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A number of people have been wondering what's going to happen to TPJ ^[?] in light of Earthweb's (the owner of TPJ) sale of most of its properties to Internet.com. Many rumours have been flying around and Jon Orwant has decided to clear things. I've put his status update below.

From Jon Orwant:

"January 2, 2001

Some folks have been asking me about the status of The Perl Journal #20, and prospective authors have been asking me about deadlines for future issues. The answers: TPJ #20 is in press and ready to print, but EarthWeb (the owner of TPJ) has told the printer to stop the presses until further notice. I am currently responding to proposals sent to me with approximately "I don't know if there's going to be another issue, but when I do I'll respond to your proposal."

Since the future of the magazine is in doubt, I can't in good conscience greenlight proposals; I will not encourage an author to spend weeks writing an article when I know that it might never be printed. So I've told people who've asked what I know about the current situation: while EarthWeb has sold many of its properties to internet.com so that it can focus on "career services", it has not sold TPJ. However, EarthWeb has also made it clear that they don't want to publish TPJ any more.

This story has started to leak out to the Perl community and has already mutated a bit in not-quite-correct directions, so I wanted to write this note to set the record straight. Or as straight as I can, given what little I know about EarthWeb's decisions.

While TPJ's future is very much up in the air, people shouldn't take this as any indicator about Perl itself. TPJ was doing just fine back when I ran it, there's no shortage of content out there, and the magazine could easily go bimonthly and then monthly -- indeed, when EarthWeb acquired TPJ I had thought that was the plan. I still enjoy the editing, the authors enjoy the writing, and the designers enjoy the designing. What happens now is up to EarthWeb. And no, I'm not suggesting that people bombard them with e-mail. Heck, they just laid off 100 people, so I'm not even sure who to bombard. Eventually there will be some resolution, and when there is I'll write again to let everyone know.

As of December 27th, this matter is now in the courts, and so I have to adopt the "just the facts" tone of this letter without portraying my opinions. Someday I'll be able to talk more about what is happening in these strange days; until then, you'll have to conjure up your own adjectives on my behalf.

Cheers,

Jon Orwant "

Gaming cheats like "Up, Up, Down, Down..." are techno-folklore, a universal introduction to people of the gaming era. Other generations told war stories or bragged about their sexual exploits. Gamers trade techniques and other lore -- early experiences, confrontations, conflicts, great exploits, cheats, tricks, myths, and legends. Gaming is moving so quickly that it's time to start building some gaming archives. What, for example, is the most addictive game, now or ever: Asheron's Call? Quake? Final Fantasy 8? Red Alert2? You can testify, brag, reminisce, and otherwise post your own gaming stories and experiences here. (And more below about some surprising new stats on Xmas game sales figures, and gender and gaming)

A new report by PC Data says that 35% of Net users are going to buy console or PC console games this Christmas, and that PC and console gaming is no longer a male-dominated activity. The study found that while men make up 55% of gamers overall, for the first time women comprise a a majority of online gamers -- 50.4%. Women, according to the study, favor online gambling, card gones and quiz and trivia contests.

PC Data says men prefer war - and sports-themed games, and that men are three times as likely as women to participate in first-person shooter games (38% vs. 10%). "Solitaire," "Free Cell" and similiar bundled games are the most frequently played of all online and offline games. The top PC game categories are strategy real-time/turn-based, world building, and flight simulation.

Christmas is perhaps the best indicator of what mainstream America is buying and thinking about. The PC Data survey greatly underscores the idea that gaming has become a mainstream form of culture, if not the single most pervasive form of culture, in America.

Julius C asks: "What coding resource should one use? There are so many out there. Should I go to the big jungle, Internet.com? Or what about Planet-Source-Code.com? There is even this promising new site DeskCode.com. All have their pluses, but what is the best for me? I am a serious die-hard programmer like many out there. My only thirst is the thirst for new unheard of knowledge. Internet.com seems to provide to those who like reading through articles written by a group of know it alls. That's good for some, but I like code, I like reading up-to-the-minute stuff contributed by my peers. Where do I go for that?"

"When I first started on this quest for a place on the net where I can call home, a lot of people pointed me to HotScripts.com. Now this is a good site. But it is only a site full of links. I have to give it up to the creator of the site for creating the Yahoo!-like link central for coding but that is all HotScripts is, a link repository.

Then one of my peers sent me to a site called Planet-Source-Code.com. Now at first I was amazed. I couldn't believe it; this site had most of what I was looking for. Discussion groups, code and articles submitted, well by a group of know-it-alls, but I guess a decent group I could live with. For months I made this my home and all was great. But time came for me to test new waters. I still had to find the perfect home on the net.

Early this month, I saw a post on a message board, about this new site called DeskCode.com. Now this site is perfect. Code submissions by users, wow. So I decided 'Hmm, let me test it!' What did you know, the code was submitted and it showed up right on the main page after I hit refresh. Wow. People will actually read the knowledge I have to share. To make things better, it even had voting for its submissions, so they can even tell me if my code stinks. The site is filled with tons of features not found on the big corporate sites. Now this was great. The only problem with the site is that the user-base is low. Hopefully the site is run by some headstrong people and won't see its doom anytime soon. Until then, or when another site shows up with better features DeskCode.com will be my home. What do the rest of you think?"

This time, an astute reader points us to the place where Guido Van Rossum speaks out on the Python license issues recently posted about here on Slashdot, and an Everquest enthusiast points to the Official Word (well, chatroom response) to Everquest server emulators. Oh, and remember that CueCat scanner you picked up last week (and quickly wrote a Linux kernel driver for) -- did anyone at Radio Shack mention something about an embedded serial number? Hmmmm. I thought not. Good thing reverse engineering isn't yet a capital offense ...

That's one long and winding snake of an issue ... Kevin Reichard writes: "Since you covered the original issues surrounding Python licensing, you may also want to note that Guido van Rossum of PythonLabs has officially responded in a Linux Today interview. He has many interesting things to say."

Which things notably include: "The sad thing is that all of this is based on technicalities: Stallman agrees that Python is free software, but a technicality in the licenses prevents compatibility. The choice of law clause in the CNRI license, which is causing the incompatibility, is very common is software licenses, and CNRI doesn't want to drop it because the validity of the general disclaimers in the license may depend on it. At the same time, Stallman doesn't want to allow any choice of law clauses, because one could stipulate the law of "Unfreedonia" which might reverse the meaning of the GPL."

Abort, retry, fail, bend, fold, spindle, mutilate? L Fitzgerald Sjoberg writes: " A recent posting on the official EverQuest boards by a spokesperson for Verant states that even RUNNING an EverQuest emulator violates the EverQuest license agreement.

If the emulator is legal, and emulators seem to be making a lot of legal headway these days, doesn't this essentially amount to Verant forbidding you to use a competitor's product? Not a good sign, if you ask me."

"Sir! Sir! There's something wrong -- this knob goes up to eleven!" Signal 11 writes: "I took apart a cuecat and did a rundown of the circuit tracings on the board. What follows is a short summary of what I found. I'm working on putting together a schematic for it and hope to have it together within a couple weeks.

The cuecat is fairly simple. It uses a pair of infrared LEDs to direct light onto the sheet of paper with the barcode on it. It is then picked up by an IR detector, whose output is tuned by a single potentiometer (adjusted at time of manufacture, I would guess) and then fed into the analog input of a microprocessor. The detector is the same type one can pickup at radioshack. All you do is enclose it in a box and then make a pinhole at one end. Cheap, but it works well enough.

The microprocessor I haven't had time to put together a circuit from the specs provided by texas instruments to download the microcode out of it. It is also a matter of me not wanting to learn about microprocessors although I understand it is common in the industry.. I'm an analog guy. :) I suspect it is nothing more than running the output through a ACD (analog->digital) inside the microprocessor and then referencing the binary input with a list of values to produce the barcode string. After that, as has been previously noted, it is passed to an XOR algorithm, and then modulated to be fed out onto the PS/2 interface. There are a pair of transistors on the board near the outputs of the microprocessor - I suspect these are used to either boost the signal to run over the PS/2 interface (the microprocessor may not have enough power), or as part of an oscillator to get a clock for the processor. Until I finish tracing out the board paths, I can't say for sure.

Somewhere in the chip they probably set the serial number into the nvram, which is prepended to the output. The software does the rest. As has been demonstrated, there isn't much to do on the software side either - one could just create an indexed array containing scancodes. One might even be able to write a new key definition file under linux.. no programming required.

This is a really simple device. This is also probably why they were so concerned about competitors.. it wouldn't take them more than one afternoon with an EE and a microcode programmer to reverse-engineer it and produce their own. Then again, the device was probably designed in the same amount of time, likely by a random contractor. The reason it took me so long? I've been messing around with electronics for all of three months, so yes, I'm not a professional - I also haven't gotten into DSP technology yet, which is all the cuecat is. As always, if someone could provide me with a basic circuit for reading the contents of the processor's memory out, I'd appreciate it!

Anyway, DigitalConvergence - I'm waiting for my cease and desist now."

Troodon writes "The Guardian reports on James Murdoch's speech ( "You Say Tomato" ) to the The Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival. In which he argues that given the near-exponential internet growth? of the worlds most popular language, Mandrin (835 millon compared to 470 millon English speakers) and the potential of both Spanish (330 million) and Hindi (300 million), that the assumption that English (well american-english ) is both the inevitable linguistic and cultural lingua franca of the modern age is flawed. That tailored localised content rather than some unthinking americanized homogenization is the way ahead, that "English will [sic] not become the "default language" of the digital world"."

ptbrown writes:\w"An investigation by Interhack revealed cookies, Web bugs, and other methods that were tracking visitors to TRUSTe's Web site in violation of their own privacy standards. TRUSTe's David Steer said the tracking was done by thecounter.com, part of Internet.com. After being contacted by a reporter on Thursday, the tracking code was removed. "If we find that Internet.com is fraudulently breaking this agreement, then we're going to come down hard on them...&quot says Steer. Original AP story" Somehow I'm not surprised. Although honestly TrustE's sin here - tracking users with temporary cookies rather than long-lived ones - does not seem especially bad. But TrustE's whole point is that sites should tell users what they're doing, and even TrustE can't do it correctly.

MichaelH writes: "AllLinuxDevices has intervie wed seminal X developer Jim Gettys of handhelds.org. He discusses the fate of the Itsy (and Itsy 2), the GNOME/KDE environments on a palmtop, and some of the challenges of porting X to a compact environment. Handhelds.org is currently driving development for the Compaq iPAQ 3600 series as part of the 'Open Handhelds' initiative."

Duke of URL writes: "Boardwatch interviewed OpenBSD contributor Louis Bertrand. It's an excellent article about OpenBSD's niche and mission. They discussed the continued code audit, OpenSSH, and future version plans, including SMP development, ports rework, and continued integration of IPv6. Journalist Jeffrey Carl does a good job of pointing out OpenBSD's strengths and tradeoffs."

EmilEifrem writes "BrowserWatch has an interesting feature about the status of Mozilla. It's a mail from a Netscape engineer but it's NOT the official word from AOL/Netscape. It talks about how half of the Netscape engineers now use Seamonkey as their main browser, about upcoming dates (first Netscape branded alpha/beta doesn't seem to be far away) as well as engineering priorities and goals. Not the official word but an interesting read nevertheless."

EmilEifrem writes "BrowserWatch has an interesting feature about the status of Mozilla. It's a mail from a Netscape engineer but it's NOT the official word from AOL/Netscape. It talks about how half of the Netscape engineers now use Seamonkey as their main browser, about upcoming dates (first Netscape branded alpha/beta doesn't seem to be far away) as well as engineering priorities and goals. Not the official word but an interesting read nevertheless."

Tristan Louis noted that at some point Internet.com announced their purchase of LinuxStart. LinuxStart, according to the press release is "a leading resource and search engine for the Linux community providing Linux information, tools, applications and more." If you're looking for Linux* domain name opportunities, hurry because linuxninja, linuxtomorrow, linuxtv, linuxpenguin, linuxbob, linuxpaper, linuxpop, linuxtraffic, linuxvision, linuxphone, and of course, linuxfood.com are already taken. No we're not kidding.

Lawrence Lessig - the name may be familiar from the Microsoft trial - has written an excellent book, which I've taken my time reviewing because I felt I had to read it twice to grasp the full import. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace covers the real future of your liberties on the internet, and it is not a happy book. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace author Lawrence Lessig pages 297 publisher Basic Books rating 10/10 reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 0-465-03912-X summary A gloomy look at the forces which shape the internet.

Slashdot isn't the first to review this book. Declan McCullagh (Wired), Andy Oram, and Carl Kaplan (NY Times) have all taken a look at it, he's been interviewed, there's an audio debate (mp3 format) between Lessig and McCullagh, and at least a couple of other places have all mentioned it and it is, at this writing, 134 on Amazon.com's best-seller list. I was privileged enough to receive a review copy of the book some time ago, but my review has been delayed because the book is too deep to easily sum up. It's a book about law, and about policy, and about the internet, which doesn't require any grounding in any of the above, but it seems like it would be appropriate for people at almost any level of knowledge - if you know more, you'll get deeper insights, and if you know less, you'll get the basics. A fractal book, in other words. An almost philosophical work, disguised as a law book.

To start with, Lessig's book is a counter to John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow had a good idea, a good goal, but he was totally and completely wrong about how to achieve it, and his declaration and the mindset it embodies has and will do great harm to the future of civil liberties on the internet.

Cyberspace is not and has never been independent of real life, or of government. What it has been is a place where the rules of real life were hard to enforce. That doesn't mean that the rules don't exist - just that it has been hard to make people obey them. The problem for people, like me, who like this state of affairs, this lack of enforcement, is that there's no reason cyberspace has to remain in its current state.

Cyberspace wasn't designed to enforce real-world rules. Such enforcement wasn't built in to the code that runs the internet, was consciously avoided in the early internet designs, and therefore regulators have been working in an environment unfriendly to them. Copying of digital works is easy. Transmitting and receiving content, even forbidden content, is easy. Etc.

But just because it was designed that way once, does not mean that it need be that way in the future. There are tremendous forces (business and government) that would prefer an internet which is friendly and cooperative to regulators. The people building the internet of tomorrow are not professors and geeks, they're CEO's and to a lesser extent, bureaucrats. If the architecture of the internet is "adjusted" to favor regulation instead of disfavor it - and the current internet builders all have reasons to favor regulability - regulating behavior on the internet is not impossible, it's trivial. Lessig has a short chapter on "is-ism", the belief that just because something is, so must it always be. Applied to the internet, this is "We are free, and will always be so." Wrong, wrong! The internet is totally man-made, and what man has made, man can change.

It is hard for me (or Lessig) to emphasize this point too much: the people who claim that we should keep our hands off the internet are completely playing into the hands of government and business. While the net-libertarians have buried their heads in the sand, the net is being changed, constantly, to favor regulation by business and by government.

Lessig takes a look at the infrastructure of the internet and how it is changing for the worse. There's another terrible flaw in thinking about the internet, which runs roughly: "whatever restrictions are placed, someone of technical competence can get around them". This is not true, not if the architecture is designed to support those restrictions rather than oppose them.

The internet, says Lessig, is about to "flip" from "unregulable" to "totally regulable". When that occurs (neither Lessig nor I think there's an "If" involved), who will be regulating the place? Currently corporations, with guidance from government - guidance coming in the form of regulations like CALEA, which make demands not on individuals, but on the code. Once the code is altered to be conducive to regulation, regulation follows naturally.

Lessig makes a great point about open source software. Closed source code which incorporates regulation (censorware is the easiest example, but there are many others) means that the people who are regulated can't even tell exactly what regulation is occuring. When the source code is available, you can at least tell exactly what you can and cannot do, or exactly how your privacy is being infringed. Open source code is inherently less suited to enforcing regulation on users.

I can't do justice to the book without rewriting it. Lessig is deeply skeptical about the ability of the U.S. government to initiate policies which promote, rather than denigrate, the civil liberties we have come to take for granted in cyberspace. Government is busy selling off our freedom to corporations through mechanisms such as ICANN. But no one else is going to do it - and with a government actively hostile to liberties or even one that adopts a hands-off approach, freedom in cyberspace is headed downhill at a tremendous pace.

I recommend this book to almost anyone who cares about the future of the internet. It's well-written - he's a good teacher. It's got some awesome examples - like how Communist Vietnam is more effectively libertarian than the U.S., because it doesn't have the infrastructure of control that we do. It is a scholarly work, but the footnotes are pushed off to the end - they alone are worth the price of the book to a serious student, but someone looking to just read can skip them without problems. It's a deep and thus far unmatched view of what will shape the net of tomorrow, the most inspiring book I've read this year.

Some of Lessig's other papers and articles are available on his home page. The book has a promotional website as well, available at code-is-law.org or what-declan-doesnt-get.com.

Pick this book up at fatbrain.com.

diane wrote to us about the latest joint press release: Sony and Palm are going to be teaming up, to make "Wireless Music, Video Devices." Palm will also start to use Sony's memory stick format as part of the deal, a response to the pressure from Handspring's devices. Diane also noted that this makes Sony one of the first Windows' licensees to go with the PalmOS over WinCE, another sign that WinCE is in some troubled waters.

mulan writes "The E-Business and Internet Technology Network has acquired linuxcentral.com. This comes shortly after the recent aquisition of LinuxToday.com in a move to further Linux support for the Internet community. The article appears in today's Business Wire or you can read the official press release here. "

mulan writes "The E-Business and Internet Technology Network has acquired linuxcentral.com. This comes shortly after the recent aquisition of LinuxToday.com in a move to further Linux support for the Internet community. The article appears in today's Business Wire or you can read the official press release here. "

EDmaster wrote in mentioning a new review of FreeBSD at ServerWatch. It's very positive (if a little non-technical). (Nik: Moved to the BSD section, where it should have been. Mea culpa)

EDmaster wrote in mentioning a new review of FreeBSD at ServerWatch. It's very positive (if a little non-technical). (Nik: Moved to the BSD section, where it should have been. Mea culpa)

EDmaster wrote in mentioning a new review of FreeBSD at ServerWatch. It's very positive (if a little non-technical). (Nik: Moved to the BSD section, where it should have been. Mea culpa)

Thanks to Brett Glass for pointing out his recent piece in Boardwatch. Very well written coverage about DEFCON 7, as well as the ethical side of hacking.

Donnie Barnes from Red Hat Software dropped us a line to let us know how things are going at ISPCON. Click on the link below to see the full report.

I just wanted to write Slashdot and let the readers know how ISPCON is going. I've put up an introductory web page off of my own home page at http://www.redhat.com/~djb that now includes some pictures I took with my new digital camera. I have pictures of Linux running in the Intel, Compaq, IBM, Corel, and Hallmark booths. I might find some more tommorrow. :-)

As of Tuesday morning, ftp.redhat.com has been running from the ISPCON show floor in the Intel booth. We have a 20Mbs network pipe provided by Intel and a Dell PowerEdge 2300 server. In just 24 hours we've done over 170G of data transferred to the Internet from that single server. The server is a Dual P-II 400 with 1G of RAM. It also has 4x9G Seagate Cheetah LVD drives running Linux software RAID 5 on the embedded Adaptec controller. This machine simply *screams*. We had originally spec'ed two machines, but we now simply use one of them as a backup.

That breaks our own personal record for a 24 period. The previous record for us was 129G during the release of 5.1. But we only had 15Mbs to play with. :-)