. I have an MP3 player in my car, and also a portable player. By removing (or, as I'll illustrate in a momeny, simply complicating) my ability to convert a CD that I legally purchase into a *legal* copy for listening, you have removed a great portion of the reason for me to purchase that CD. In fact, you have not even removed my ability to perform that conversion; there are several ways that such copy-protection could be circumvented - and one of them is certain to work.

I am a long-time member of the BMG Music Service in the United States. As things stand, I have no guarantee that when I purchase a CD from you that it will in fact be a CD Audio (Red Book) compliant disc, nor that it will work in my high-end (but old) CD player. If this matter is not resolved acceptibly, this leaves me no choice other than to cancel my membership with BMG Music Service.

Here's a link to an article (in German) if you hadn't already heard about this:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker /data/cm-25.01.00-000/

For those that can't read German, here it is (poorly) translated through Babelfish:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/cgi-bin/trans late?doit=done&urltext=http://www.heise.de/newstic ker/data/cm-25.01.00-000/&lp=de_en

it's hard to use this list to compare linux vs. NT, because lots of the bugs listed for the operating systems are in add-ons and third-party products.

the nearest statistical comparison of openrating-system-security is on attritions web-defacement-counter. in the overall OS-count from august 1999 to present Win-NT is leading clearly with 55%, followed by linux with 19% and solaris with 13%. source: http://www.attrition.org/mirror/att rition/os.html

these total number of defacements should also take into account, that there are more webservers running on linux than on NT, as can be seen here.

open source brings a security-problem which is not as big in closed source: it's far easier to write trojans. but this risk is small compared to backdoors intentionally implemented by clodes-source software manufactures. a good example is the international version of lotus notes where the NSA knows 24bit of the 64bit-key.

See: Linux for Nintendo 64.

It's sufficiently near to technically feasible as to make it imaginable, but you'd really need to add a few MB of RAM and an NIC in order for this to be feasible for getting any actual work done. And it's a sufficiently tightly proprietary design as to make that unrealistic.

Some products are exported with longer than 40 bit keys but they must be granted an export license which means there is key escrow or a back door. The back door may "only" decrease the effective key length to 40 bits for the NSA.

In the case of the export version of Lotus Notes, encrypted messages expose 24 of the 64 bit key to the NSA enabling easier brute force attacks. You may agree or disagree with this, but it seems wrong to sell your customers a 64 bit encryption subsystem and not tell them about the back door. Of course the existence of a back door for one party generally means that any party has an easier time breaking the encryption.
--

As I was on my way to look for happenings of this kind I stepped over heise's newsticker. They reported that two japanese nuclear powers plant seemed to have some Y2K-problems. Although they were (according to japanese officials) not really threatening it worries me to see people pretending to be Y2K-ready and then really having some major problems!

All fans of babelfish will be able to read this. They report some problems with nuclear power plants and some problem with earthquake detecting systems.

Cye has been reviewed by the german c't Magazine (http://www.heise.de/ct/), and well, it doesn't look like anything decent. It needs to dock very often, and the time needed to load its batteries is higher than the time it can move around. Besides, the software is only for windows and the mapping is not the best, and the robot has problems with any surface except carpets... Not quite what you want, I guess.

Check out the excellent c't benchmark showdown. It shows that in one configuration (two fast ethernet cards in the same machine, serving static pages) NT can truly outperform Linux, but that in all the realistic configurations tested Linux beats NT, usually by a wide margin.

Naturally something has to be done about that one case where NT sneaks ahead, right?

A project to remove commercials from Video-recordings already exists. It has been a master thesis at the Fachhochschule Muenster in Germany. In issue 13/99 of the German Computermagazine c't they had an article about it.

The article came complete with instructions on how to build a device to control the VCR over infrared signals.

The software works by determining the logo that TV stations have to put on the screen. It is being switched off during the commercials, so you have a kind of indicator.

You can get the GPL'd sourcecode for Windows 95 and Linux from their webpage: http://www.ktet.Fh-Muenster.DE/ina/

Unfortunately, you have to know German.

I just found http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/gs-20.12.99-00 1/> saying that AMD demonstrated two version of their CPU running 900 MHz, one who aluminium and one with copper interconnections. Well, the article is in german, so ask some babelfish to translate!

This article (in german) tells us that "the head of technical commitee 41, Michael Wheatley (IBM), possibly wants to continue with the standardization of Java even without Sun's support.

So the sudden moves (no licence fees, linux support) may in fact be defensive maneuvres...

So the sudden moves (no licence fees, linux support) may in fact be defensive maneuvres...

So the sudden moves (no licence fees, linux support) may in fact be defensive maneuvres...

McCarthy strikes back, but this time from a different angle, hehe.

You can find the article ("Windows 2000 threatened by excommunication") at http://www.heise.de/ct/english/99/25/058/ . The German version of the complete article is at http://www.heise.de/ct/99/25/058".

You can find the article ("Windows 2000 threatened by excommunication") at http://www.heise.de/ct/english/99/25/058/ . The German version of the complete article is at http://www.heise.de/ct/99/25/058".

is here. That link has been obviously added later at the bottom of the original German article.

The article contains some more details:

• Diskkeeper has of course access to the full harddisk.
• c't could find no obvious hints that the software is spying.
• Of course you can only be sure when you have the source.
• Microsoft, it seems, has the code.
• Microsoft's Recommendation (to uninstall Diskkeeper) is not working. The files will be restored by the `System File Protection' (SFP).

The article contains some more details:

• Diskkeeper has of course access to the full harddisk.
• c't could find no obvious hints that the software is spying.
• Of course you can only be sure when you have the source.
• Microsoft, it seems, has the code.
• Microsoft's Recommendation (to uninstall Diskkeeper) is not working. The files will be restored by the `System File Protection' (SFP).

For those who may want an accurate translation of the article, view this article from the authors of the article: Translation Link.

also have a look at this article by c't (german). use babelfish to translate it. it has some interesting thoughts why microsoft changed the name.

--
www.game-over.ch - Jesus rules!

• The german goverment not only officially supports crypto
  it canceled almost all export regulations!
  German Cryptosoftware freely exportable (in german)
• The day the american goverment is changing its crypto policy
  is the day more german than american crypto products are sold in the us.

Here is the link to the C't benchmark I mentioned. Even though I don't believe in benchmarks I still think they did a relatively good job. I think it pretty much defuses your remark about performance.
Regarding your remark about overhead: Duh? Besides, I've worked with SQL-Server/ASP. It crashed about every time it had a chance to.

Janet Reno already wrote to the german government. You can find the letter on the Heise/Telepolis website. They have a commentary article as well as the original letter. Telepolis' writer Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti covers the whole Echelon and ENFOPOL (english URL) thingy in a special Telepolis section. If you do not read German, this woman is a single, very good reason to do so.
© Copyright 1999 Kristian Köhntopp

Janet Reno already wrote to the german government. You can find the letter on the Heise/Telepolis website. They have a commentary article as well as the original letter. Telepolis' writer Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti covers the whole Echelon and ENFOPOL (english URL) thingy in a special Telepolis section. If you do not read German, this woman is a single, very good reason to do so.
© Copyright 1999 Kristian Köhntopp

Janet Reno already wrote to the german government. You can find the letter on the Heise/Telepolis website. They have a commentary article as well as the original letter. Telepolis' writer Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti covers the whole Echelon and ENFOPOL (english URL) thingy in a special Telepolis section. If you do not read German, this woman is a single, very good reason to do so.
© Copyright 1999 Kristian Köhntopp

Janet Reno already wrote to the german government. You can find the letter on the Heise/Telepolis website. They have a commentary article as well as the original letter. Telepolis' writer Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti covers the whole Echelon and ENFOPOL (english URL) thingy in a special Telepolis section. If you do not read German, this woman is a single, very good reason to do so.
© Copyright 1999 Kristian Köhntopp

Janet Reno already wrote to the german government. You can find the letter on the Heise/Telepolis website. They have a commentary article as well as the original letter. Telepolis' writer Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti covers the whole Echelon and ENFOPOL (english URL) thingy in a special Telepolis section. If you do not read German, this woman is a single, very good reason to do so.
© Copyright 1999 Kristian Köhntopp

This summer there has been the conference Wizards of OS in Berlin. One day before that conference there has been an expert hearing of the German Minstry of Commerce (BMWi) about Open Source. The meeting has been initiated by Ulrich Sandl (BMWi), who was unable to attend in person due to an accident.

They managed to get into contact with german developers of the KDE Team, the Apache Team, the Linux Kernel, the Mutt mailer, the GPG and OpenPGP projects and other key Open Source projects. Also attending were CEOs or key people from companies which were actually earning money with Open Source based business models. After that meeting, there has been a fruitful discussion between multiple supporters of the Open Source Scene in Germany and the BMWi.

The BMWi was particularly interested into ideas on how to create a supporting infrastructure for Open Source development without destroying the current structures and without creating a culture shock or the impression of a governmental takeover of Open Source development. They also learned first time about the dangers of Software Patents and were quite shocked to learn that Software Patents were seen as an obstacle, and not as a good thing by the Open Source devlopment scene.

The donation to the GPG project is the first in a number of actions in a governmental plan which are the direct or indirect result of this meeting. Exspect further investment and support for Open Source projects from the German Government as well as the donation of ressources and services where needed.
© Copyright 1999 Kristian Köhntopp

I'd be curious to see exactly what government agency or arm is giving this money to the GPG project.

There is a link from the newsticker page to another with the complete article here

The last paragraph is interesting:

actually, that article is still up, someone else posted the link: http://www.heise.de/ct/english/99/13/18 6-1/.