Slashdot Mirror

orn writes: "Reuters is reporting that IBM has made a step toward using carbon nanotubes as the next best thing since sliced silicon wafers. They created a process that could potentially be turned into a manufacturing method to make extremely small transistors. Yahoo has a copy of the article. We all know that small transistors means higher speeds! Yum!" The NY Times has another article about the same technology, which we've mentioned before.

RagingBull writes: "This new article walks through the latest release of the new 2.2 Samba. What a huge jump in improvement the 2.2 version was over the older 2.x version's; made my job a lot easier especially with its new support of ACL's."

Sean writes "Take a look at this comparison of Server-side scripting languages. The article explains how PHP scripts, Perl CGIs, and Java servlets work. It can help you decide whether to use PHP scripts, Perl CGIs, or Java servlets for your next Web development project. It also covers the issues that separate the three languages and provides all the source to test their differences." Right tool, right situation. That's all I have to say.

frknfrk writes "i stumbled across the IBM developerWorks KDE theme contest. apparently there are three prizes, $3000, $2000, and $1000 which entrants can win for the non-profit OSS group of their choice. and Sam Lantinga (SDL, Loki) is one of the judges. they also have a tutorial on building KDE themes for Linux." I've been running KDE on my laptop since I melted the old hard drive, and have been disappointed by the existing choice of themes. Hopefully this contest will change that, as well as hook up an open source group with some cash. Get gimpin' people!

frknfrk writes "i stumbled across the IBM developerWorks KDE theme contest. apparently there are three prizes, $3000, $2000, and $1000 which entrants can win for the non-profit OSS group of their choice. and Sam Lantinga (SDL, Loki) is one of the judges. they also have a tutorial on building KDE themes for Linux." I've been running KDE on my laptop since I melted the old hard drive, and have been disappointed by the existing choice of themes. Hopefully this contest will change that, as well as hook up an open source group with some cash. Get gimpin' people!

Blasphemous Preist writes "For all of you looking for a good religious war over shells, IBM has just posted the following article on zsh. It's very informative and comes from a strong Linux and Z-shell proponent. If you're in to hack around with something other than bash zsh may be z answer."

Tonight: Reactions and reductions of previous Slashdot appearances, including but not limited to: in-dash video gaming for the less upwardly mobile; a CSS descrambler you could scratch as a crib onto the side of your #2 pencil; and more on the engineers vs. scientists brouhaha. Enjoy!

I like the driving game in front of the windshield. Not everyone has the cash or the gumption to outfit his Macintosh with a Pathfinder; for the computationally experimental on a more modest budget, there is an easier way. wing_king writes: "A fellow named Troy Kellogg managed to hack an actual Atari 2600 console into the dashboard of his 1978 Volkswagen. The "AtariMobile" even has controller ports and a screen built right into the dash! The AtariMobile site has some pictures of the unit and some details on its construction. What a way to kill all that time sitting at stoplights."

Please tell me this is only for passengers and while parked, ok? I own one of these micro televisions, and it seems like playing on a screen that size while hunched over the stickshift might constitute more work than this labor-intensive project took in the first place. Wow.

Stir, reduce and simmer, stir in indignation: Aimster has removed the Pig Latin Encoder software from its site. And if that wasn't enough trivial encoding for you ...

If just over 500 bytes still wasn't small enough for your new MPAA-mocking tattoo, note that the famous Content Scramble System most famously De-flated with DeCSS has fallen anew.

PotatoNO writes: "Charles H. Hannum has created an even smaller DeCSS decoder than the perl script posted a few days ago. This one is written in C and takes 442 bytes, beating the perl script by 30 bytes. It's small and in C, so of course it's speedy. Hannum's program can decode in excess of 21.5MBps which is faster than the DVD spec allows for. That means it can actually be used for realtime playback."

Now hold on a goldarned minute there! William Evans, of Clark University's Dept. of Computer Science, took issue with the report Tuesday night in which drhpbaldy wrote: "At the latest ACM meeting, scientists and engineers threw mud at computer scientists for not contributing anything useful."

Wrote Evans in response:

"There seems to be some confusion as to what computer science is, and who computer scientists are. Programmers and other IT workers are not, for the most part, computer scientists--they're programmers and other IT workers. This is by no means disparaging, but simply a delineation based on definition.

Computer scientists study the branch of mathematics dealing with computation.

In the terms of your story, it was perhaps 'computer scientists' throwing mud at 'programmers and other IT professionals.' In actuality, though, it was mud thrown at business executives, and the ages-old indictment of the larger culture of western corporate management."

What medal do you get for 11th? ;) Rathnor writes: "I've spent the last week or so in Vancouver, Canada in the lead up to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World finals. I'm a reserve in the University of NSW Team from Australia. Its been a great week with lots of cool things done for us from IBM and UPE.

The results are officially out and presented: The winners were: St Petersberg State University Second place: Virginia Tech the rest of the standings can be found here. (We made 11th)"

Tebubaga writes: "The BBC is reporting that IBM has won the contract to produce the next generation of micro-processors for Sony's Playstation 3 game console due sometime in 2004. Sony, IBM and Toshiba are joining toether to create a 'supercomputer on a chip' which sounds like the PS3 will be much more than just another games console. Quote, 'The result will be consumer devices that are more powerful than IBM's Deep Blue super-computer, operate at low power and access the broadband internet at ultra-high speeds". Bet it still won't do my laundry though...'

deran9ed writes "Folks over at IBM have an article explaining the intricacies regarding the NSA's SE Linux distribution. Included in the article, are the inner workings of the operating system. its features, design architecture. Definitely a nice article for Linux users (especially SE Linux users). Full The review is in IBM DeveloperWorks."

deran9ed writes "Folks over at IBM have an article explaining the intricacies regarding the NSA's SE Linux distribution. Included in the article, are the inner workings of the operating system. its features, design architecture. Definitely a nice article for Linux users (especially SE Linux users). Full The review is in IBM DeveloperWorks."

sergio asks: "I was discusing with friends about application frameworks and other things when I mentioned that there was something in Alphaworks that looked promising and I remembered it was on its way to be quite portable. I was talking about the SASH tool and the Webications concept (see http://sash.alphaworks.ibm.com/ ). I recently looked in their web site and I see the typical Windoze only shpeel and the 'licence me' approach that has killed so many ideas before. Does anybody know what has IBM in the works for this application? It seems like it would be nice way of building distributted front ends for apps beyond what a browser would provide."

Frank writes "Here's a good interview with KDE League chairman Andreas Pour. He talks about the K desktop environment (KDE) 2.1, that will be Hitting the streets on Monday, February 26. He reveals info about some significant advantages over the old 1.0 platform, including a full-fledged browser and the upcoming KOffice suite of business applications."

Frank writes "Here's a good interview with KDE League chairman Andreas Pour. He talks about the K desktop environment (KDE) 2.1, that will be Hitting the streets on Monday, February 26. He reveals info about some significant advantages over the old 1.0 platform, including a full-fledged browser and the upcoming KOffice suite of business applications."

Several people submitted the news that IBM withdrew its CPRM plan yesterday - some of them with blurbs like "We Won! Yay!". But only a few people got the additional information that it was simply replaced with another extremely similar copy-prevention scheme, this one from Phoenix Technologies, well known for their widely used BIOS's. Even though the committee responsible for this has been deluged with email in opposition, the CPRM group (led by Paul Anderson and Jeffrey Lotspiech of IBM) continues to press forward, distributing propagandistic lies about how the system will protect [sic] your fair-use right to access and use digital content. Update: 02/24 7:20 PM EST by michael : The Register has even more information from Andre Hedrick.

Several people submitted the news that IBM withdrew its CPRM plan yesterday - some of them with blurbs like "We Won! Yay!". But only a few people got the additional information that it was simply replaced with another extremely similar copy-prevention scheme, this one from Phoenix Technologies, well known for their widely used BIOS's. Even though the committee responsible for this has been deluged with email in opposition, the CPRM group (led by Paul Anderson and Jeffrey Lotspiech of IBM) continues to press forward, distributing propagandistic lies about how the system will protect [sic] your fair-use right to access and use digital content. Update: 02/24 7:20 PM EST by michael : The Register has even more information from Andre Hedrick.

Jason Bennett, frequent reviewer of books, now regales you with this great piece on the background and development of the new encryption standard to replace the pretty-good-till-now DES. It's full of linked information you'll want to digest, too. Update: 02/23 12:32 AM by T : Note: The links I borked are better now; mea culpa (and beware copying in Mozilla).

Since it was officially approved by the U.S. Government in November of 1976, most of the world's sensitive commercial traffic has been secured through the use of the Data Encryption Standard (DES). In its twenty-five year lifetime, it has become the most widely used, most widely trusted, and most widely studied encryption algorithm in existence. Alas, in the same way that your Atari 2600 ^[?] is currently sitting on the floor of your closet, DES' lifetime has come to an end as well. This was most dramatically demonstrated in the three DES Challenges sponsored by RSA Labs between January of 1997 and January of 1999, with a DES-encrypted message eventually being broken in less than 24 hours. This challenge also witnessed the birth of a DES-specific cracking computer, a machine widely theorized about, but never before (publicly) built. Although variants of DES (most notably Triple DES) are still widely used, it became clear that a new algorithm would be needed for the next twenty-five years.

Thus was born the Advanced Encryption Algorithm Development Effort. Beginning in January, 1997 (just before the RSA challenges finally broke DES), the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced its intent to begin the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) process. The initial AES workshop was held in April, with the official call for algorithms going forth in September. Importantly, this call specified that the algorithms submitted have a key length of 128 bits, and be free of intellectual property constraints. Algorithms would be accepted from domestic and international submitters, and the resulting algorithm would be completely public. The con test would also consider both the hardware and the software implementation -- a divergence from DES, which was specifically designed for use in hardware. Importantly, the hardware that the AES had to operate in could vary from the largest supercomputer to a ROM-based smart card or other embedded ed environment. A candidate algorithm might well be optimized for one or the other, but had to perform at least reasonably well on all to have a real chance of being selected. Finally, this algorithm would be designed from the ground up to use the long key length, and thus would be faster and more secure than Triple-DES is at that length.

Thus came the warriors to the joust. On August 20-22, 1998, the first AES conference was held, with fifteen different algorithms being presented. Over the next seven months, these algorithms were tested in laboratories around the world to probe for weaknesses and to test the their speeds. There is a huge selection of papers on these tests at the AES1 site for your perusal, so I will not try and detail those tests here. Suffice to say, several of the algorithms had serious problems identified, while others came through with flying colors. The next March, the second AES conference was the forum for the presentation of these results, and a subsequent discussion of which algorithms should thus advance to the final round. These finalists were announced in August of 1999, thus beginning the second round of competition. NIST subsequently issued an excellent report detailing their rationale about each algorithm, including the problems and benefits associated with each.

The AES finalists were:

• MARS (IBM) (their case)
• RC6 (RSA) (their case)
• Rijndael (their case) (how to pronounce it)
• Serpent (their case)
• Twofish (Counterpane) (their case)

Obviously, each candidate comes to the conclusion that their cipher is the best. Nevertheless, there are some shared criticisms of the various ciphers that show patterns in each one. Serpent, for example, is universally named the slowest algorithm (in software), even by its creators. Nevertheless, they make their case based on being the most secure algorithm of the bunch. RC6 and MARS are both very fast on certain processors, but terrible on others. As noted above, any serious AES candidate had to perform well across all platforms, and thus this variable performance tended t o compromise these candidates. None of the algorithms were ever broken by a practical attack, however, and all should be considered secure enough for serious encryption work. Thus was held the third AES conference in April of 2000. This was the final conference before the official AES selection, and the last chance for each algorithm to make it s case. The statements above were presented at the end of this conference in an effort to make that case. Once the conference ended, it was up to NIST to make its selection. The candidates could only wait.

Finally, on October 2, 2000, NIST released their final decision, that R ijndael was to be the AES selection. Simultaneously, NIST released a paper detailing their rationale for the selection. In sum, this paper says that any of the finalists could have been selected (an opinion echoed by man y in the industry), but that Rijndael proved to have the proper balance necessary between speed in hardware, speed in software, and security. To quote from NIST's statement:

Rijndael appears to be consistently a very good performer in both hardware and software across a wide range of computing environments regardless of its use in feedback or non-feedback modes. Its key setup time is excellent, and its key agility is good. Rijndael's very l ow memory requirements make it very well suited for restricted-space environ environments, in which it also demonstrates excellent performance. Rijndael's operations ons are among the easiest to defend against power and timing attacks. Additionally, it appears that some defense can be provided against such attacks without significantly impacting Rijndael's performance. Rijndael is designed with th some flexibility in terms of block and key sizes, and the algorithm can accommodate alterations in the number of rounds, although these features would require e further study and are not being considered at this time. Finally, Rijndael's internal round structure appears to have good potential to benefit from instruction-level parallelism.

At this point, it's all over but the shouting. At some point later this year, the Secretary of Commerce will officially designate Rijndael the Advanced Encryption Standard, and a new era will have begun. AES was specified (and is expected) to remain a standard for at least as long as DES, and to protect data for even longer, and barring a major development (such as faster-than-forseen developments in quantum computing), this standard will likely be met. No one expects research into new algorithms to die, however. There will continue to be parallel algorithms developed and used, just as there are today. Thanks to be combined efforts of NIST and the community, however, there will always be the bedrock of AES available.

In conclusion, I'd like to point out the positive role that the U.S. Government, as represented by NIST, has played in this process. The Free Software/Open Source community has taken its share of shots at the government over patents, copyright and crypto export over the past several years, and deservedly so. The AES process, however, was lauded throughout the encryption community as a fair and open process that brought together the best minds available to select the algorithm for the next century (as NIST likes to say). Making an algorithm a FIPS standard gives it a legitimacy that cannot be obtained in any other way, especially given the way that this standard was arrived at. The algorithm is completely free of any IP hurdles, as was specified at the beginning of the process, and since the code is open, it can be downloaded by anyone in the world (and since it was designed outside of the U.S., any attempt to regulate its export from the U.S. would be silly). It is reasonable to criticize when a situation is bad, but it is only fair to praise when something is good.

Bibliography

I used a great number of sources from print and the web, so it's only fair to list them here. I also put many links in the body itself, most of which go into much more detail than I did.

• NIST's main AES site is the place to start. It links to most of the technical information I linked to above.
• RSA's crypto FAQ has been around for many years, and the latest edition only gets better. Covers all sorts of ground on cryptography, both general and specific. If you're trying to learn more about crypto, this is the definitive place to go.
• SANS InfoSec has a good overview of the process and the finalist algorithms.
• A Cryptographic Compendium has a good AES section
• SecurityPortal has an excellent perspective on what AES means
• Everyone's favorite IT rag The Register has a solid overview of the process
• Bruce Schneier publishes a crypto newsletter through his company, Counterpane Internet Security. See especially the issues from May 15, 1998, March and August 15, 1999, and April and October 15 of 2000.
• Simon Singh's The Code Book provided some excellent background

horst writes: "Subject says it all -- IBM has released first GPL winmodem driver. Link found at LWN" I'll be even more excited when they release the code that works with my T20 ... I've never even dialed my modem *sniff*, but if you've got an MWave (600, 600E, 770) then you should be golden. But props to IBM for making a cool move. Hopefully it's not an isolated one.

Wolverine writes "IBM has finally seen the light and modified the BIOS on their T20/T21 laptops so users can now install FreeBSD without worrying about turning their machine into a paperweight. Although the official fix is listed as a fix for "System can not boot from a hard disk with partition ID of n5h.(n is 1 or greater)", they may have well just posted "You can install FreeBSD so stop whining". ThinkPad T20 bios can be found here and T21 bios update can be found here."

Wolverine writes "IBM has finally seen the light and modified the BIOS on their T20/T21 laptops so users can now install FreeBSD without worrying about turning their machine into a paperweight. Although the official fix is listed as a fix for "System can not boot from a hard disk with partition ID of n5h.(n is 1 or greater)", they may have well just posted "You can install FreeBSD so stop whining". ThinkPad T20 bios can be found here and T21 bios update can be found here."

Mojo Jojo writes "There's a story on developerWorks about DARPA-funded work being done at Stanford Research Institute (aka SRI International) to develop soemthing called Event Monitoring Enabling Responses to Anomalous Live Disturbances (EMERALD) -- software components that are capable of providing anomaly and misuse detection for networks. EMERALD components monitor local activity, then work in conjunction with analysis engines for visualization, response, correlation, and data logging to provide a global picture of what's occurring throughout the network. Sort of like having beat cops and police call boxes throughout your network (or something)."

bfree asks: "Robert LeBlanc, Vice President, Software Strategy, Software Solutions Division says both that IBM would open source any part of AIX and that we would be better off taking bits and pieces and the expertise that IBM bring along with it. IBM's AIX Web site lauds Linux compatibility of AIX and the new AIXL only just slightly behind their statements such as 'A robust, scalable UNIX platform for critical applications.' It's clear IBM wants to be involved with Linux, and I feel that we should want that also. What should we ask them to do for us in return for their involvement? Networking scalability and redundancy, optimization and facilities for database systems (as the jfs has started) or systems management applications? It seems to me we have the offer on the plate from IBM to create a new joined project to bring Linux up another level if we can find a way from AIX. Surely we must take them up on this?"

leviramsey writes: "The Jakarta Post (through Lexis-Nexis) has an article on MAGIC, an eye-tracking component of BlueEyes, a project to add greater sensory abilities to computers IBM's Almaden Research Center. Oddly enough IBM's site has very little on MAGIC under that name, though a reference is made to PupilFinder which seems to be the technology underlying MAGIC. The article speculates about possible applications, including in cars (gulp!) and goes into detail on other components of the project, several of which are very interesting."

leviramsey writes: "The Jakarta Post (through Lexis-Nexis) has an article on MAGIC, an eye-tracking component of BlueEyes, a project to add greater sensory abilities to computers IBM's Almaden Research Center. Oddly enough IBM's site has very little on MAGIC under that name, though a reference is made to PupilFinder which seems to be the technology underlying MAGIC. The article speculates about possible applications, including in cars (gulp!) and goes into detail on other components of the project, several of which are very interesting."

leviramsey writes: "The Jakarta Post (through Lexis-Nexis) has an article on MAGIC, an eye-tracking component of BlueEyes, a project to add greater sensory abilities to computers IBM's Almaden Research Center. Oddly enough IBM's site has very little on MAGIC under that name, though a reference is made to PupilFinder which seems to be the technology underlying MAGIC. The article speculates about possible applications, including in cars (gulp!) and goes into detail on other components of the project, several of which are very interesting."

BSD Today has this story about IBM refusing to deal with the fact that FreeBSD will not boot on their laptops. The actual service page is on IBM's support site. IBM does support Linux on the A20m though, but only OpenLinux. Is it my imagination or does this seem strange for a company that seems to understand the Open Source idea? Update: Seems that the problem is a BIOS issue where IBM used partition type a5 (or 165) for their suspend partition, this was reserved for 386BSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD. (NetBSD has since started using a9.) Here's a list of partition IDs as well as an explanation.

jjr writes: "It seems that IBM has a Open Source Project called Daisy that does a lot of what transmeta does. Their code-morphing technology supports PowerPC, x86, and S/390, as well as the Java Virtual Machine. They Morph the [code] into VLWI just like transmeta but they still have some issues to work out. Other issues dealt with in the report include self-modifying code, precise exceptions, and aggressive reordering of memory references in the presence of strong MP consistency and memory mapped I/O."

jjr writes: "It seems that IBM has a Open Source Project called Daisy that does a lot of what transmeta does. Their code-morphing technology supports PowerPC, x86, and S/390, as well as the Java Virtual Machine. They Morph the [code] into VLWI just like transmeta but they still have some issues to work out. Other issues dealt with in the report include self-modifying code, precise exceptions, and aggressive reordering of memory references in the presence of strong MP consistency and memory mapped I/O."

rjh3 writes: "IBM is offering to recycle old PC's (monitor included) for $29.99. They've made a deal with Envirocycle to do the recycling and UPS for discount shipping. The old computers are assessed and either refurbished and donated, or stripped for usable parts, recyclable content, and the remnants sent to disposal. Envirocycle has found a way to recycle the highly leaded glass in CRTs and removes much of the toxic lead content in the electronics." Read on for more information on why you might want to take them up on the offer.

"Many readers are probably unaware that used electronics, including TVs and monitors, are already categorized as a hazardous waste by the US EPA. Unsafe disposal by any business can lead to some staggering costs. The EPA does not inspect your trash. But if they find your monitor at an unsafe waste site, you are 100% responsible for cleaning up that entire site. They go after everyone who contributed to the site and just keep going until everyone is bankrupt or the site is cleaned. There is no proportional allocation. One PC is enough to be charged the entire site cleanup cost.

Consumers not exempt, but there is no point in prosecuting them. They don't have enough money and the political cost to the EPA is too high.

If you do not already have a suitable electronics disposal plan in place, this may be of interest. Most Massachusetts towns have a recycling plan in place because Massachusetts already prohibits consumer disposal of electronics in the regular trash. There are also a variety of donation programs for usable electronics, although many charities have become rather restrictive. They have been burned by people donating broken useless equipment and forcing the charity to pay the recycling disposal fees."

Frank writes: "What most programmers probably think of when they talk about 'Python' is the specific implementation sometimes called 'CPython' (because it is implemented in C). However, Python as a language specification has been implemented several times in parallel with the evolution of Guido van Rossum's reference implementation. This article consists of annotated interviews with the creators of two of the non-standard Pythons -- Stackless and Vyper." A pair of interviews to make your head spin with talk of Literate Programming and the odd but neat concept of "continuations."

Frank writes: "What most programmers probably think of when they talk about 'Python' is the specific implementation sometimes called 'CPython' (because it is implemented in C). However, Python as a language specification has been implemented several times in parallel with the evolution of Guido van Rossum's reference implementation. This article consists of annotated interviews with the creators of two of the non-standard Pythons -- Stackless and Vyper." A pair of interviews to make your head spin with talk of Literate Programming and the odd but neat concept of "continuations."

wonko writes: "IBM has begun shipping new monitors that are as much as 12 times sharper than current displays, and 4.5 times sharper than HDTV. These new 22-inch active matrix liquid crystal displays use aluminum-based technology and have over 9 million pixels. IBM will soon be licensing the technology to other display makers, so you could soon see these screens in laptops, PDAs, cellphones, etc. Pardon me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard ..." This is the same high-definition display you read about here earlier. They are not yet in CompUSA, to put it lightly -- first examples are going to Lawrence Livermore -- but the trickle-down effect in a couple of years is promising.

wonko writes: "IBM has begun shipping new monitors that are as much as 12 times sharper than current displays, and 4.5 times sharper than HDTV. These new 22-inch active matrix liquid crystal displays use aluminum-based technology and have over 9 million pixels. IBM will soon be licensing the technology to other display makers, so you could soon see these screens in laptops, PDAs, cellphones, etc. Pardon me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard ..." This is the same high-definition display you read about here earlier. They are not yet in CompUSA, to put it lightly -- first examples are going to Lawrence Livermore -- but the trickle-down effect in a couple of years is promising.

An anonymous reader sent us an analysis of the new Amiga Virtual Processor assembly Language -- unlimited registers, register naming, high-level looping constructs, a tool-based architecture, and object-based assembly programming, complete with some cool examples.

sighup asks: "My company is in the need of a distributed file system for WAN use. I've looked around. CODA and InterMezzo aren't there yet. NFS is not going to work well in our instance. So, I went looking at AFS (having used it in college). I found that IBM had announced that they were opensourcing AFS. We were willing to pay for it, but this is soooo much better. The original announcement said that IBM would be releasing the source code in September. September has come and gone and October is almost gone. They've posted the docs, but nothing else. I've even mailed DeveloperWorks and got no response. So, when's OpenAFS -actually- going to be out?"

sighup asks: "My company is in the need of a distributed file system for WAN use. I've looked around. CODA and InterMezzo aren't there yet. NFS is not going to work well in our instance. So, I went looking at AFS (having used it in college). I found that IBM had announced that they were opensourcing AFS. We were willing to pay for it, but this is soooo much better. The original announcement said that IBM would be releasing the source code in September. September has come and gone and October is almost gone. They've posted the docs, but nothing else. I've even mailed DeveloperWorks and got no response. So, when's OpenAFS -actually- going to be out?"

NoInfo writes: "You've heard a lot about XML, SOAP and the idea of Web services. All of which have been intriguing me a great deal lately. Sun, Big Blue, MS, Ariba and others have teamed up to create UDDI.org. The site describes a bit about their idea of companies publishing the electronic services they provide. They will also eventually let you search a registry of those businesses and their offered services, including any exposed 'Web services' they provide. With all these forces behind it, perhaps it's not even a question, but will UDDI and/or Web services 'fly'? Are there any Slashdotters aiming to provide Web services, despite its heavy backing by Microsoft?" If this lives up to its promise of platform independence, then may turn out to be something incredibly useful. Are there any readers involved in UDDI who can comment further on how things are progressing?

NoInfo writes: "You've heard a lot about XML, SOAP and the idea of Web services. All of which have been intriguing me a great deal lately. Sun, Big Blue, MS, Ariba and others have teamed up to create UDDI.org. The site describes a bit about their idea of companies publishing the electronic services they provide. They will also eventually let you search a registry of those businesses and their offered services, including any exposed 'Web services' they provide. With all these forces behind it, perhaps it's not even a question, but will UDDI and/or Web services 'fly'? Are there any Slashdotters aiming to provide Web services, despite its heavy backing by Microsoft?" If this lives up to its promise of platform independence, then may turn out to be something incredibly useful. Are there any readers involved in UDDI who can comment further on how things are progressing?

Raleel writes: "IBM has released the source code to AFS for AIX 4.2, Digital/Compaq UNIX 4.0, Red Hat Linux 6.2, Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, and Windows NT 4.0. You can download it from here. It is under IBM's Open Source license." This was supposed to be released a while ago, but it's good to see IBM following-thru. For more information, see our article regarding the open sourcing of AFS and the article from 1998 regarding the porting effort.

mach10 writes: "An article here shows that a scientist has been able to create fibers that collect ambient light, strong enough to power a dotted matrix for display. It can reach 30 times ambient light, and they are soon hoping to expand the area to replace signs on roads. Hrm ... But my sundial watch still doesn't work in the dark =\" Add this to some ultra-efficient light source (like white LEDs?), a low-power processor, human power and some solar cells, and most of my requirements for portable computing happiness would be met.

Skapare asks: "A year ago, this question about using Apache and SSL in a commercial environment was asked in the Apache section of Slashdot. The RSA patent was still in force back then, and the focus was on commercial products like Raven. Since then, the RSA patent has been released and then expired. That same month a year ago, Ask Slashdot also featured a question about encumbrance of SSL/PGP. But with the RSA patent gone, and Diffie-Hellman before it, this surely opens up Apache with SSL free for commercial use. Now I'm exploring options for free SSL for Apache, and note at least two choices, Apache-SSL, and mod_ssl. What I'd like to ask is what are the fundamental and principle differences between these free versions that I should consider in deciding which I should use in a commercial environment."

Skapare asks: "A year ago, this question about using Apache and SSL in a commercial environment was asked in the Apache section of Slashdot. The RSA patent was still in force back then, and the focus was on commercial products like Raven. Since then, the RSA patent has been released and then expired. That same month a year ago, Ask Slashdot also featured a question about encumbrance of SSL/PGP. But with the RSA patent gone, and Diffie-Hellman before it, this surely opens up Apache with SSL free for commercial use. Now I'm exploring options for free SSL for Apache, and note at least two choices, Apache-SSL, and mod_ssl. What I'd like to ask is what are the fundamental and principle differences between these free versions that I should consider in deciding which I should use in a commercial environment."

John E. Cosgrove writes "I read in this article that IBM signed a deal with Red Hat to include RedHat linux on all of their mainframe servers. It's a little short, but worth the look."

A reader writes: "Many experts, especially pundit Bob Metcalfe, have argued that Internet access should be metered so that light users don't have to subsidize flat rates for heavier users. John Levine, author, expert and sewer commissioner, argues that this idea of metering the Internet flies in the face of 100 years of history."

a2800276 asks: "The story that XFS has gone beta raised some questions in my mind. There are now four journaling filesystems available under various OSS licenses and being actively developed for Linux, there being (in estimated order of maturity): SuSE/Namesys's reiserfs, SGI's XFS, IBM's JFS and Tweedie/Redhat's ext3fs. Avoiding the obvious question of why can't the effort going into four different projects be channeled into one, I think a discussion of the particular merits of the different fs's would be interesting."

tewl writes: "Saw this [article] on [New Scientist] -- 'BT's hopes of enforcing its U.S. patent on Internet hyperlinking (New Scientist, 1 July, p 17) may be dashed by an old movie clip. The U.S.-based Internet Patent News Service is pointing patent lawyers to a website which says it hosts film of a prior demonstration of hyperlinking prior demonstration of hyperlinking. BT is basing its claim on a 1976 patent (4873662) that through a legal quirk remains in force until 2006. The 90-minute film was shot by Stanford University in 1968 when Douglas Englebart showed 1000 people the first mouse -- using it to click on hyperlinks.'" What's not open-and-shut here?

Linux Magazine interviewed IBM's chief Linux strategist, Irving Wladawksy-Berger, about IBM and Linux. IBM sees Linux as a disrupting technology of the same class as the Internet: an OS that can run on many platforms and that nobody owns: something that can fundamentally change the landscape of computing. By adding Linux compatability to AIX/Monterey, IBM is guaranteeing itself a big-iron version of Linux without angering the community by forking the kernel ... but they'd obviously also would like to see big-iron features added to Linux. Interestingly, Irving suggests IBM would be willing to open-source just about anything the Linux community wants ... one just needs to make one's mind known at IBM's developerworks site. Following the usual path, Linux adoption by IBM was a bottom-up process, finally convincing senior management. It's a shame that Linux Magazine did not ask about IBM's patent strategy, which was already a hot topic two years ago when slashdot facilitated the release of the Jikes compiler.

Arkan writes "After Adobe sued Macromedia over their patented tabbled widgets, Macromedia has made counterclaims against Adobe for using their patents on graphic element blending (5,467,443), and sound waveform editing (5,151,998 and 5,204,969)."

Arkan writes "After Adobe sued Macromedia over their patented tabbled widgets, Macromedia has made counterclaims against Adobe for using their patents on graphic element blending (5,467,443), and sound waveform editing (5,151,998 and 5,204,969)."

Arkan writes "After Adobe sued Macromedia over their patented tabbled widgets, Macromedia has made counterclaims against Adobe for using their patents on graphic element blending (5,467,443), and sound waveform editing (5,151,998 and 5,204,969)."

rageout noted that Cisco seems to have filed patent US5793763, which looks remarkably like RFC 1631 (the RFC that defines NAT). This came from this story on freebsddiary.