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Quite some time ago, there were many reports of an AOL client for Linux being leaked to the net, even on /.. I have tried and used this AOL client, it was an internal build that only worked on their networks, so it was really pointless, but yes it did run, and just sat there. So, it's probably not running on Wine at all, though there was one comment from a guy that WINE CVS does run AOL7. We'll have to wait and see. There's also this application for Linux users Logik

Well, there's always Relatable and their audio fingerprinting technology. Given an MP3, you can get a key to determine artist, album, etc. Kind of like what Napster did in 2001. MusicBrainz uses Relatable for their community music database.

Anyone remember him he had hacked the a cd reseller website ( cduniverse.com afaik ) and stole
about 25,000 credit card numbers and publish them on the net!
Check here for his page

Though he never get caught....

Related Links :
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/4_ 278091
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,33539, 00.html

It matters for exactly one reason:

Auditing.

The SEC has struck the fear of God into Financial Firms regarding shady transactions that have taken place on IM networks.

Things like Don't Delete That Email and
Email Compliance Alert
show that the SEC has expanded the supervision and archival rules of e-mail to also include instant messenging.

"HOW DID THESE E-MAILS BECOME STATE'S EVIDENCE?
Under SEC Rule 17a-4 and NASD rules 3010 and 3110, financial-services firms are required to supervise and record all electronic communication between employees and clients. Under the regulations, the communications, which initially focused on e-mail and now have widened to include instant messaging, have to be preserved for a period of not less than six years, with the first two years in an easily accessible place"

Companies like FaceTime are making a market out of IM auditing and archival - they basically have a proxy server that sits between the client and the 'net that takes every IM message and dumps it into an Oracle database... It even goes so far as to insert a disclaimer into the top of every IM session you open every few minutes...
The main problem with this is cost - FaceTime charges somewhere in the neighborhood of $100k to get started, and then $50k for each additional 500 screennames...

The last thing any financial company wants to do is to get caught with it's pants down in any SEC investigation - so it's easier to block IM altogether or to just allow one easily auditable one than to allow five different kinds.

Here and Here

Actually I submitted this article last week but was rejected.

Well... according to internetnews, VeriSign is partnering with the Union of International Associations, based in Brussels, Belgium. Under that arrangement VeriSign would provide the back-end services for up to three years, after which UIA will open bidding for that job, hoping to contract out the service to a non-profit.

And $5M seems like a lot, until you consider the $6/.org/year cited in the original article for the amount Verisign currently receives for each of the 2.3M .org domains. That's $13.8M/year. If Verisign's share is reduced to $2.20/.org/year, they break even on their $5M seed... and that's just in the first year!

This patent should be easily declared invalid due to prior art. For example, NetGravity did domain based geotargeting as early as 1998 in AdServer 3.5.

For years internet architects have built a house of cards that is not nearly as robust as it's outer appearance. In fact, there are some aspects that point to a fragile infrastructure just waiting for the final earthquake. The ATM backbone that Tom's previous company helped produce, is largely responsible for creating the packet lost instabilities in the network over the last 5 years. Under Vint Cerf's leadership at MCI/WorldCom/UUNet (Will WorldCom's Woes Engulf UUNet?) switched ATM networks created several years of heavy packetloss at key peering points, that can only cascade into total collapse if UUNet goes dark. This fragility might be the only thing that actually saves WorldCom/UUNet - the fear of what can happen without it.

With UUNet dark, the remaining network lacks the switching capacity to handle all of today's traffic (it barely can handle today's traffic without packet loss monitored here), much less short term growth as the world economy recovers from the dire recession. The resulting high packet loss would take us back 5 years where many DNS lookups timed out and simply failed due to high packet loss, and the network loading is dominated by 100% to 300% retries cascading into congestive failure (RFC896 Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks. J. Nagle. January 1984).

There have been many people explore this issue, some very excellent papers (Quality of Service in the Internet: Fact, Fiction, or Compromise? by Paul Ferguson and Geoff Huston) - but largely missed are very basic architectural issues like NTP time syncronization network wide for packet loss retransmission that CREATES well synchronized additional packet loss. This happens because the retranmissions are all timed to arrive at the same time in overloaded switches just to be dropped again due to servers having their scheduling clocks syncronized at a very low rate of 50/60/100/1K Hertz.

A study I did in 1997 of peering point packet loss showed that 90% of packet loss observed correlated to retransmit clock boundries. Changes in traffic flow from primarily mail and ftp in the early 90's, to web traffic where browsers launch 4-20 concurrent small file lookups changed the nature and ability for Slow Start to be effective in throttling loads causing packet loss (web browser designers flood requests to mask packet loss timeouts) and the short files which are often only a couple packets in length do not throttle with TCP window size controls.

Nothing in the next generation design of the internet (IPv6, VoIP, Streaming UDP MP3's, FPS games which flood packets, or any other new protocol) addresses these critical failings ... in fact there is a huge head in the sand approach to just continue providing excess bandwidth and applications to saturate it even more quickly.

Tom's suggestions largely miss the boat, for all the wrong reasons - but the end conclusion is correct - the biggest problems tomarrow are not going to be solved by the solutions being offered.

Hm, makes you wonder.

IBM sells their harddisk business to Hitachi, but apparently they keep their excellent R&D stuff in the storage area up.

Some strategic moves on here. I wonder what kind of corporate plan they have. Focus on consultancy and R&D probably, not manufacturing (expcept their mainframes).

Bit of trouble ? With only a small fraction of their cash reserve they can buy out RedHat ....if it comes to that. Neither Ingo nor anyone else will be able to stop that. You can give it to them to "think out of the box".

What sucks most about AOL's behavior is that they knew before shipping 5.0 that it had this "Evil Connectoid" bug. See this story from 1999.

BulkRegister Gets Injunction Against VeriSign

http://www.internetnews.com/isp-news/article/0,,8_ 1122101,00.html

• Microsoft, States Debate Remedies (eWeek, March 18)
• Microsoft Back in Court (internet.com, March 18)
• States ask for broad sanctions on Microsoft (USA Today, March 18)
• Microsoft 'killed Dell Linux' - States (Register, March 19)
• Microsoft pressured Dell to drop Linux (The Inquirer, March 19)
• Microsoft caught in the anti-Linux act (vnunet.com, March 19)

• Case Filings
• District Court Opinions

Do I care if cops are present at my ISP while executing a search warrant? Of course not. As long as a search warrant is required and a judge (with accountability) believed the police presented enough logical reason for the warrant, I certainly don't care.

Exactly, there was a warrant presented and that's what really matters here. If they have a warrant the courts have allready ruled that they have a right to access the data, and it's not like Officer Bag O'Donuts is gonna have the technological skill to glean the data from a server anyways, even if he is present, he will just stand there while a admin goes thru and collects the data and then hands him the printouts of it. He will not have any more of a clue about how the data was collected than if he wasn't present.

There are far more troubling ISP privacy issues than this, such as the Cyber Security Enhancement Act of 2001 that we should be worried about

Not only is this going on, but surveillance is increasing, and penalties are being stiffened for "cyber-crime". More info here.

According to this article

"Shauna Smith, a wireless industry analyst with ARS Inc., said the Verizon Wireless launch this week was a disappointment for the industry and users looking to capitalize on 3G.
(Verizon Wireless officials) say the maximum speeds that they provide are 144 Kbps, but actual speeds are 40 to 60 Kbps, which really qualifies it as a 2.5G technology, but it is not technically 3G yet," she said. "What we're looking for in 3G is speeds around 2 Mbps, but we won't see that kind of speed until 2003 or 2004 before we starting touching (that speed). "

so looks like "3G" is still a overhyped buzzword and not reality yet

Go to www.gator.com

Notice the quote at the top of the page: "Customers love gator!!" -internetnews

Look up Gator on internetnews.

Find story with that quote.

Quote in story is actually from CEO of Gator.

So what's the technical term for that...."quote-laundering"???

Informative link. Thanks.

If you like that one you'll love this one.

The term ''barter exchange'' means any organization of members providing property or services who jointly contract to trade or barter such property or services.

Until January 2000, that included such "barter exchanges" as LinkExchange...

It's good to know that stories like these get published, while entirely irrelevent subjects are rejected in record time by our watchful editors. I mean, just take these two for example:

- MS Paints Bulls-Eye On AOL. Certainly of no import to the technically oriented. Little squabbles over who's going to control internet access for millions isn't much of a news item.

- Stupid White Men Debuts At Number 3 On New York Times Best-Seller List. Everyone knows the average geek can't stand to read more than five minutes of political commentary, especially if it has nothing to do with Linux. Little things like investigating the shenanigans surrounding the 2000 presidential elections aren't at all interesting - in fact, they're downright unpatriotic! Besides, most techies are white and we wouldn't want to offend their touchy egos.

Yes, the more I read slashdot the more I'm convinced that our editors do a wonderful job of culling out all those 'unimportant' stories so that we don't have to exercise our brains and do the culling for them. Especially when it's so much more critical to know about the latest kernel release, or the newest toy.

Max

It's not just this that they are getting charged extra for. According to this article (from a little while ago), there is a class action lawsuit against them for switching their users to long distance numbers when they are out of normal numbers, even when the users claim they didn't change anything. Either AOL has dumb users, dumb workers, or both, because stuff like this keeps happening and AOL and the users blame each other.

Hard to believe it's been a year (almost to the day).

Winfire article

That was less scammy than this one though. Winfire was built on the solid premise that people would stay crazy and pour money into crazy ventures for at least another two years.

Not saying this has much practical use value, but IBM has a 7 qubit computer.

It's because of the court case. According to a recent article on internetnews.com:

"Lindows.com Founder and CEO Robertson said that his firm would provide proof that no business was done in Washington, let alone Redmond, and talked about it in a public statement.

'We're looking forward to showing the Court the widespread use of the term 'windows' or variations thereof by literally hundreds of companies which are not endorsed or sponsored by Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft has chosen not to sue these companies demonstrates their true motivation in this case is to crush competition from a promising new technology which threatens their illegally obtained monopoly,' said Lindows.com CEO, Michael Robertson."

I believe overall sales are higher for ipaq than palms because ipaqs are more expensive. The link is here

I heard from someone who works at a online retailer and he told me that wince sales are outpacing palm by a pretty wide margin now. (again sales, not unit, don't know about that)

I looked around a bit for anything that would be untainted and here's an article from August 2001 that gives some of the data we're all looking for.

Microsoft is not the only operating system, says Andrew Thomas; Linux has comparable programs and it's free. So why does nobody offer it on PCs?

previous reports, although i did not find anything at verizon.com or verizonwireless.com...

internetnews.com

news.cnet.com

allnetdevices.com

Does your ISP support v.92? Last I heard, some ISPs weren't even going to support the new protocol because there wasn't a lot of demand for it and OEMs aren't putting the new modems in their machines. Here's an article on this issue.

No, I'm thinking of Road Runner. As of June, 1998 Microsoft had a 10% stake in RR.

Here in Spain AOL has just launched a service called AOL avant.

It is a iMac type box which you can have for about 20 dollars a month with internet connection. It uses Linux with Mozilla as the web browser. It's made so your grandma can use it.

They are looking for an inital roll-out of 500,000 units, moving up to about a million. They are doing this in conjunction with a national bank.

So, AOL is already using Gecko/Mozilla, maybe just not in the USA.

Personally I believe that this is a trial of a service that they wish to rollout in many other countries. I think they choose Spain to try not to generate too attention on it. It wouldn't suprise me if they had plans to roll this out in many other European countries, and perhaps Latin America.

More here

Check out this link for more info. This one is from MIT (quite a bit old, but it's still interesting read). And then of course there is the Humanoid Project.

another good reason to use the cryptix library.

There is a bunch of good info on open source crypto and how US govt restrictions on crypto will simply mean that the rest of the world has better crypto than they do at cpsr.org.

europe has gone open source crypto mad. the germans are keen, the eu has just busted eschelon wide open and their conclusion is that everyone in the eu should be using oscrypto. you can bet your ass that everyone will use the strongest cheapest crypto they can - and that will be open, free and so tough you'll need a quantum computer to crack it.

still, thinking about it, quantum computers are so small they'll probably be spray on everywhere things . - so perhaps all this talk is already redundant. software based encryption is already redundant.

dave

The times of india.

Indian Express

NDTV news.

Sify news

Rediff News

Hindustan Times

Internet News

Cnet.com

Hmm... no links in the news? Dodgy, if you ask me...

Germany:
Provider: RWE
- Power line internet access launched by Germany's RWE - Quote: "The power line technology will mean that RWE PowerNet can deliver data at a rate of two million bytes per second."
- Shocking Concept: Internet Over Electrical Lines

Sweden:
Provider: Sydkraft Bredbånd - provides up to 8mbit/s downstream.
- Sweden Using Electricity For High-Speed Connections

continue list at will. I just know it will take forever before I can get anything but forced AOL crap connections where I live in France :(

The authorities have tried port blocking before in the history of the Internet to prevent sharing of objectionable data, and it utterly failed then, as it will fail now.

Though it will be interesting to see if the ISPs try to claim common carrier status as a protection, after avoiding it (and the regulations that come with that status) for so many years. I bet the TelCo associated ISPs will go for it (it's what they know), and the small-fry independent ISPs will fold under pressure from the MPAA and RIAA.

I wonder which way Starbuck's will go when their IEEE 802.11b Internet access networks are deployed. Will they live up to their Corporate Social Responsibility Policy and support free speech, fair use of copyright, and open Internet access?

The domain resellers in competition with Network Solutions are understandably unhappy, as reported in this article at Internet News. If you're not pleased either, you can sign this letter by e-mailing your name, e-mail address, and company affiliation to william@userfriendly.com. (No relation I can see to www.userfriendly.org.)

The domain resellers in competition with Network Solutions are understandably unhappy, as reported in this article at Internet News. If you're not pleased either, you can sign this letter by e-mailing your name, e-mail address, and company affiliation to william@userfriendly.com. (No relation I can see to www.userfriendly.org.)

Today, much of that graffiti is still there, even after several large rainstorms. When are you guys going to clean up your graffiti?

What's their main revenue stream? It's hardware, isn't it? Trying to battle the likes of Dell and Compaq. Hardware with packaged software added...they're a small player in a huge market and they're doing quite well given the circumstances. It's a tough market right now, and they've been pretty steady the past few months. They're not just another dot-com, but they do have to play some hardball to survive, and getting 0wn3d doesn't help.

But look at IBM's recent software development and their Linux budget. Those are real dollars, not dot-com, VC bux.

And it really upsets me to have to do as I recently did, and recommend a $30,000 accounting package that only ran on the M$ platform. We had to pay the Win2K tax for it...I'd like to be able to have an actual choice in the future, and maybe the next time we have to upgrade, there will be some more business software out there we could use.

Suddenly, it's a *NIX vs. M$ world, and lots of business see the inherent problems of lashing themselves to a closed-standards (yet popular) environment that's noted for it's security and stability problems. They're starting to figure out how much time they're wasting (and goign to waste in the future) by rebooting their machines, performing illegal operations, reinstalling the OS when it "goes bad", and the like. It's slow in coming, but the dawn is here, IMO.

Good call. This is an argument that I've had with the anti-WTO/NAFTA/Globalization folks for some time now. Multinational corporations are shaping up to be the most powerful entities on earth, true. It's also true that there is absolutely no controls on these fantastically powerful corporations. I'll even grant you that many governments are or will be in the pockets of these corporations. However, there's one important fact that's impossible to argue with, and that's that dead people make poor consumers.

Real world example: Say that I'm Steve Case, running AOL/Time Warner/Turner/Etc. I've just gained a foothold in China and I'm looking forward to selling my crappy product to a new market of over a billion people, making untold billions of dollars. What do you think my stance on war with China is going to be? The moment that the Bush administration starts talking about taking military action against China, I'm going to be on the phone to remind him of my large campaign contribution and ask him to back off.

Admittedly, Multinationals are responsible for some heinous shit. Shell Oil has mercenaries in Africa clearing out villages to make way for oil pipelines. Globalization is not without its problems. However, if McDonald's in China means that I don't have to worry about San Francisco becoming a smoldering crater, then I'm all for it.

And to answer your question, no, the issue was never resolved. ICANN very clearly decided to simply ignore the existence of alternate roots and prior claims to TLD strings. (though they are inconsistent in this stance. Their decision not to approve a new .web TLD was clearly related to the existence of a prior claim by Image Online.

Yet another example of heavy handed authoritarianism on the part of ICANN, and yet another reason for all of us who care about the DNS as a public resource to dwitch our DNS to an alternate root system. Visit the OpenNIC to find out how. It's easy.

Claim your namespace.

Sun Offers to Clean Up IBM Mess

Sun Microsystems Inc., looking to turn an IBM Corp. marketing gaff into a public relations coup for itself, announced Friday that it will help the City of San Francisco clean up the sidewalks Big Blue spray painted as part of its Linux eServer advertising campaign. Big Blue said the sidewalk advertisements were supposed to be done in biodegradable chalk, but, at least in San Francisco and Chicago, black spray paint was used instead.

On March 2, 2001 a company called MCAM issues an analysis on the Amazon 1-click patent. The report makes available several instances of prior art -- exactly the stuff Bounty Quest is looking for.

A week later, Bounty Quest makes its announcement. There is prior art, but nobody submitted it. (Right) ;-)

On March 14, 2001 Internetnews.com reports on this whole fiasco and draws into question some of the motives behind Bounty Quest.

Hey Lenny! Great anti-spam page. Spammers are up to $4.50 on goto.com! Slashdotters, start clicking the link below to make spammers pay. Click this link to make spammers spend money!

Obligatory on-topic message:

Visit Junkbusters and view information on Web Bugs.

The industry uses the euphemism "clear GIFs" to describe web bugs. Search for "clear gifs" in a search engine as well as "web bugs" if you're after more information. I use TopClick because it is a privacy-respecting search engine that doesn't use cookies and I have found it to be very good.

*** NEWS FLASH ***
Congress to investigate Web Bugs. More details here at intenetnews.com.
--

Hey Lenny! Great anti-spam page. Spammers are up to $4.50 on goto.com! Slashdotters, start clicking the link below to make spammers pay. Click this link to make spammers spend money!

Obligatory on-topic message:

Visit Junkbusters and view information on Web Bugs.

The industry uses the euphemism "clear GIFs" to describe web bugs. Search for "clear gifs" in a search engine as well as "web bugs" if you're after more information. I use TopClick because it is a privacy-respecting search engine that doesn't use cookies and I have found it to be very good.

*** NEWS FLASH ***
Congress to investigate Web Bugs. More details here at intenetnews.com.
--

What really strikes is that Juno has brought in Yuri Rozenman, formerly of Applied Biosystems and with 13 years of experience in the bioinformatics field, to head up the project as vice president in charge of the Virtual Supercomputer Network. (source: here). The link between Applied Biosystems and informatics is the automation and analasys of genetical sequences
- this gives me the creeps - can you imagine ... collecting data on all those people

At the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo New York 2001 Wednesday, Big Blue committed to spending $300 million on Linux services over the next three years. IBM has already committed to investing $1 billion in Linux over the next 12 months.

That $300 million will go towards Linux e-business enablement and migration services, open source consulting for the Linux environment, and Web and High Availability Cluster services.