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Domain: internetwk.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to internetwk.com.
Stories · 28
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SCO Wants to License Europe
MacEnvy writes "It looks like SCO isn't letting up - they've decided to expand their war on Linux to other countries. According to Internet Week, the company will be offering its Intellectual Property License in the UK and other European countries starting February 1. Whether Europeans will buy the licenses has yet to be seen." Motley Fool has chipped in on SCO's chances. -
SCO Wants to License Europe
MacEnvy writes "It looks like SCO isn't letting up - they've decided to expand their war on Linux to other countries. According to Internet Week, the company will be offering its Intellectual Property License in the UK and other European countries starting February 1. Whether Europeans will buy the licenses has yet to be seen." Motley Fool has chipped in on SCO's chances. -
FCC To Hold First VoIP Hearings; Rules in 2004
securitas writes "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will hold its first hearings on Internet telephony and VoIP regulation on Dec. 1 and plans to regulate VoIP by late 2004. A public comment period will follow the Dec. 1 meeting. Some say that it is overly ambitious to regulate VoIP by 2004, especially since FCC Commissioner Michael Powell does not have a strong reputation for clarifying complex issues - instead he has a reputation for confounding them. More at Internet.com and InternetWeek . FCC press release (PDF1|DOC1) and attached letter (PDF2|DOC2) to VoIP proponent Senator Ron Wyden, who sits on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee." -
Microsoft Officially Shows Longhorn, WinFX
Theaetetus writes "Microsoft today unveiled its most detailed look yet at its new OS, Longhorn, due in 2006, during Bill Gates' keynote speech at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. An article at Internet Week describes some of the goals: avoiding viruses, worms, and 'building apps that are as smart as Outlook.'" The company "also unveiled 'WinFX,' which it described as a new application programming model for Windows that is the evolution of its .NET programming framework." -
Choosing Microsoft Products May Cost 10-40% More
securitas writes "Jupiter Research has issued a report that says businesses that choose to stay with Microsoft products may end up paying anywhere from 10%-40% more than if they chose another solution. Software Assurance clients will see the lowest costs and SA-have-nots will see the highest costs. The rationale is that Microsoft's strategy of integrating server and client software, as it has done with the new Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Office 2003 suite, will force costly upgrades and licenses. Ultimately the goal is to transform Office into a platform instead of a collection of applications. Analyst Joe Wilcox says, "Microsoft argues that increased integration will cut down ongoing costs, maintenance and what not, but whether that will be the case has yet to be seen. The increased acquisition costs, though, are pretty clear." This leaves the door open for other office suites like Corel WordPerfect, Sun StarOffice and OpenOffice. More on costs and integration at Jupiter/Wilcox's Microsoft Monitor Blog." -
Microsoft Apologist Apologizes for Microsoft
hillbilly1980 writes "Internet Week has published a counter article in response to the number of anti-monoculture security papers recently published. Unfortunately the author starts out by writing off the other papers as simply anti-Microsoft, unfortunate because his paper never gets past being more then just pro-Microsoft. One of his suggestions to secure your enterprise... turn off port 80." Probably the best thing to do to prevent disinformation from entering your company is to block articles by Rob Enderle. Update: 10/11 00:54 GMT by M : Note for the record that the original version of the article referred to blocking port 80; the article has now been edited to refer to port 135. -
Further Selections From the Mixed-Up SCO Files
grahamlee writes "It may be a case of 'do as we say, not as we do' over at the Santa Cruz Operation. The Netcraft statistics meter says that for the last year, SCO's web site has been served by Apache on Linux. Indeed, it's been more than a year since the site was ever served from a SCO Unix machine. So what is the possible reason for this? Your humble author suggests that SCO found themselves requiring a multithreaded web server, and as SCO UNIX is based on an ancient version of The UNIX spec it just couldn't cope ;-)." Read on for one of the strangest-yet turns to the SCO story, and several merely insipid ones.An anonymous reader writes "SCO have made much of how their claims about UNIX code being improperly copied into Linux were verified by 3 teams including 'MIT Mathematicians.' However, MIT can't seem to find the mathematicians concerned!"
(SCO's explanation is that the company is talking about a team made up of people who formerly worked at MIT, rather than a group still associated with the school, but "due to contractual obligations, we cannot specifically name the individuals.")
kuwan writes "SCO has responded to the massive debunking of their 'evidence' last week. Chris Sontag claims that the BPF code was 'not intended to be an example of stolen code, but rather a demonstration of how SCO was able to detect "obfuscated" code.' That, however is a flat-out lie. If you look at their Obfuscated Copying slide (#15), it clearly states 'Obfuscated System V Code Has Been Copied Into Linux Kernel Releases 2.4x and 2.5x,' and then the slide labels the BPF code on the left as 'System V Code.'
At this point I think they realized that their case has been severly weakened and they need to spin it any way they can. And in their case this means more lying."
Captain Beefheart writes "According to this story over at The Inquirer (crediting a special edition of Terry Shannon's Shannon Knows HPC newsletter), SCO has officially announced that HP is safe from their infringement lawsuit brigade ... This leads one to suspect that HP is the Fortune 500 company that SCO claimed recently had paid for a license."
Maybe HP just wants to avoid Microsoft/BSA-style hassles: FatRatBastard writes "According to an article on Commentwire.com SCO has started sending invoices to Linux users. If a company signs up for SCO's 'Intellectual Property License for Linux,' they allow the possibility of being audited at SCO's expense to ensure that the user has been truthful about the number of Linux installations it has. Should the audit reveal that the user has underpaid SCO by 5% or $5,000, whichever is highest, the user also agrees to pay the price for the audit."
Blacklantern writes "The SCO lawsuit has made it into "Halloween Documents" gallery. Eric Raymond takes on the contents of the lawsuit point-by-point. "
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SCO Says IBM is Beating Up on Them
SCO's McBride claims that IBM is stage-managing all the attacks and bad press, which would probably explain why I cleared this article with IBM World Headquarters before running it (not!). The publisher of Linux Journal invites SCO to sue. One of SCO's lawyers has this barely coherent interview where he spouts legal rubbish for a gullible reporter. There's an interview in German (machine translation) with SCO's execs. And finally, SCO is still hoping for a settlement with IBM. Update: 08/22 18:26 GMT by M : ESR responds. -
Microsoft Deploys Linux, Open Software in Test Lab
securitas writes "Microsoft has deployed Linux and other open-source software in test labs used by business customers to experiment with Microsoft's products. The products include Linux, Apache, MySQL and Open LDAP directory-access software on Intel-based computers, according to Martin Taylor, who is in charge of Microsoft's Linux competitive strategy. He said the goal was to learn 'what can you do and how can you do it' using open-source software in a competitive analysis. This step comes after Microsoft's recent admission that Linux is Microsoft's biggest threat after economic conditions. Mirrors at CMPnetAsia and InternetWeek." It'd be cool to see some patches come from Redmond, but that's probably wishful thinking. -
What's Behind The Odd Data?
citking writes "CNet is reporting that 'network administrators and security experts continue to search for the cause of an increasing amount of odd data that has been detected on the Internet.' While this has been going on now for a few days and some experts have already declared victory against the 'trojan', others aren't so sure that the real culprit has been identified yet. Other stories can be found here(1) and here(2)." -
Wireless LAN Equipment Shipments Up
MrBounce writes "Worldwide shipments of wireless local-area network equipment increased by 120 percent in 2002 from a year ago. So who are the current market leaders in this field?" -
Phoenix Unveils Anti-Theft BIOS
linuxwrangler writes "According to articles at PC World, c|net, Internet Week and elsewhere, Phoenix Technology is introducing a new BIOS-based anti-theft system. Every time a TheftGuard equipped machine connects to the internet it pings a server at Phoenix which can instruct the machine to wipe its hard drive, report its location or disable itself. Given that most people don't want to have their every movement tracked and don't want someone else to have the power to wipe their drives, Phoenix figures that corporate clients are the prime customer. I just wonder who is liable when a company sells a surplus laptop on eBay but gets their inventory control screwed up and reports it as stolen..." -
What if SCO is Right?
b17bmbr writes " What if SCO is right. Bruce Perens was quoted with this scenario. "it's entirely possible that SCO was inadvertently distributing its own proprietary Unix code in its version of Linux. In that case, SCO would've already released its Unix source code into open source". But here's the catch: Does this validate Microsoft's view of a "viral GPL"?" -
Microsoft Simplifies API for Longhorn
zzxc writes "InternetWeek.com reports that Microsoft is cleaning up its API and integrating its XML Application Markup Language for its anticipated Longhorn release. An unnamed source says that Microsoft will be slashing the number of API calls from 76k to 8k. In addition, the new graphics device interface, codename Avalon, will use XAML-based scripts instead of a complicated API. Microsoft is planning on including XAML design in the next Visual Studio.net release. CRN is also reporting on this." -
Searching for the Oldest Running Application
A columnist from InternetWeek has completed a search for the oldest running commercial software application. His results are interesting (note that he's mostly skipping over mainframe applications, just looking at PC-based apps). -
Sun Launches Instant Messaging Server
theIG writes "According to this article at geek.com, and another one at InternetWeek, Sun has shipped the first part of its new enterprise collaboration platform to compete with Exchange and Domino. Dubbed 'Sun ONE Instant Messaging 6.0,' this server will work with other products to be released in May, to allow a single login for all of its services that allow connections from outside a corporate firewall." Instant messaging is becoming increasingly popular in the workplace. Local messaging servers like this were only the next logical step for businesses which don't wish to rely on an outside network for their messaging. -
IBM Researcher Offers an E-Stamp Spam Solution
UnanimousCoward writes "This Internet Week article describes a research project by Scott Fahlman that looks to limit spam using e-stamps. Here is more detailed description of the system under his CMU homepage along with a link to the original paper." As crappy as it sounds, charging some tiny fee per email would cut spam dramatically. 207 of the buggers so far today. Hundreds of megs a month. I'd love to see something done. -
Sun Introduces Subscription Solaris
cyberlync writes "Sun is planning to implement a pricing policy similar to Microsoft's recent subscription pricing plan. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software, said that they are calling this project Orion. It looks like another attempt to grab more cash in this nasty economy to me. Schwartz said that they are going to try a similar senario with linux soon as well. On a side note, it mentions some interesting things about a new desktop distro of linux." -
MIT Spam Conference Conclusions
RT Alec writes "The 2003 Spam Conference has concluded, reports InfoWorld. (related read: abstracts of the conference discussions). I was unable to attend the conference, but it appears all that was discussed was filters (client and server). I think the key problem is ISPs that do not block egress traffic on port 25. If you need to send mail through a different SMTP server than provided by your ISP, the admin of that server ought to provide you with a means of using it with authentication on a port other than 25 (you do have permission to use that SMTP server, don't you?). It is not too tough to set up an SMTP server to require authentication, or at a minimum to run off a different port. I am suprised that this is never mentioned as a cure for spam. If just AOL blocked port 25, this could reduce spam by 50% (I base this figure on close examination of the headers of the spam I receive). I was pleased to see that Barry Shein, president of The World (a Boston based ISP) was included in the talks. I am not sure by the abstract (see link above) posted if he mentioned blocking port 25. In a recent interview he did not mention it." -
Red Hat & Dell Host Open Source Security Summit
wishus writes "Red Hat and Dell said they would co-host an Open Source Security Summit. 'Join Red Hat, Dell and experts in enterprise security from around the world for a summit on securing infrastructures with open source software.'" -
Federal Technology Czar Proposed
Alien54 writes: "The E-Government Act, which Sens. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) introduced Tuesday, is designed to make it easier for citizens to access federal information and services online. As reported in Internet Week, the bill [S.803]will create a federal chief information officer and allot $225 million annually to improve government services over the Internet. The Bill text has yet to be posted to the web, but should be up in a week or so." -
Jello Biafra's H2K Keynote
Hyena writes "Jello Biafra's surprisingly brilliant H2K address is now available online compliments of 2600, with many more H2K panels to follow. Expect further civil unrest in coming years." Here's a description of the speech written at the time. Despite being given at H2K, it isn't technical in nature, it's primarily a reflection of Biafra's decidedly anti-establishment views. -
Overhead of using SSL?
jedinite writes "I'm currently heavily involved in a project to develop a specialized online community. We've hit a serious debate among the team regarding whether or not we implement the site using SSL.
Basically, there are two schools of thought here: My side, that privacy and security are the most important, and we're willing to take the performance hit, and the Other side: that the use of SSL will "devastate web server performance" - that the trade off of security for speed is necessary. My question to the assembled masses: What are the potential upsides and downsides of using SSL on a (relatively) high-traffic site? Anyone have any better metrics on the real difference between unencrypted and SSL traffic? Can anyone here help me convince my team that we need to use SSL -- or convince me that we don't?
More info on our situation, if it helps:
We're running a four-way Sun E450 with 2gig of RAM. Big, big box.
We're running Stronghold/2.1.1 Apache/1.2.4 mod_perl/1.11
We're anticipating approximately 50k-60k "hits" and about 5k-6k page views on the community daily.
The box handles about 3 times that traffic total (other sites on same box). "
Another "solution," other than the all or nothing approach, would be to use a "shopping-cart" type setup. You know, the bulk of the site is non-SSL and the switch to SSL is only when there are items to be protected. Other suggestions and comments?
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Overhead of using SSL?
jedinite writes "I'm currently heavily involved in a project to develop a specialized online community. We've hit a serious debate among the team regarding whether or not we implement the site using SSL.
Basically, there are two schools of thought here: My side, that privacy and security are the most important, and we're willing to take the performance hit, and the Other side: that the use of SSL will "devastate web server performance" - that the trade off of security for speed is necessary. My question to the assembled masses: What are the potential upsides and downsides of using SSL on a (relatively) high-traffic site? Anyone have any better metrics on the real difference between unencrypted and SSL traffic? Can anyone here help me convince my team that we need to use SSL -- or convince me that we don't?
More info on our situation, if it helps:
We're running a four-way Sun E450 with 2gig of RAM. Big, big box.
We're running Stronghold/2.1.1 Apache/1.2.4 mod_perl/1.11
We're anticipating approximately 50k-60k "hits" and about 5k-6k page views on the community daily.
The box handles about 3 times that traffic total (other sites on same box). "
Another "solution," other than the all or nothing approach, would be to use a "shopping-cart" type setup. You know, the bulk of the site is non-SSL and the switch to SSL is only when there are items to be protected. Other suggestions and comments?
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Linux: Look before you Leap
juniorboy sent us JP Mogenthal's latest piece from Internetwork, this timing cautioning people about Linux and along the way tries to get at the root of why people are switching. -
IBM VisualAge for Java for Linux
Locutus writes "IBM is said to announce at JavaOne that they are working on VisualAge for Java on Linux and are looking at a 4th quarter release date. This is a really amaizing development IDE for Java (editor could use some work though). Now if BlackDown can just get the JIT crank'n faster we will be styling. Here is the news article: VisualAge for Java on Linux " -
Sun does not consider Linux a threat
InternetWeek interviewed McFarlane of Sun today. Although the interview does not go into detail, McFarlane revealed that 50% of the Fortune 500 companies use Java, that Sun's seen an upturn in hardware orders (despite the slump most other manufacturers are feeling), and that Linux is not really a competitor for it in the very high end. -
Compaq Migrating Tandems to Alpha
K-Man writes "This article in InternetWeek covers Compaq's plans to migrate Tandem's Himalaya servers from MIPS to Alpha. It looks like Compaq is keeping the chip around after all. "