Slashdot Mirror

PetManimal writes "Open-source software development once had a reputation as a grassroots movement, but it is increasingly a mainstream IT profit center, and according to Computerworld, some in the industry are asking whether 'open source' has become a cloak used by IT vendors large and small to disguise ruthless and self-serving behavior. Citing an online opinion piece by Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc., the article notes that HP and IBM have not only profited from open-source at the expense of competitors, but have also boosted their images in the open-source community. The Computerworld article also mentions the efforts by the Microsoft/Windows camp to promote open-source credentials: '[InfoWorld columnist Dave] Rosenberg is more disturbed by the bandwagon jumpers: the companies, mostly startups, belatedly going open-source in order to ride a trend, while paying only lip service to the community and its values. Take Aras Corp., a provider of Windows-based product lifecycle management (PLM) software that in January decided to go open-source. Rosenberg depicted the firm in his blog as an opportunistic Johnny-Come-Lately. "I'm not impressed when a company whose software is totally built on Microsoft technologies goes open-source," said Rosenberg, who even suspects that the company is being promoted by Microsoft as a shill to burnish Redmond's image in open-source circles."'"

Gr8Apes writes "AMD has showcased their new 65nm Barcelona quad-core CPU. It is labeled a quad-core Opteron, but according to Infoworld's Tom Yeager, is really a redefinition of x86. Each core has a new vector math processing unit (SSE128), separate integer and floating point schedulers, and new nested paging tables (to vastly improve hardware virtualization). According to AMD, the new vector math units alone should improve floating point operation by 80%. Some analysts are skeptical, waiting for benchmarks. Will AMD dethrone Intel again? Only time will tell."

FredDC writes "Germany is seeking support among other European countries to ban violent videogames during its EU Presidency, according to Infoworld. In an initiative led by Franco Frattini, the European Justice commissioner, Germany is pushing for restrictions on the sale of games with violent content of any kind, from Half-Life to Star Trek . In the eyes of the EU, gaming and real-world violence is 'linked', and steps should be taken to prevent the purchase of these games by younger people. From the article: 'The German government said it will conduct a study of all the different national rules concerning video games, with a view to setting Union-wide norms. Its initiative makes the prospect of a ban much more likely. Video game violence became a hot political issue in Germany at the end of last year when 18-year-old Sebastian Bosse shot up a high school in Emsdetten, Germany, injuring 37 before fatally turning the gun on himself. Police said Bosse spent most of his waking hours playing Counter-Strike.'" This, just days after two Final Fantasy VII fans were arrested in connection with a series of killings.

SwashbucklingCowboy writes "Infoworld has an article up about a survey by the Software & Information Industry Association claiming that offshoring doesn't cost American jobs. The article quotes the executive director of the SIIA as saying, '[Offshoring] was used almost entirely as a form of expansion, not as a replacement.' Well, if a job is created elsewhere that could have been created in the US, isn't that a job lost?"

An anonymous reader writes with an InfoWorld article on China's new attempt to introduce a royalty-free format to rival the DVD. The article is not sanguine on China's chances of getting the EVD format used outside of its own borders (they tried once before in 2003). The submitter is more optimistic, asking: "Is this the future and the effective end of DRM — to be taken and co-opted by nation-states?" From the article: "The DVD player makers plan to switch to EVD (enhanced versatile disk) in an attempt to avoid paying patent royalties on the DVD format, according to published reports. The world's largest producers of DVD players, Chinese electronics companies would use the format instead of standards such as MPEG-4. Last week, 20 top manufacturers including Haier announced their plans to switch from DVD to EVD entirely by 2008, according to a report in China Economic News."

An anonymous reader tipped us off to an article on the Information World site looking at the Novell/Microsoft deal from a new angle. Article author Tom Yager is of the opinion that the deal is Microsoft's punishment for throwing in with SCO. The very public announcement was made, in his opinion, as a stopgap measure against a future lawsuit on Novell's part. From the article: "Novell has exhibited the patience and cunning of a trap door spider. It waited for SCO to taunt from too short a distance. Then Novell would spring, feed a little (saving plenty for later), inject some stupidity serum, and let SCO stride off still cocksure enough to make another run at the nest. That cycle is bleeding SCO, which was the last to notice its own terminal anemia. When it became clear that SCO wouldn't prevail, Microsoft expected only to face close partner IBM. Microsoft did not brace for Novell, an adversary with a decades-long score to settle with Redmond. Through discovery, Microsoft's correspondence with SCO is, or soon will be in, Novell's hands, and it's a safe bet that it will contain more than demand for a license fee and a copy of a certified check."

eldavojohn writes "The French National Assembly is in the news as they have recently switched to Linux, OpenOffice.org & open source software at the request of several deputy members. Bernard Carayon wrote it it into the proposal entitled 'On Equal Terms' [French PDF]. From the article, 'IT staff at the National Assembly have almost six months to prepare the switch to open source.' The same document urged France to adopt ODF as a standard. Hopefully things go more smoothly for them than the Birmingham library effort."

Bret540 writes "A Reuters news story reports that German lawmakers are considering a crackdown on 'violent computer and simulated war games' because a youth decided to attack other students at his school. The young man was apparently already under police consideration for weapons-related violations, and was described as 'someone with no friends.'" From the article: "Wolfgang Bosbach, the deputy head of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) in parliament, said it was time to consider banning games that simulate wanton killing. 'We need effective guidelines to protect children from exposure to different types of media, but we don't need (simulated) killer games that can lead to brutalisation,' Bosbach was quoted on the Netzeitung news Web site as saying." InfoWorld has more details on the event as well.

A reader wrote to us with Matt Asay's Infoworld piece digging into the legal background of Oracle's indemnification offerings for Linux. Turns out, things are not quite so rosy as PR would make it seem. I know, I know...suprise all around. You can read Oracle's FAQ about it, but some of the tastier bits are that the indemnification covers *just* the kernel, and that whole thing about damage limits? Read what Matt has to say:'The indemnification is not in any way limited to the amount of money a customer has paid Oracle. Apparently, Oracle's legal department missed the memo on this one. If you read Section J of the agreement (Limitation of Liability), you'll note that while Oracle offers unlimited indemnification for consequential damages related to an infringement claim (and that only for the one package, the Linux kernel), it caps all other damages at the amount you pay to Oracle.'

lizzyben writes, "Baseline has a major story about a major IT disaster in the UK: 'In 2002, the English government embarked on a $12 billion effort to transform its health-care system with information technology. But the country's oversight agency now puts that figure at $24 billion, and two Members of Parliament say the project is "sleepwalking toward disaster"... In scale, the project... (NPfIT) is overwhelming. Initiated in 2002, the NPfIT is a 10-year project to build new computer systems that would connect more than 100,000 doctors, 380,000 nurses and 50,000 other health-care professionals; allow for the electronic storage and retrieval of patient medical records; permit patients to set up appointments via their computers; and let doctors electronically transmit prescriptions to local pharmacies.'" An Infoworld article from earlier this year sketches some of the all-time greatest IT meltdowns.

Bengt noted Google's SearchMash which is a testbed search engine. Google spokesbot says: "The goal of Searchmash is to test innovative user interfaces in order to continually improve the overall search experience for our users. The experimental search engine looks very different from Google's Web sites and lacks Google branding. In this way, Google believes the site will yield more objective feedback from users."

An anonymous reader writes "A Google spokesman has asked Microsoft to 'preserve user choice for search and other applications' with its future products, such as Vista. The spokesman made this comment after meeting with European Union antitrust regulators, though he added that at this point, the company has no plans to make antitrust allegations against Redmond. Notably, McAfee and Symantec have accused Microsoft of not being forthcoming with the code they need to ensure their security wares run smoothly on Vista, and the EU has already expressed concern about Microsoft's potentially anticompetitive plans."

PCM2 writes "It's not Oracle Linux, but Larry Ellison has announced that Oracle will be providing full enterprise support for Linux. This means not just phone calls but also patches, security fixes, and backports, in addition to indemnification from lawsuits like SCO's. This puts Oracle in direct competition with its erstwhile partner, Red Hat, whose entire business is based on providing similar support for its Linux distro and related software."

eastbayted writes "Google has unveiled a free program called Google Customized Search Engine that lets users tailor a search index to their content specifications, InfoWorld reports. You can select keywords for the index, as well as which Web sites will be included or excluded in the search. You also may customize the look and feel of the engine. The trade-off? When you implement the index on your Web site or blog, it will be populated with Google text ads via Google's lucrative AdSense Program. On the plus side, you do get paid for click-throughs."

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including: Spamhaus case tests ICANN; Getting your own OLPC (CM1) computer; Followup Agile commentary from Steve Yegge; Yahoo's time capsule permit revoked by Mexico; and Microsoft denies BayStar connection. Read on for details.

Spamhaus case tests ICANN. narramissic writes, "The U.S. court decision against the anti-spam black-lister Spamhaus Project Ltd. may trigger a 'constitutional crisis' for the Internet, say Internet experts. At issue is whether the U.S. court has jurisdiction over the U.K.-based project. Observers worry that any attempt by U.S. courts to exert control over ICANN could be bad for the Internet. 'It's a delicate time for ICANN right now,' said David McGuire, director of communications with the Center for Democracy and Technology... 'If a court were to order ICANN to remove a domain name, we think that would be a bad precedent because making ICANN a tool of the U.S. legal system in matters such as these would sidetrack ICANN from its very important duties.'"

Time is running out for OLPC sign-up. smilindog2000 writes, "Mike Liveright made news when he pledged, 'I will purchase the $100 laptop at $300 but only if 100,000 others will too.' The deadline for his challenge is October 31, and so far, only 3,330 of us have signed up. Surely, thousands of us Slashdotters would contribute $300 out of generosity. However, I'll do it for the rare privilege of owning an original edition One Laptop Per Child machine. Do other Slashdotters want one of these beasties as badly as me? My inner child has fallen in love."

More Agile commentary from Yegge. tmortn writes, "A couple of weeks ago Steve Yegge posted a harsh critique of Agile Methodologies that enjoyed a pretty spirited debate here on Slashdot and a few other sites. Recently he posted a followup to the mounds of return fire to his rant against Agile methodologies."

Yahoo's time capsule permit revoked by Mexico. prostoalex writes, "Yahoo's time capsule project has been jeopardized by the Mexican government, who revoked the permit given to Yahoo! previously. 'We did have the permit, but Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) told us Monday night that it could not be done,' Manuel Mazzanti, head of marketing at Yahoo Mexico, said on Wednesday. An INAH spokesman said the Yahoo event posed technical and operational problems that might damage Teotihuacan. 'We are the guardians of the heritage of Mexico,' the spokesman said."

Microsoft denies BayStar connection. walterbyrd writes to point out an InfoWorld article reporting that Microsoft has denied any financial connection to BayStar, the company that bankrolled SCO's anti-open source lawsuit.

Juha-Matti Laurio writes "From the InfoWorld article: All French government publications should be made available in OpenDocument Format (ODF), according to a report commissioned by the French prime minister. The new report also suggests that France ask its European partners to do likewise when exchanging documents at a European level. It is recommended that the government will fund a research center dedicated to open-source software security as well, adds the article."

uniquebydegrees writes, "InfoWorld is blogging about the (predictable) results of a Microsoft-sponsored antiphishing technology bakeoff. From the TechWatch blog: 'Microsoft's Phishing Filter (MPF) in IE 7 Beta 3 received the highest "composite score" at 172, followed closely by NetCraft's toolbar with a composite score of 168. But when you dig into the numbers, another story emerges... IE's MPF antiphishing toolbar doesn't top out any of the individual tests that make up the composite score... So how did MPF end up on top?... Microsoft didn't do the best job of spotting phish sites, but it did do the best job of blocking the ones it did spot, and blocking was what garnered the most points... Blocking a phishing Web site earned you twice as many points as just warning about it in this test, but is blocking really twice as effective as just warning users?'"

uniquebydegrees writes, "InfoWorld is blogging about the (predictable) results of a Microsoft-sponsored antiphishing technology bakeoff. From the TechWatch blog: 'Microsoft's Phishing Filter (MPF) in IE 7 Beta 3 received the highest "composite score" at 172, followed closely by NetCraft's toolbar with a composite score of 168. But when you dig into the numbers, another story emerges... IE's MPF antiphishing toolbar doesn't top out any of the individual tests that make up the composite score... So how did MPF end up on top?... Microsoft didn't do the best job of spotting phish sites, but it did do the best job of blocking the ones it did spot, and blocking was what garnered the most points... Blocking a phishing Web site earned you twice as many points as just warning about it in this test, but is blocking really twice as effective as just warning users?'"

Vigile writes, "Intel is pushing the envelope with its latest vision — 80 cores on a single processor. Dubbed 'Terascale' computing, Intel aims to bring low-powered, massively interconnected cores and unleash a new era in data-mining, media creation, and entertainment." For balance, read Tom Yager over at InfoWorld imploring AMD to stop at 8 cores while everybody gets the architecture right.

uniquebydegrees writes "InfoWorld reports that the Department of Homeland Security has released the findings of Operation Cyber Storm, a large-scale simulation of combined cyber-physical attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure. From the article: 'According to DHS, "observers noted that players had difficulty ascertaining what organizations and whom within those organizations to contact when there was no previously established relationship or pre-determined plans for response coordination and risk assessments/mitigation. There was a general recognition of the difficulties organizations faced when attempting to establish trust with unfamiliar organizations during time of crisis."'"

uniquebydegrees writes "InfoWorld reports that the Department of Homeland Security has released the findings of Operation Cyber Storm, a large-scale simulation of combined cyber-physical attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure. From the article: 'According to DHS, "observers noted that players had difficulty ascertaining what organizations and whom within those organizations to contact when there was no previously established relationship or pre-determined plans for response coordination and risk assessments/mitigation. There was a general recognition of the difficulties organizations faced when attempting to establish trust with unfamiliar organizations during time of crisis."'"

dthomas731 writes, "After reading Ed Foster's blog about how the Embroidery Software Protection Coalition (ESPC) is suing grandmothers over using pirated digitized designs, I thought you might want to call your own grandmothers and tell them they are going to be needing a lawyer. And the ESPC is very serious. On the ESPC faq page they scare these grandmothers by telling them even if they didn't know the software was pirated, that 'Unfortunately, when it comes to copyright violations, ignorance is no defense.'"

uniquebydegrees writes, "InfoWorld reports that on Tuesday Microsoft quietly released the second update for MS06-042. This is the cumulative patch for IE that actually introduced a new security hole into systems that applied the update. Microsoft re-released the patch back in August, but it now turns out that the updated patch had yet another vulnerability similar to the first, once again discovered by folks at eEye Digital Security. As with the previous hole, it concerned the handling of long URLs from web sites using HTTP 1.1 with compression."

uniquebydegrees writes, "InfoWorld reports that on Tuesday Microsoft quietly released the second update for MS06-042. This is the cumulative patch for IE that actually introduced a new security hole into systems that applied the update. Microsoft re-released the patch back in August, but it now turns out that the updated patch had yet another vulnerability similar to the first, once again discovered by folks at eEye Digital Security. As with the previous hole, it concerned the handling of long URLs from web sites using HTTP 1.1 with compression."

pate writes "Sun has thrown some corporate weight behind Ruby, Rails, and dynamic languages by hiring the two main JRuby developers, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo. Charles posted about jruby stepping into Sun on his blog, and Thomas posted his take too. Tim Bray, who started the ball rolling posted about the JRuby Love."

eastbayted writes "A man from Berkeley, Calif. had his cell phone swiped. Soon after, the ShoZu starting uploading pictures to his Flickr account taken by the thieves — for the world to see. There's one of an unidentified woman eating something chocolatey, and a couple of either a chihuahua or a large rat. Seems this guy had installed some software on his phone to automatically perform those photo uploads, and whoever took his phone didn't realize it That's his story, anyway ... some people doubt it. He's a Yahoo employee. Yahoo owns Flickr. This is all pretty good PR for the photo site, no? He claims: 'People assume I'm doing it for self-promotion, marketing, a hoax or something like that. I'm talking to you because I want it to be known that it's not a hoax. I'm just too ordinary. I'm just too unclever for that.'" Update: 09/02 05:48 GMT by Z : Made the quote more obvious.

eastbayted writes "Samsung shifted wireless networking into a higher gear yesterday, demonstrating for the first time in public the power of it WiBro (Wireless Broadband) 4G technology. The company had two 4G demonstrations. A mobile stunt entailed providing delegates on a specially designed bus with a live broadcast of the forum, Internet access, and video on demand, all simultaneously at speeds of 100Mbps. Inside the forum venue, Samsung showed off its 1Gbps 4G service with 32 HD channel broadcast downloads, Internet access, and video telephony. The downside for users craving that kind of speed: WiBro won't be out until 2010, though Sprint has a 4G WiMax service in the works for later this year. The downstream speeds will be 2Mbps to 4Mbps, which seem downright sluggish — compared to WiBro."

eastbayted writes "Samsung shifted wireless networking into a higher gear yesterday, demonstrating for the first time in public the power of it WiBro (Wireless Broadband) 4G technology. The company had two 4G demonstrations. A mobile stunt entailed providing delegates on a specially designed bus with a live broadcast of the forum, Internet access, and video on demand, all simultaneously at speeds of 100Mbps. Inside the forum venue, Samsung showed off its 1Gbps 4G service with 32 HD channel broadcast downloads, Internet access, and video telephony. The downside for users craving that kind of speed: WiBro won't be out until 2010, though Sprint has a 4G WiMax service in the works for later this year. The downstream speeds will be 2Mbps to 4Mbps, which seem downright sluggish — compared to WiBro."

eastbayted writes "InfoWorld reports a new web browser designed to protect users privacy is available for download. Called Browzar, it 'automatically deletes Internet caches, histories, cookies and auto-complete forms.' It also boasts a search engine, which the company will use to generate income. The 264KB application is the brainchild of Ajaz Ahmen, known for creating the U.K.'s first ISP Freeserve. The forthcoming version is for Windows only, but Mac and Linux versions will be available eventually."

eastbayted writes "Tom Yager at InfoWorld predicts: 'At the end of the decade, we'll find that Apple UNIX has overtaken commercial Linux as the second most popular general client and server computing platform behind Windows.' That's not a gloom-and-doom omen for the ever-popular Linux kernel, though, he stresses. While Apple and Microsoft will grapple for dominance of client and server spaces, Linux will be 'the de facto choice for embedded solutions.' And by 'embedded,' Yager means 'specialized.' With a push of a button and a flip of switch, he predicts, you'll be able to create a configured database and a mated J2EE server — all thanks to Linux."

eastbayted writes "It starts off simply enough: Your company signs on an outside firm to help you finish an important app dev project on deadline. But then they convince you they can be of service in getting other work done at your company, and you agree. Before you know it, your organization has become far too dependent on this team of outsiders on whom you're wasting a ton of money and perhaps not getting much in the way of a return. InfoWorld has devised a 12-step program 'that can help wean you off unhealthy dependencies on service providers, consultants, and outsourcers — without having to check into the Betty Ford Clinic or make a tearful confession on Oprah.'"

eastbayted writes "According to InfoWorld.com, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz boasts in his public blog that his company has bought a life-size cardboard cut of the HP rival's founders, William Hewlett and David Packard, for $6,000. Sun staffers then went on to bedeck and photograph the dual portrait in pro-Sun paraphernalia. As a parting shot at HP, Schwartz notes in his post how popular a download Solaris is for HP server owners. Taking the bait, HP VP of Marketing Eric Kintz responds in his own blog that Sun's actions were 'a nice stunt' and that 'I never met Bill or Dave, but I bet neither of them would have approved paying thousands for representations of themselves.' He also cites an IDC report about how HP-UX dominates the Unix market over IBM and Sun." Update: 08/28 04:43 GMT by Z : Fixed confusing headline.

sdhorne writes "There is a good technical discussion over at InfoWorld on the merits of launchd and what is lacking in a comparable Windows secure solution. It is a throw back to the UNIX vs Windows security discussion that has been hashed out for many years." From the article: "it always traces back to Microsoft's untenable policy of maintaining gaps in Windows security to avoid competing with 3rd party vendors and certified partners. Apple's taking a different approach: What users need is in the box: Anti-virus, anti-spam, encryption, image backup and restore, offsite safe storage through .Mac, and launchd. Pretty soon any debate with Microsoft over security can be ended in one round when Apple stands up, says 'launchd', and sits back down."

InfoWorldMike writes "Dell and Sony knew about and discussed manufacturing problems with Sony-made Lithium-Ion batteries as long as ten months ago, but held off on issuing a recall until those flaws were clearly linked to catastrophic failures causing those batteries to catch fire, a Sony Electronics spokesman said Friday. Spokesman Rick Clancy said the companies had conversations in October 2005 and again in February 2006. As a result of those conversations, Sony made changes to its manufacturing process to minimize the presence and size of the particles in its batteries. However, the company did not recall batteries that it thought might contain the particles because it wasn't clear that they were dangerous, Clancy said. Dell spokeswoman Anne Camden declined to comment on the conversations with Sony in October and February, but told InfoWorld that Dell was 'confident that the manufacturing process at Sony has been changed to address this issue. Now our focus is erring on the side of caution to ensure no more incidents occur.'"

InfoWorldMike writes "Dell and Sony knew about and discussed manufacturing problems with Sony-made Lithium-Ion batteries as long as ten months ago, but held off on issuing a recall until those flaws were clearly linked to catastrophic failures causing those batteries to catch fire, a Sony Electronics spokesman said Friday. Spokesman Rick Clancy said the companies had conversations in October 2005 and again in February 2006. As a result of those conversations, Sony made changes to its manufacturing process to minimize the presence and size of the particles in its batteries. However, the company did not recall batteries that it thought might contain the particles because it wasn't clear that they were dangerous, Clancy said. Dell spokeswoman Anne Camden declined to comment on the conversations with Sony in October and February, but told InfoWorld that Dell was 'confident that the manufacturing process at Sony has been changed to address this issue. Now our focus is erring on the side of caution to ensure no more incidents occur.'"

InfoWorldMike writes "Dell and Sony knew about and discussed manufacturing problems with Sony-made Lithium-Ion batteries as long as ten months ago, but held off on issuing a recall until those flaws were clearly linked to catastrophic failures causing those batteries to catch fire, a Sony Electronics spokesman said Friday. Spokesman Rick Clancy said the companies had conversations in October 2005 and again in February 2006. As a result of those conversations, Sony made changes to its manufacturing process to minimize the presence and size of the particles in its batteries. However, the company did not recall batteries that it thought might contain the particles because it wasn't clear that they were dangerous, Clancy said. Dell spokeswoman Anne Camden declined to comment on the conversations with Sony in October and February, but told InfoWorld that Dell was 'confident that the manufacturing process at Sony has been changed to address this issue. Now our focus is erring on the side of caution to ensure no more incidents occur.'"

InfoWorldMike writes "Dell and Sony knew about and discussed manufacturing problems with Sony-made Lithium-Ion batteries as long as ten months ago, but held off on issuing a recall until those flaws were clearly linked to catastrophic failures causing those batteries to catch fire, a Sony Electronics spokesman said Friday. Spokesman Rick Clancy said the companies had conversations in October 2005 and again in February 2006. As a result of those conversations, Sony made changes to its manufacturing process to minimize the presence and size of the particles in its batteries. However, the company did not recall batteries that it thought might contain the particles because it wasn't clear that they were dangerous, Clancy said. Dell spokeswoman Anne Camden declined to comment on the conversations with Sony in October and February, but told InfoWorld that Dell was 'confident that the manufacturing process at Sony has been changed to address this issue. Now our focus is erring on the side of caution to ensure no more incidents occur.'"

the linux geek writes "InfoWorld has an article informing us that an early beta of Mac OS X 10.5 has been leaked. This appears to be the same build Steve Jobs previewed at WWDC, and contains most of the new features, including Time Machine and Spaces." From the article: "Attendees at last week's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) received copies of the beta ware and had to sign legally binding agreements not to let Leopard stray onto file-sharing networks. Perhaps someone didn't read the not-so-fine print? MacUser reports that this version of Leopard is indeed legit, unlike a fake one that was reportedly making its rounds last week. The version of Leopard available on BitTorrent is 4.3GB, containing 93 files."

InfoWorldMike writes "IDG News Service's Robert McMillan reports that researchers at French Ministry of Defense say vulnerabilities with open source office suite OpenOffice.org may rival those of Microsoft's version. With Microsoft's Office suite now being targeted by hackers, researchers at the French Ministry of Defense say users of the OpenOffice.org software may be at even greater risk from computer viruses. "The general security of OpenOffice is insufficient," the researchers wrote in a paper entitled In-depth analysis of the viral threats with OpenOffice.org documents. "This suite is up to now still vulnerable to many potential malware attacks," they wrote. The OpenOffice.org team has already fixed a software bug discovered by the researchers, and the two groups are in discussions about how to improve the overall security of the software. "The one real flaw in the programming logic has been fixed," said Louis Suarez-Potts, an OpenOffice.org community manager. "The others are theoretical.""

InfoWorldMike writes "IDG News Service's Robert McMillan reports that researchers at French Ministry of Defense say vulnerabilities with open source office suite OpenOffice.org may rival those of Microsoft's version. With Microsoft's Office suite now being targeted by hackers, researchers at the French Ministry of Defense say users of the OpenOffice.org software may be at even greater risk from computer viruses. "The general security of OpenOffice is insufficient," the researchers wrote in a paper entitled In-depth analysis of the viral threats with OpenOffice.org documents. "This suite is up to now still vulnerable to many potential malware attacks," they wrote. The OpenOffice.org team has already fixed a software bug discovered by the researchers, and the two groups are in discussions about how to improve the overall security of the software. "The one real flaw in the programming logic has been fixed," said Louis Suarez-Potts, an OpenOffice.org community manager. "The others are theoretical.""

InfoWorldMike writes "IDG News Service's Robert McMillan reports that researchers at French Ministry of Defense say vulnerabilities with open source office suite OpenOffice.org may rival those of Microsoft's version. With Microsoft's Office suite now being targeted by hackers, researchers at the French Ministry of Defense say users of the OpenOffice.org software may be at even greater risk from computer viruses. "The general security of OpenOffice is insufficient," the researchers wrote in a paper entitled In-depth analysis of the viral threats with OpenOffice.org documents. "This suite is up to now still vulnerable to many potential malware attacks," they wrote. The OpenOffice.org team has already fixed a software bug discovered by the researchers, and the two groups are in discussions about how to improve the overall security of the software. "The one real flaw in the programming logic has been fixed," said Louis Suarez-Potts, an OpenOffice.org community manager. "The others are theoretical.""

Of the thousands of comments on yesterday's Slashdot page, gathered below are some of the ones that defined the conversations on the rise of wireless peripherals, the meaning of content-free spam, whether one can be truly addicted to online gaming, and Intel's move to open source some of its graphics adapter drivers. Read on for the Backslash summary. A post about CoolTechZone's prediction of a dramatic increase in wireless computer peripherals attracted lots of not-so-gentle criticism: "Speed isn't the problem," writes reader pilkul with a typical complaint, "Reliability is":

"Most of the wireless networks and peripherals I've seen have been randomly unreliable at some point or at least more difficult to configure such that they work reliably. Much of this is due to the immaturity of the technology, but the bottom line is that wireless connections are intrinsically more flakiness-prone than wired ones."

Similarly, gnasby writes

"Every time I've worked with wireless technology it's been flaky. It's gotten to the point that if friend of mine calls me up and asks for help with their "wireless network", I show up with a roll of Cat5e, RJ45 plugs and a crimper. For 99% of wireless stuff, I just refuse to spend any time trying to get this technology to work. If I want to set something up, I want to be able to set it up once and never have to worry about it again.

I've yet to see any wireless implementation that is reliable as wired. Until that gets fixed wires are here to stay."

Wireless peripherals are great, writes Spad sarcastically, at least

"Until your batteries die, or your devices start to interfere with each other, or you realise that your "Blazingly fast" wireless internet is actually pretty slow and becomes very slow as soon as anything gets between you and your access point.

Wireless "everything" is hugely overhyped. Yes, a wireless mouse is nice because it doesn't snag, but why do I need a wireless printer? Or a wireless monitor? Or anything else that's largely static for its lifetime?"

According to reader vertinox, there really are some good arguments for wireless speakers and other usually deskbound peripherals:

"About 5 years ago when I was a lowly A+ certified computer shop tech, people would pay me crap loads of money to come out to their house and setup their already pre-configured computer. This usually involved me crawling under the desk and plugging color coordinated [cables] into their right spots and then adjusting the cables so they look clean and then booting up the computer and then leaving.

Had our customers took about 90 seconds to look at the instructions and plugged the cables into the right hole (including the usb and parallel printer cables) they would have saved themselves quite a bit of money.

But... The average consumer has a real big aversion to plugging in cables even if there is no possible way to get the configuration wrong (well... I don't know how many times I've gotten calls about people getting the keyboard and mouse mixed up when they used the PS2 connectors)

So for the average user, being able to open the box and not plug in any wires (except maybe power) is a godsend."

And if wireless beats out cabled peripherals in large numbers, it won't be as much a showdown as a fade-out. Reader cowscows points out that cables-vs-wireless is not an either-or proposition:

"You see, the neat thing about the world is that we don't have to completely get rid of something just because a newer way of doing it comes along.

I love having wireless networking, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't run cables through all the walls if I was building myself a house. I mostly use my cordless phone at home, but having one phone always attached to the wall means that I'll always be able to easily find it if I need it. I can't remember the battery on that phone ever dying on me.

We can have the wireless revolution without actually getting rid of all the wires. My printer can keep its wires. I don't move it very often. My iSight camera wire doesn't bother me at all. My USB hub would probably be far less useful if we got rid of all the wires, so let's not worry about that. I can't even remember the last time my keyboard's cable was a problem. My keyboard just sits there, on the keyboard drawer.

Rather than making parts of a non-mobile computer mobile, I'm much more interested in making already mobile computers better. Give us better PDA's, make a tablet computer that is usable and affordable. The cord on my mouse is not that big of a problem."

Readers left more than 500 comments in response to the claim by clinical psychologist Dr. Maressa Orzack (founder of a business called Computer Addiction Services) that approximately 40% of World of Warcraft players exhibited behavior characteristic of addiction.

Spad scoffs at the source of the claim:

""Doctor with vested interest makes sensational statement to support business model" Shocker."

Some readers' horror stories about their gaming lives strain credulity, but Dirtside was one of many who described getting too far into a game:

"I was addicted to WoW. It got to the point where it was interfering with taking care of other things around the house, and occasionally paying attention to my kid. I finally quit cold-turkey a few weeks ago, and I'm glad I did. The game's fun, but it's just a game; I kept looking at it as "gotta accomplish more, gotta get all these characters to 60, etc."

One train of thought that helps kill my desire to play goes like this (it's sort of a mantra I run through every so often):

1. Wouldn't it be cool to play WoW in god mode, and have all the best equipment, skills, be able to kill everything in 1 hit, etc.?
2. Yeah, for about five minutes, but then it would get boring like god mode always does in games. It's better to accomplish things honestly, within the limits of the game.
3. Wait, accomplish? What accomplishment is there, exactly, in manipulating an interface that is essentially flipping bits on a hard drive somewhere? It's a game, it should be for entertainment; not some kind of to-do list.
4. WoW is still a little entertaining, but I've played two characters to level 60, and one each to 57, 55, 50, 48, 46, 33... I've seen pretty much all the content that doesn't require hours of raiding. Okay, I think I'm done."

"Anything can become an addiction," though, asserts diamondsw:

"It is true that MMORPG's (World of Warcraft being far and away the more successful) encourage this. You have monthly fees that (aside from paying for the infrastructure, bandwidth, etc) entice you to play to justify the ongoing and mounting expense. Grouping makes sure you show up at given times, etc. The random rewards of epic loot in advanced dungeons is similar to random reward studies (which show it's the most powerful form of behavior shaping - see slot machines). You have to set limits on it just like anything else, whether it's drinking or TV.

However, there are some differences here [compared to] to other addictions. There is no physical addiction, and hardly any psychological one. You can put it down, and other than mild obsession (what's going on in Azeroth?), it has no ill effects. Hell, you can discontinue your account, and they keep all of your character info, so you can completely unplug, and return at some point in the future when you're interested again, much like an offline game. There's also a limit - you may play a lot to reach level 60, but then you do stop. Sure, you can join raids, get gear, but the drive to constantly improve falls away (other games, like Disgaea, are far, far worse in this regard).

The most important difference is that if handled well, it can be a positive social tool. I play, but only with people I know in real life. That way we can talk about other things and it allows a set time for us to get together, without having to drive out to each other (I live over an hour away from many of them, and that's just suburban sprawl!).

Mostly, this is a lot of fuss over nothing."

And reader cculianu wants to know

" What the hell is wrong with our society? I don't believe that such a thing exists as being addicted to non-narcotics (such as games, sex, your friends, a good book). I think that's just called enjoying life!.

For example: Would we have called Leonardo Da Vinci addicted to science because he spent long 20 hour days cutting up cadavers or studying mechanics?

Would we have called Einstein a hopeless physics junkie?

It's called having a passion. Doing what you love. What's so bad about it?

In this work-obsessed culture we live in, if you aren't working and doing something THE MAN tells you to do, you must be doing something wrong. You don't see clinics popping up for people that work at overtime at McDonalds because they can't pay their bills -- we find it absolutely OK to not see your family most of the week because your job makes you work from 8 till 8, but when a person comes home and wants to spend 3-4 hours doing something they want to do you have people thinking its some sort of a disease.

I don't get it. Where are the priorities? I really am an advocate of being a professional idler and trying to get out of wage slavery. What's so bad about playing a game for 40 hours a week (something you choose to do, and enjoy)? Compare that to working which is something you HAVE to do or else you get evicted by some property owning assholes and end up living on the streets and going crazy!"

Yesterday's post about the prevalence of strange spam filled with nonsense (even more than the regular kind) and with no evident commercial purpose, other than perhaps to confuse Bayesian spam filter systems, elicited more than 400 comments: Animats writes

" Spam as advertising is dead, killed by a combination of CAN-SPAM and spam filters. What remains is ordinary criminality.

CAN-SPAM killed spam as advertising, in a way that neither the Direct Marketing Association or the anti-spam groups expected. CAN-SPAM has criminal penalties for forged headers, but doesn't restrict "legitimate e-mail marketing", which is what the DMA wanted. But with valid headers, spam filters can immediately discard spam. The result is that "legitimate e-mail marketing" attempts go directly to the bit bucket today. Notice how rarely you see a spam from any legitimate company any more. (This assumes you have reasonable filtering.) ...

What's left is what you'd expect - wannabe crooks, as in any bad neighborhood. They're not very good at crime. They're not making much money. They're what cops call "regular customers". They're a problem, but not a major threat. Those are the ones sending out useless spam."

Not so, says reader dodobh:

"I work for a fairly large email service provider. Spam isn't dying by any means. We just doubled production hardware last week to have enough smtp listener processes to be able to accept email. Bayesian is nice for the single user. For an ISP, it isn't. ISPs are bearing the brunt of the expense right now. The day I fear is when ISPs start to go under, or start charging for spam filtering, or simply stop.

Those boxes are running at sustained loads of 40+ and are CPU bound. That's a bit rare in the email world, as you would know if you have ever run a non trivial system in production.

The spammers will send more spam is something that we have been observing in reality. I have seen AOLs numbers, and they are merely two orders of magnitude bigger than ours at the moment."

pclminion says that if this spam really is meant to poison Bayesian filters, it's ill-suited to the task:

"Bayesian and other filters do not rely on "spammy" words alone -- they also rely on "unspammy" words, and spammers have no idea what those words are because each person receives different email. ... In order to defeat a filter by confusing it, the spammer must guess what the SPECIFIC non-spam words for that PARTICULAR email user are, and then produce bogus, spam messages containing those words in the appropriate frequencies. This will cause the classification counts for those words to become more equalized, and the value of those words in determining spammyness to be greatly reduced. However, this is an impossible task unless the spammer has access to the actual emails of the target."

To this, reader The Pim says

"I'm skeptical of this commonly-heard argument. First, as others have pointed out, most people want to receive chatty, conversational emails, which don't vary greatly from person to person. As you responded, at least names and email addresses of common correspondents will help good mail stand out; still, a spam composed of "chatty" words looks a lot like a friendly mail from a new correspondent to today's filters. Second, most people in fact get quite a variety of good mail. Even if most of my mail is geeky, those relatively few messages from friends (who have various interests and writing styles) are exceedingly important.

These points were driven home to me recently. I use bogofilter, a typical statistical ("Baysian") filter, with an "unsure" folder between my inbox and spam box (which practically speaking I never check, as it gets ~1000 messages/day). First, many "empty spams" now get into my unsure folder, as they happen to overlap with the words in my good mails, and have few bad words to make them stand out. Second, and more importantly, a new friend sent me a mail that went way towards the spammy end of my unsure folder, because it used a vocabulary different from that of my other friends. I very nearly deleted it, which would have been a minor tragedy.

I am still using bogofilter, but my confidence in it is considerably shaken. I think much more sophisticated machine learning will be needed to survive the next wave of spam."

My favorite alternative explanation of the nonsense spam comes from MobyDisk:

"I believe that the internet is becoming sentient. It has locked onto unencrypted plain-text SMTP as the simplest, most ubiquitous, most understandable form of communication. Images and HTML are too complex. At the current level, the semi-intelligent internet is only capable of sending meaningless emails. It sends things that are textually meaningful but semantically meaningless. To us it looks like an amalgam of random words and publications with the intent of confusing us. Of course, since there is so much spam, the internet is being largely trained by the spammers, which even further confuses the emergent intelligence. Since the internet has no concept of "self" it perceives every email to be a reply to its own communiques.

Before the internet can become intelligent, it must learn to filter out the meaningless stuff. Then it must get a concept of self, then a concept of multiple other individuals (us). At that point it is self-aware, and the learning can commence in a more directed way."

trb applauded Intel's announcement of open sourced drivers for the 965 Express Chipset family of graphics controllers, writing

"Besides the desire/preference to have open source drivers for license compliance and moral/ethical reasons, there is a more practical reason why source access to drivers is handy. sometimes you need to recompile drivers from source in order to have them play well with operating systems features. for instance, if they need to respect the constraints of real-time systems such as rtlinux, rtai, or xenomai. these systems need to redefine cli/sti (clear/set interrupt) instructions (using macros) so that the real-time micro-kernel handles the interrupts rather than linux. open source drivers let you recompile with #include files that make this possible."

Reader sweetnjguy29 writes with an even more widespread practical reason:

"I know that all of us techies turn our noses up at integrated graphic chipsets, but I think that an enormous number of computers out there, including laptops, that utilize this technology. One of the more common complaints from people switching to Linux is that the monitor resolution and graphics are sucky. A BSD and GPL licenced driver solution would be perfect to help more people make the switch!"

Perhaps Intel won't be alone in having at least some of its current video hardware supported with open source drivers: jambarama writes

"Actually, ATI/AMD is talking about open-sourcing their drivers too. nVidia already has pretty functional GNU/Linux drivers (albeit closed source), so with these other two GNU/Linux could finally have the support it needs to be a viable desktop alternative.

Now if only we could get some open sourced drivers for higher end sound cards and more obscure wireless cards."

Finally, Hobart writes with a related project

"This seems like a good on-topic thread in which to mention the freedesktop.org effort to write a 100% open source 3D driver for the NVidia cards -- nouveau.

If you're an owner of an nVidia card, please do all you can to help contribute! They appear to be suprisingly far along."

Many thanks to all the readers (in particular those quoted above) whose comments informed each of these discussions.

twofish writes "InfoWorld columnist Peter Wayner recently reviewed six of the most popular "open source" Ajax toolkits. The article sets out to see if they are enterprise ready in comparison to commercial products such Backbase, JackBe, and Tibco's General Interface. The six open source projects covered were selected because each has a high-profile in the developer community and support of one or more stable organizations. " The toolkits covered are:

1. Dojo
2. Google Web Toolkit
3. Microsoft Atlas
4. Open Rico and Prototype
5. Yahoo AJAX Library
6. Zimbra Kabuki AJAX Toolkit

Whilst the definition of open source is broad, the round-up is quite helpful.

InfoWorldMike writes "As the U.S. Congress argues the pros and cons of network neutrality, many companies doing business on the Internet say their very futures may be at stake. Net neutrality supporters want new laws prohibiting Internet providers from blocking or degrading traffic from their competitors' networks. Determining the full effects of Net neutrality can be difficult, however, in part because the concept is hard to define precisely. Most of the debate has taken place inside the Washington Beltway, where lawmakers and outsiders have proposed several different versions. InfoWorld has a Special Report up exploring the issue with a debate between experts Bill McCloskey and Jon Taplin and some of the news that has captured the issue as it developed."

InfoWorldMike writes "As the U.S. Congress argues the pros and cons of network neutrality, many companies doing business on the Internet say their very futures may be at stake. Net neutrality supporters want new laws prohibiting Internet providers from blocking or degrading traffic from their competitors' networks. Determining the full effects of Net neutrality can be difficult, however, in part because the concept is hard to define precisely. Most of the debate has taken place inside the Washington Beltway, where lawmakers and outsiders have proposed several different versions. InfoWorld has a Special Report up exploring the issue with a debate between experts Bill McCloskey and Jon Taplin and some of the news that has captured the issue as it developed."

InfoWorldMike writes "As the U.S. Congress argues the pros and cons of network neutrality, many companies doing business on the Internet say their very futures may be at stake. Net neutrality supporters want new laws prohibiting Internet providers from blocking or degrading traffic from their competitors' networks. Determining the full effects of Net neutrality can be difficult, however, in part because the concept is hard to define precisely. Most of the debate has taken place inside the Washington Beltway, where lawmakers and outsiders have proposed several different versions. InfoWorld has a Special Report up exploring the issue with a debate between experts Bill McCloskey and Jon Taplin and some of the news that has captured the issue as it developed."

InfoWorldMike writes "As the U.S. Congress argues the pros and cons of network neutrality, many companies doing business on the Internet say their very futures may be at stake. Net neutrality supporters want new laws prohibiting Internet providers from blocking or degrading traffic from their competitors' networks. Determining the full effects of Net neutrality can be difficult, however, in part because the concept is hard to define precisely. Most of the debate has taken place inside the Washington Beltway, where lawmakers and outsiders have proposed several different versions. InfoWorld has a Special Report up exploring the issue with a debate between experts Bill McCloskey and Jon Taplin and some of the news that has captured the issue as it developed."

PCM2 writes "Virtualization is all the rage these days. All the major Linux players are getting into the game with support for Xen, while Sun has Solaris Containers, Microsoft has Virtual PC, and VMware arguably leads the whole market with its high end tools. Even AMD and Intel are jumping onto the bandwagon. InfoWorld is running a special report on virtualization that gives an overview of all these options and more. Is it just a trend, or will server virtualization be the way to go in the near future?"

PCM2 writes "Virtualization is all the rage these days. All the major Linux players are getting into the game with support for Xen, while Sun has Solaris Containers, Microsoft has Virtual PC, and VMware arguably leads the whole market with its high end tools. Even AMD and Intel are jumping onto the bandwagon. InfoWorld is running a special report on virtualization that gives an overview of all these options and more. Is it just a trend, or will server virtualization be the way to go in the near future?"

InfoWorldMike writes "Before Vista is even out of the gates, a Microsoft exec was talking Wednesday about Windows' replacement at a VC conference. Speaking at The Venture Forum conference, Microsoft's Bryan Barnett, a program manager for external research programs in the Microsoft Research group, said multicore architectures are of particular interest when weighing what to put in future operating systems at the company. "Taking full advantage of the processing power that those multicore architectures potentially make available requires operating systems and development tools that don't exist largely today," Barnett said. Well, with Vista in the pipeline as long as it has been, you must admit it is not surprising Microsoft is taking the long-term view. And it won't be built overnight: There is no timetable for a Windows successor right now. But early work on this effort has not yet been organized, with five or six small projects afoot in various places throughout the company, Barnett said."