Slashdot Mirror

hornerj asks: "I've noticed quite a few pundits commenting on how the Open Source movement goes against the standard business model. I've come to believe that it not only goes against it, it rewrites it. Could it be possible that, with the shift from marketing software to marketing services, the business suits are being forced out of the technology pipeline? If IT businesses shift to providing services, will the suits, which historically make software releases buggy, bloated, and premature, be taken out of the decision process? Without a suit forcing an unready software release, it only makes sense that software will get better and better."

Sandeater writes: "BBC news is reporting that an new telescope has just been completed to search out black holes from the Australian outback. The astronomers using the telescope will be looking for huge black holes at the centres of galaxies, as well as seeing how they evolve. The Cangaroo II will be offically opened tomorrow. The BBC link can be found here."

aoechsli asks: "I am in the process of setting up a computer learning center for K - 12 age students. The system will be based on a network of about 10 - 15 X-terminals all running off of a server (duh). I will be running Red Hat with KDE2 (when it comes out). It will be used for office aps (Koffice) and Web browsing (Konquerer). What I need help with is trying to find an inexpensive set-up for the X-terminals. I have abandoned the donated hardware route as the set-up of each for individual machine proves to be overwhelming with my limited time constraints. I may be able to secure some funding, and if that comes through, I would like to use a standardized set-up with all of the terminals. I am looking for a small footprint, low power set-up. My proposed solution would be to make an X-terminal with a single board computer and a flat panel display (the 10" LCD seems adequate after seeing the I-Opener.) What flat panel displays are supported? I thought about using flash memory for the boot image, but thought that a smaller HD would be more appropriate. Does anyone have any suggestions on what would be optimal and inexpensive? I am looking to spend no more than $350 on each unit."

Phantom writes: "The Village Voice has great story (here) about DeCSS, 2600.com, and the legal battle about to ensue. Looks like the MPAA may be in some trouble. " Well written piece - things have been quiet here for a while, but I think both sides have been lining up necessary support. The lawyer, Martin Garbus, is going to be defending Eric Corley aka Emmanuel Goldstein, and is a /very sharp/ cookie.

parad1gm asks: "So I was an idiot and when offered my choice of a free Cisco 605 internal DSL modem or a $50 external 675 router, I opted for free. Now I cry nightly as I stop to swap out my Linux drive with my Windows 98 drive. If anyone has any word on drivers for the 605 drop me a line."

dan of the north was the first to write in with the Supreme Court Ruling outcome that ruled that ISPs (in this case, Prodigy), are not liable for the content of e-mail messages sent through them. The details of the circumstance are availible in the above link. Yes, this was a big "duh", but it's good to see this stand.

Cactvs142 asks: "Have to make a choice for writing my science report in chemistry. I want to use XML and end up with PDF, so Word (etc.) and LaTex fail. It comes down to this choice: DocBook or TEI. DocBook is used by O'Reilly, but TEI already supports MathML. Which one is the better choice?"

smeng58 writes: "If haven't got your Athlon yet, you may have to wait. This article found on CNNfn states AMD has sold out their production of the Athlon for the second quarter. Looks like AMD has capacity problems, or a lot of people are choosing AMD over Intel."

OscarMeier writes "ArsTechnica has posted an article about the Espresso PC. 0.5kg light, it is a fully featured i810e Celeron or PIII system including everything and the kitchen sink (VGA out, NTSC out, USB, PS/2, 12 GB Hard Drive, up to 256 MB RAM, docking 24X CD w/ floppy). " must... resist... temptation... if only it had a battery.Check out the manufacturer's site for more information.

stitzman writes: "Senator Jon Kyl, R-AZ and Senator Charles Schumer, D-NY have co-sponsored a bill that would make it possible to investigate cyber-crime without all those pesky search warrants. Here's the San Francisco Chronicle story." Frightening quote: "law enforcers would no longer need to obtain a search warrant in every jurisdiction through which a cyber-attack traveled." And in a vaguely related story, jkujawa passes along this ComputerUser article in which the National Infrastructure Protection Center frets about (but offers no answers to) the ease of launching anonymous electronic attacks.

Moleman was one of the number of people who wrote in about the apparent move by the Japanese Government to restrict export of the Playstation 2. The reason? It has been apparently deemed to be a potential weapons development platform, in particular for missle guidance systems. Geez, get a couple and I can form my own rogue nation. The UK Telegraph has a more complete story - it's apparently only if you want to take two or more out of the country that they require permission - so you could fly and take one if you wanted without a problem.

|GopheR| writes "Mr. George changed his mind and is planning to release episode 1 on DVD before 2005? If The digital bits rumormill is right, then he probably did change his mind. " Note that they don't really have a date set, and Lucas hasn't said he *won't* release DVDs... just that it'll be years before they do. To bad. I own two copies of the original trilogy on VHS (Original and Special edition) but I've sworn off video. I woulda bought the DVD the day it came out, but I won't spend a penny on VHS.

Lets start this off with some homework: we were nominated for a 2000 Webby in Community. Please go vote for us (requires annoying login, but please do it anyway! I want a crappy little trophy!) Now with the 'biz outta the way, brainsik pointed us to the Brainshaker: a headmounted subwoofer that looks like it would make Quake a bit to real. Plastik noted a web filter guaranteed to offend the conservative and humorless. But it makes reading Slashdot damn entertaining. And if you're interesting in violating most religions, vkulkarn found an "Escort" who apparently reads Slashdot (will she go out with CowboyNeal?) Speaking of religion, Zippy noted that I am apparently a prophet in the Church of The Enlightenment , along with Jay Stile of Stileproject . Illiad, from Userfriendly.org is a bard. webword sent us CalculusGirls.com which combines 2 of the many things I don't understand. Andy Lester noted that Brunching Shuttlecocks has a book on "Fuzzy Logic Functions", in the style of O'Reilly. yek401 noted that his english professor builds barbie doll cyborgs: god bless tenure ;) Trenchcoat Steve warned us about Moon Land Registry which claims to be selling land on the moon for $10/acre: you even get a deed and mineral rights... and it might be legal! Gravey noted that their are two new Reboot movies going into production. For you conspiracy theorists, backtick noted that everyone's favorite software monopoly might be getting into the furniture biz along with Lazyboy. SgtPepper pointed us to RFC 2795 which "describes a protocol suite which supports an infinite number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters" ucsimon noted that LegoLand in California just gota liquor license. Mind you after a few shots of vodka, finding a 2x2 blue block takes a lot longer. Let's wrap up with jyuter's note that Comedy Central has vid clips of the south park kids doing Python's parrot sketch in Quicktime or Real.

This is a two-fold question. Someone asked me a while ago if combination MP3/CD Players existed. I haven't heard of any, but that doesn't mean that they aren't out there. Now there are portable CD players and portable MP3 players, but has someone out there actually put the two together in a nice affordable unit? Who makes it? Where can I find them? How much do they cost? Here's a slightly related question from JDALaRose: "I'm interested in the opinions of fellow Slashdotters as regards which of the portable MP3 players are the best in terms of not being SDMI compliant, or at least not restrictively so. Thoughts?"

Maktoo writes: "According to MacCentral, the June 2000 issue of MacTech magazine will include a CD containing a 'SuSE for PowerMac' Linux distribution. The full distribution will be available from SuSE at that time as well. It's nice to see SuSE coming to the PPC market!" It'd also be nice to see some less expensive PPC systems.

GnutellaFanBoy writes "If you said Gnutella is dead gnutella.nerdherd.net would like to tell you otherwise. Currently a version .56 is available for download. If your wondering who is still developing gnutella, read this excerpt from their FAQ: In the interest of protecting those involved, it can only be said that these versions are being produced by someone with access to the source code. No, of course they're not official in the gnullsoft sense, but let's just say that they're legitimate. I would certainly expect more versions, since we've already seen several materialize. Also of intrest is the protocol specs are out, and people are working on *nix ports. "

Mr_Meowman pointed us to linkage with pictures of Sony PDAs. Of course I'm not skilled enough to read the text, but it appears to be a pilot, in color, with the camera and memory stick from the VAIO picture books.

eoPh asks: "I recently aquired myself an Avatar Shark, a beautiful little portable 250meg removable disk drive. I only have one slight little problem. The company that makes these suckers has gone bankrupt and I need some linux drivers or even some good information so I can begin coding my own. Maybe an ex-employee of Avatar reads /. and is willing to help, because I don't think that I'm the only person to have run into this problem. " This is the classic case as to why I feel companies should open their specs. When I buy a device, I want to know what I'm getting and how it works. I don't want to become utterly dependent on the company that makes it, because it might not be around forever.

Let's start this off with bio2's link to "the tube": an unrollable laptop:super crazy hardware. seizer sent us the most amusing firewall circumventer: a TCP/IP Email Tunnel. While on the subject of bizarre technology, John Petz sent us a webserver running on an Atari 800. Still not in shock? hool sent us a hack over at x42.com which uses the hostname as input to a calculator. tdunn linked us to a place that lists odd things found inside PC cases. It includes a *shudder* severed finger tip. For more wierd tech support, yeahbensteres submitted iamanidiot.com which has some tales that you may or may not believe. Pike sent us 94 Uses for Old Altoids Tins: Who eats 94 tins of altoids? Oh... wait. OwenF sent us linkage to the latest robotic pet craze. Look out AIBO, here comes Robotic Fish! Slashdot's own jamiemccarthy points us to TimeCube.com for all your wierd-science needs. You econ majors might be interested in Yhetti's link to the fortune-cookie market index. Bradley noted a story about a man who changed his name to 'Oxford University' to avoid domain squatting charges from Oxford University. If you have a mission:impossible scheduled next week, Dr. Manhattan sent us a link to a Swiss company that is developing self-destructing CDs. The CIA has some on back order. An anonymous reader pointed us to EarthKam, which has several really beautiful pictures of earth from space. Check out their top 10 ... if only they were bigger they'd make great background art. And finally for those of you who are sick of all the naughty language on TV, deepak saxena sent us a machine that claims it will filter all the damn swearing from TV and video. I'm waiting for a version that filters out Regis.

Slackeress writes "Looks like Astronomers searching the skies for distant planets have detected two Saturn-sized worlds orbiting distant suns, the smallest planets found thus far outside our solar system. "

joshamania writes "There's an article on Yahoo entitled "Why the Net doesn't belong to America." The article references some good examples of "side-stepping" government regulation on the Internet. " This is gonna become much more important in upcoming years. What will it mean, and how will it affect all of us?

DeePCedure asks: "I'm the network administrator for a small e-commerce solution provider that is growing very quickly. We need a host independant means to centralize our data storage, but we have multiple platforms including Linux, Win32, two generations of Mac's, BeOS, and even OS/2. A Storage Area Network(SAN) seems like the best solution, but most of the information I've found on SANs is geared toward large enterprises. Also, Fiber Channel technology being as expensive as it is, a SAN seems out of reach. Network Attached Storage(NAS) is probably the next best thing but NAS has it's own problems. Most of the devices I've found don't support all of our platforms, and the ones that do don't have very good security. How can I centralize ~100GB of data on a multiple platform network within budget? Also, how can I do it securely, with controlled access all the way down to the bottom level of the data structure? "

Dobromir Montauk wrote to us to say that Real has released the new RealPlayer 7 beta for glibc 2.0. The installation seems to be nicer than the last one, with support of mime types amongst other improvements. Now, if it doesn't crash my browser, we'll be getting somewhere.

Repton writes, "Another one from CNET's News.com: A commission set up by the government to look into ways to keep youngsters from Internet smut has realized that they have no funding. This is a sad state of affairs, but somehow I don't feel too much sympathy." Perhaps people "charged with evaluating high-tech tools and other methods to keep online pornography away from children," but on a beer budget, should enjoy a few hours reading through the Censorware Project's Web site. At a library in Utah, say.

In the wake of recent announcements by Peacefire that they'd decrypted the secret block lists employed by two brands of censoring software, the "encryption" used by another major brand of software, Cyber Patrol, (produced by a company repugnant enough to advertise the increase in sales after Australia passed national censorship legislation), has also been broken. Matthew Skala and Eddy L O Jansson report in an in-depth essay about the practical difficulties encountered when undertaking this task. Their announcement follows.

Their announcement:

"March 11, 2000 - ANNOUNCEMENT

Cyber Patrol(R) 4, a "censorware" product intended to prevent users from accessing undesirable Internet content, has been reverse engineered by youth rights activists Eddy L O Jansson and Matthew Skala. A detailed report of their findings, titled "The Breaking of Cyber Patrol(R) 4", with commentary on the reverse engineering process and cryptographic attacks against the product's authentication system, has been posted on the World Wide Web at this address:

http://hem.passagen.se/eddy1/reveng/cp4/cp4break.html

The abstract of the report:

Several attacks are presented on the "sophisticated anti-hacker security" features of Cyber Patrol(R) 4, a "censorware" product intended to prevent users from accessing Internet content considered harmful. Motivations, tools, and methods are discussed for reverse engineering in general and reverse engineering of censorware in particular. The encryption of the configuration and data files is reversed, as are the password hash functions. File formats are documented, with commentary. Excerpts from the list of blocked sites are presented and commented upon. A package of source code and binaries implementing the attacks is included.

Eddy L O Jansson
srm_dfr@hotmail.com
http://hem.passagen.se/eddy1/index.html

Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca
http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/"

In the wake of recent announcements by Peacefire that they'd decrypted the secret block lists employed by two brands of censoring software, the "encryption" used by another major brand of software, Cyber Patrol, (produced by a company repugnant enough to advertise the increase in sales after Australia passed national censorship legislation), has also been broken. Matthew Skala and Eddy L O Jansson report in an in-depth essay about the practical difficulties encountered when undertaking this task. Their announcement follows.

Their announcement:

"March 11, 2000 - ANNOUNCEMENT

Cyber Patrol(R) 4, a "censorware" product intended to prevent users from accessing undesirable Internet content, has been reverse engineered by youth rights activists Eddy L O Jansson and Matthew Skala. A detailed report of their findings, titled "The Breaking of Cyber Patrol(R) 4", with commentary on the reverse engineering process and cryptographic attacks against the product's authentication system, has been posted on the World Wide Web at this address:

http://hem.passagen.se/eddy1/reveng/cp4/cp4break.html

The abstract of the report:

Several attacks are presented on the "sophisticated anti-hacker security" features of Cyber Patrol(R) 4, a "censorware" product intended to prevent users from accessing Internet content considered harmful. Motivations, tools, and methods are discussed for reverse engineering in general and reverse engineering of censorware in particular. The encryption of the configuration and data files is reversed, as are the password hash functions. File formats are documented, with commentary. Excerpts from the list of blocked sites are presented and commented upon. A package of source code and binaries implementing the attacks is included.

Eddy L O Jansson
srm_dfr@hotmail.com
http://hem.passagen.se/eddy1/index.html

Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca
http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/"

drxenon writes, "In this story on AltaVista Live, the real truth about those hand injuries is made known. Nintendo is offering up to $80 million (US) worth of gloves for buyers of the "Mario Party" Nintendo64 game. Over 90 complaints have been filed concerning blisters, cuts, and other hand injuries!" The article gives info on how to get *your* gloves. If you're a Nintendo user, go for it!

Merlyn42 writes, "According to this article at Intel's Web site, Intel is giving Pentium III systems and lots of goodies, including free Internet access, to all its employees. Who else is going to follow this new trend started by Ford?" Don't know, but I wonder how many 'geek houses' we'll see comprised of five Intel employees living in a house with free systems. The cool thing is that the site says that they can use the systems for whatever they want.

Moo-ha-ha. CmdrTaco is on vacation (and sending his e-mail to /dev/null, so please don't even try), so I'm doing Quickies this week. On to the good stuff. DigitalDaedalus wrote in to tell us about the SGI 404 pages. Cute. For those with that not-so-fresh feeling, dodobh wrote in to tell us about the Slashdot Purity Test. No, I won't tell you my score. In the 'ear candy' bin, casret told us that they posted the results of the XMMS plugin contest. Time for some stuff from the 'exploding stuff' bin. Aardappel wrote in about Fisheye Quake, and Kintanon caught my eye with Fun With Grapes. Charles Helfenstein told us about the anti-cubicle. Very cool. Fanmail used the force and wrote in about George Lucas In Love. With all the X-Men hype going on, Link wrote in about Mutant Watch. Smurfy cared to share AIEEE, the Acronym Interaction, Expansion and Extrapolation Engine. fwfr told us about the Sim-William Shatner. You'll need Flash. Last but certainly not least, The Welcome Rain wrote in to tell us about your friend and mine, Robot Frank.

Xanthippe asks: "I'm currently looking to build a new system and hunting for a within-reasonable-budget ideal. A friend suggested going with dual-P500 processors instead of an Athlon650. I wouldn't mind going with either, but I'd like to know how they compare. I know zilch about processors and their mysterious voodoo-god-like inner workings, but I can read a benchmark as well as the next geek-wannabe. Has anyone tried pitting a dual system against one of the 600+ AMDs? Are there any major advantages/disavatages in going with a dual system?"

naasking writes, "A new desktop project has been started by former Apple and AOL employees. Their goal is to create a graphical environment for Linux that "your mother could use." The company doing it is called Eazel. " It also is supposed to be based on GNOME. CT: Several people noted that this shell is destined to be the GNOME 2.0 shell/file manager.

bineronbrain wrote to us with class notes from Stanford Online's ee380 class. The guest speaker was David Ditzel, Transmeta's CEO, who goes into quite a bit of detail about the basic architecture, and teaches about how the code-morpher works and the implication it has for compiler-writers. Pretty cool stuff and you can grab the audio recording, as well as the class notes. For some reason, it's only availible in Media Player format - which means I'll never hear/see it again, of course. *sigh*

smeng58 writes "InfoWorld's Bob Metcalfe asks why, if Linus Torvalds is truly a believer in Open Source, Transmeta Corp. has seen fit to make Crusoe, or at least its VLIW "code morphing", proprietary. The column goes on to say that, since the processor will run Windows code, there must be some thing wrong with Linux. Sad when a computer pundit appears not understand what x86 code is. "

SL33Z3 writes "Researchers at the University of California at San Diego have found increased brain activity in areas of the brain that otherwise stay inactive. The longer the students went without sleep, the more activity was found. Research found students to have better recollection after long periods of sleep deprivation. Check out the release here. " Heck, combine this with the news about caffeine and I'm all set!

In one of the many submissions concerning the recent Connectix victory: Enosson writes, "The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned the lower court injunction prohibiting Connectix from selling Virtual Game Station or using the Sony BIOS in developing new versions of it. The decision says that its use of the copyrighted BIOS in reverse engineering was "fair use," and that any "shoddiness" in the VGS product did not tarnish Sony's PlayStation trademark. The full text of the decision is available." There is also, as you would expect, mention of the ruling on the Connectix site as well.

Jenny Stevens writes "A group of courageous third graders and their science teacher have decided to try to correct "errors" by the mighty Smithsonian Institution. They are trying to give proper credit to Nikola Tesla (he is my favorite scientist of all time) and his inventions. They have started a campaign and have mailed hundreds of executives of major American corporations asking for donations to their campaign. They have even received a donation from the CEO of Sony Corp. in Japan. To read more, check their Web page. For an intro to Tesla and his contributions check this page."

Stephan Ullmann writes "Another nice story on the Heise Newsticker: According to this study (in German) from the Swiss WWW-Performance Index, WWW sites using MS IIS have on average twice as much downtime as sites with Apache. To obtain these values they were monitoring 100 big Swiss Internet sites every five minutes for a period of more than three months. They logged the downtime and the latency of the machines. Furthermore, they mentioned that there are a number of sites with IIS that are rebooted every day at the same time ;-) On average in all categories the servers had a weekly downtime of 99 minutes." Better check out Babelfish if you don't sprechen Sie Deutsch.

Mad Gav writes "Sony's Music Clip and Memory Stick Walkmans have been around here in Japan for months, but the software from Sony has been lacking, until now. Sony launched their first stab at a digital download service in Japan, albeit with a limited selection of tracks. A single track costs 350 Yen (just over $3) to download. It looks like Sony is finally making serious moves into this arena, and I'd predict that it's only a matter of months before their entire catalog goes online..." The link is in Japanese, but you can understand what's going on there.

PraveenS writes "There's an in-depth analysis of LinuxOne and its IPO at linuxtoday.com. Paul Ferris of Linuxtoday spoke with LinuxOne CTO Dr. Peter Milford. Here's an interesting quote: "Our next version will have applications on it that no one else has." However, he said little else, making one wonder if they really do have something great. Also, it seems LinuxOne is not entirely unaware of the controversy surrounding them; they're holding a "Flame of the Week Contest." "

plasticquart writes "A recent article by Clifford Smith over at 32bitsonlne.com outlines his theory on the recent spat of Internet-related lawsuits. As he puts it: "What do the lawsuits against everybody in the Known Universe concerning DeCSS, mp3.com, and Napster all have in common?
Time Warner. Let's make that AOL and Time Warner." The article goes on to outline the direct interests of Time Warner and Co. in squelching content distribution (uh, hello - money). Quite an interesting read, indeed. "

CJMClark writes "I am a university student working on a public policy analysis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and I am interested in (since the government's stance is pretty clear) the opinions of members of the computing community as regards this particular piece of legislation and its effect on the freedom of information. Has the government, in your opinion, gone too far or overstepped its bounds? Have you been affected by the DMCA? How is it that the government can prohibit an average U.S. citizen from decrypting encrypted files, and yet also attempt to force Kevin Mitnick to decrypt his personal files? Is this a blatant violation of the fair use clause of Title 17? All replies will be held strictly confidential, as I am simply trying to get a feel for how this legislation affects those citizens who, on the whole, are technologically oriented.

Please feel free to post replies to this post, or simply e-mail them to me at CJMClark@hotmail.com. I welcome any and all opinions on this matter.

Carl J. Clark
"Justice for All in the Digital Age" "

FModnar writes "Texas Instruments CEO Tom Engibous is claiming that the PC era is ending. He claims that wireless Internet devices are replacing PCs as 'the driving force in the electronics industry' and will become even more popular once they are linked to broadband networks. Check out this story at Yahoo! News."

Disgruntled Goat sent us a review of Intrusion Detection, a text sure to be of interest to all those working in organizations. The author is a former NSA employee and has written this book as a text to convince upper-level types of the need for security and actually paying attention to it. Click below to read more. Intrusion Detection author Rebecca Gurley Bace pages 339 publisher Macmillan Technical Publishing, o01/2000 rating 9/10 reviewer Disgruntled Goat, disgruntled_goat@hotmail.com ISBN 1-57870-185-6 summary Very good InfoSec handbook for suits and junior suits. The Scenario Security books, quite frankly, are pretty much a dime a dozen, most of which are written by people in IT field security. What immediately separates this book from the rest is the background of the author. Ms. Bace is an ex-government employee, spending 12 years in everyone's favorite spook organization, the National Security Agency. She led the Computer Misuse and Anonmaly Detection (CMAD) Research Program for six years at the NSA. She also collaborated on Computer Crime : A Crimefighter's Handbook by Dr. David Icove of the FBI. She also won the Distinguished Leadership Award in 1995 from the NSA.

What's Bad? This book is sort of dry reading. It's akin to reading college CS textbooks for pleasure. Or law books. What I didn't like is the fact that she wasn't real clear on the distinction of "hackers", nor how she describes them. She worries that "hackers" wish to "corrupt the trust process". And the focus for the book is not primarily for techies. It's designed for CIO smacking. Generally, if you're in an organization like mine, your CIO has very little technical background. So, good for CIO bashing.
And, it's $50 also.

What's Good? This is good if you're in a position where you need to convince management of security threats. It's also good for the kiddies who want to get an idea of what to look for when they're gunning for targets to disrupt.
What made this good for me was the fact that I could have points to show to management for InfoSec issues. I work in a hospital and we tend to attract a large amount of famous people as patients. If something damaging was leaked to the media about a famous person's medical condition that was potentially embarassing, we're looking at a good multi-million dollar lawsuit. This book isn't a by-the-book "How to protect your systems", but more of a book on what to safeguard, and how to detect patterns that may indicate patterns of unauthorized usage.
One of the things that I liked was the chapter on Legal Issues. One of the sections in the chapter was "What Real Cases Have Taught Us". It did a few page review on Mitnick's case, cut and dry. It shows that Shimomura was no rocket scientist, and with cooperation from the courts, you can bust almost anyone. But it did bring up several good points, such as obtaining court orders, how laws work, and how it can be considered evidence.

So What's In It For Me? If you're a script kiddie, probably nothing. But for those who are achin' to topple some network, this may be for you.

For those with functioning brains who have vested interests in InfoSec and protecting their organization from people who wish to do harm, and getting real security info, rather than from those half-assed "Security Experts" like JohnP, then pick this up.

Pick this book up at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

1. The History of Intrusion Detection
2. Concepts and Definitions
3. Information Sources
4. Analysis Schemes
5. Responses
6. Vulnerability Analysis: A Special Case
7. Technical Issues
8. Understanding the Real-World Challenge
9. Legal Issues
10. For Users
11. For Strategists
12. For Designers
13. Future Needs

try67 (and many others) wrote to tell us Mozilla Milestone 13 was made available yesterday. Check the release notes here. You'll see full builds for Linux, Win32, and Mac OS 8.5. And the source, of course. This is the long-awaited Mozilla Alpha version. Have fun!

"X Company now supports Linux" announcements are coming in thick and fast these days. Examples: yesterday J Ellerbroek sent this link for Aureal's Linux drivers and Drakar wrote, "I e-mailed Sigma Designs asking them about Linux support for the RealMagic Hollywood Plus DVD Decoder, and they say they're working on supporting Linux for a future product." And Nicholas Tang turned us on to this announcement about an upcoming open sourced RPG with a Linux client. Very nice! But we're getting so many of these announcements that we can't possibly run them all. If you've spotted any others recently, please post them below. (Click for more.)

I had a thought while I was typing the words above: should Slashdot do periodic "roundups" of new Linux ports and support announcements? With so many hardware and software vendors now moving into the "Linux marketplace" (which is how many of them see Linux -- as a marketplace), these announcements are no longer "news" in the sense of being unique or unusual events, but they're still good to know about.

Should we make a weekly post out of all these announcements? Or, because they don't come in at an even rate, should we save them up until we have 10 or so and post them all then whether that takes two days or three weeks?

So, besides posting any new Linux product/support announcements you've seen lately, how about a little advice on how Slashdot might best handle these announcements in the future? I promise to read every comment with a moderation level of zero or higher.

- Robin "roblimo" Miller

nickdog writes "The upcoming presidential election will probably be the first to be significantly influenced by the Internet. According to a study by Media Quotient, Bill Bradley and John McCain are in the best position to win over voters who rely on Internet news sources."

bravehamster writes "Bungie Software has announced that at 7 pm CST tonight they will release the Marathon 2: Durandal source code under the public GNU license. Programmers need only apply, but gamers everywhere should reap the benefits." The press release is attached below. Or you can just cut to the chase and download the sit version or a gzipped version.

"Today at 7 pm CST Bungie Software releases the Mac source code for their classic game "Marathon 2: Durandal" to the net. This game represented the pinnacle of first-person shooter technology in 1995, and was the most successful of the highly-acclaimed Marathon series."

"Programmers only need apply: the code is in MPW format (Macintosh Programmers Workshop, which can be freely downloaded at developer.apple.com), and because various components had to be removed before public release, devising some workarounds will be necessary before the code will compile. Nevertheless, for those with the skills to manipulate it, the code can form the basis of all kinds of 3D, first-person perspective games, and we look forward to seeing what is done with it."

"The code is being released under the terms of the GNU public license, and Bungie does not offer technical support with the code. More information can be found in the ReadMe that accompanies it. You can download sit version or a gzipped version "

Update: 01/18 04:25 by CN : Jason Pellerin of Bungie writes: "I'd like to see a linux port, and I can donate some server space and time to help it happen, please write me at m2linux@bungie.com if you want to get in on the fun."

GuardianKnight asks: "I am working for an organization who is going from WinNT to Linux. They have a fairly large database and I was wondering is there a way or does anyone know how to convert an Microsoft Access database to a MySQL database (other than retyping all the data)? Is there any software that can do this?" How difficult would it be to create a program for all SQL based databases that would create export scripts that you could import into any engine that would recognize INSERT statements? Does something like this exist?

NoNsense wrote to us about the team-up of Millionaire.com and auctions.lycos.com are auctioning a complete T. Rex skeleton. Yes, the opening price of $5.8 million includes shipping of the 25-foot-tall, 40-foot-long skeleton. Cool. I was going to buy a new house soon anyway. *grin*

daveb writes "There was some discussion back in September regarding the first pictures from the Chandra satillite obervatory. I thought you might be interested in this article about identifying the source of much "background" x-ray radiation. "