Slashdot Mirror

eldavojohn writes "The 18th century Copiale Cipher has finally been decoded after a few minor breakthroughs were made by linguists versed in machine translation analyzing the document. From the article, 'Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden to decipher the first 16 pages. They turn out to be a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society that apparently had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology.' The Roman characters and abstract symbols turned out to be a sort of encryption of the German language. The important clues they discovered were that the Roman characters were nulls (misleading junk) and the bogus looking symbols the actual text. Lastly, a colon would mean a duplication of the last consonant. A cipher falls to word-frequency analysis. Perhaps the researchers could start another 'weekend project' and tackle The Voynich Manuscript for us?" Update: 10/25 15:25 GMT by T : eldavojohn adds also a link to the final translation.

netbuzz writes "The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute says it's the first full census of the 'visible Internet' since David Smallberg canvassed a piddling 315 allocated addresses in 1982. They're talking about 3 billion pings directed toward 2.8 million addresses over the course of 62 days. Oh, and they credit the comic strip xkcd for sparking the idea of presenting the data using a Hilbert curve." The main page for the census project has links to versions of the census at various scales.

JavaTHut writes "The Journal Language Learning and Technology has a new article describing how The Sims can be modified to teach a foreign language. With this and other efforts at U.S.C. and M.I.T., could simulated immersion within video games become an effective way of acquiring a foreign language? Also of interest in the article are suggestions for using spatialized translation layers in foreign language songs and a Firefox extension for learning foreign vocabulary words."

man_ls writes "The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute is working with the U.S. Joint Forces Command to harness supercomputer power, to simulate a virtual continent for use in urban battlefield situations. The simulation, set in the year 2015, involves 100,000 entities to simulate, although the system can support more than a million."

man_ls writes "The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute is working with the U.S. Joint Forces Command to harness supercomputer power, to simulate a virtual continent for use in urban battlefield situations. The simulation, set in the year 2015, involves 100,000 entities to simulate, although the system can support more than a million."

Roland Piquepaille writes "After five years of trials, Craig Knoblock and his team at the Information Sciences Institute of the University (ISI) of Southern California, have developed Heracles Maps, an easy-to-use laptop package to optimize routes in the whole world for both military and business travelers. This news release, "A SuperMap for Soldiers -- Or Business Travelers," says that the application integrates various sources of geospatial information, such as satellite imagery of mapping data. From this data, soldiers can easily find a safe route between two locations without being seen or shot from an enemy in another location. this package can easily be adapted to civilian applications, such as a powerful travel planner. You'll find more details and references in this overview."

Roland Piquepaille writes "In an article named "Puckish robots pull together," Nature describes the work done at the Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory (PRL) of the University of Southern California on self-reconfigurable teams of robots. There, Wei-Min Shen and his colleagues simulate the absence of gravity by creating a 2D representation of space by using an 'air-hockey table.' With jets of air flow blowing on the surface, the 30 cm-wide robots, working in pairs, evolve in a frictionless environment, pick elements such as girders to assemble structures like if they were in space. NASA will use these teams of autonomous robots to build space systems like 10 km-long arrays of solar panels and other huge spatial structures. You'll find more details, illustrations and references in this overview."

Roland Piquepaille writes "In an article named "Puckish robots pull together," Nature describes the work done at the Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory (PRL) of the University of Southern California on self-reconfigurable teams of robots. There, Wei-Min Shen and his colleagues simulate the absence of gravity by creating a 2D representation of space by using an 'air-hockey table.' With jets of air flow blowing on the surface, the 30 cm-wide robots, working in pairs, evolve in a frictionless environment, pick elements such as girders to assemble structures like if they were in space. NASA will use these teams of autonomous robots to build space systems like 10 km-long arrays of solar panels and other huge spatial structures. You'll find more details, illustrations and references in this overview."

An anonymous reader writes "The topic of pigeons and modern technology has come up a number of times now. For instance, we have the Google pigeon rank method, and there have been several April fools hoaxes like this previous story and RFC 2549. Now the Waikato Times is reporting in this story about how pigeons are being used to transfer large amounts of data in a short amount of time. The pigeons have proven to be faster and more relieable than electronic means. However, as you will see from the story there is still the occasional packet loss. This is definitely a case of high bandwidth wireless networking."

Dan writes "Marshall Vale writes on behalf of the MIT Kerberos team and several other parties interested in the availability of Kerberos authentication for the SSH protocol. Kerberos is a network authentication protocol. It is designed to provide strong authentication for client/server applications by using secret-key cryptography. Marshall says that Kerberos support within OpenSSH may be incomplete and needs more work. In particular, implementing draft-ietf-secsh-gsskeyex in addition to any other Kerberos mechanisms will better serve the needs of Kerberos community. Secondly, he says that they would like to reduce user confusion associated with all of the different options for Kerberos and SSH. He suggests adoption of the GSSAPI key exchange mechanism in the IETF draft (which uses Kerberos to authenticate both parties to each other), in order to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks."

hensley writes "There is a (not quite) new effort by the IETF to standardize a framework for network applications, called BEEP, the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol. Standardized in RFC3080, it takes care of all lower level tasks an application level protocol has to like framing, authentication and capabilities negotiation in a modular and lightweight way. In the current issue of Internet Packet Journal (a quite nice and free-as-in-beer technical publication by Cisco) is a well written Introduction to this framework. Why isn't anyone adopting this protocol besides some Java libraries like beep4j and PermaBEEP and a C library called RoadRunner. I couldn't find any applications based on this protocol, regardless of it's promised capabilities. Is everybody still inventing his own application layer protocol?"

Thanks for the usual April Fools Day flame- every year people fall for it. It never ceases to amaze me how angry and venomous, yet utterly clueless a few people can be despite the blatant obviousness of the joke. Lastly, jfengel sent us the annual April Fools RFC: RFC3251 describes "Electricity over IP" and RFC3252 on "Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport" reformulates IP to work over XML."

Thanks for the usual April Fools Day flame- every year people fall for it. It never ceases to amaze me how angry and venomous, yet utterly clueless a few people can be despite the blatant obviousness of the joke. Lastly, jfengel sent us the annual April Fools RFC: RFC3251 describes "Electricity over IP" and RFC3252 on "Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport" reformulates IP to work over XML."

Dr. Zowie writes "My ISP places an opaque (intended to be transparent) web proxy between me and the rest of the world. It is causing me problems due to misconfiguration or misdesign. My question is twofold. On the micro level, what can I do in the short term to work around the broken routing (in the long term, I switch ISPs if it's not fixed)? On the macro level, what can we as a community do to prevent breakage of the net on a global scale by poorly designed routing hacks?"

Dr. Zowie continues: "I use a regional ISP with otherwise-very-good policies. However, they seem to be intercepting anything that comes from my home net on port 80, so that they can ``transparently'' cache web requests based on the payload of those packets. The proxy seems to work rather well in most cases: I never noticed it until I started using OpenNIC. Then I found that some web pages that should have resolved OK through the OpenNIC system failed even though routing on different ports worked OK.

"I did some experimentation using ``telnet'' on port 80 directly, and found that packets are being routed based only on the payload regardless of the original destination address: I can (for example) retrieve the Slashdot front page by using ``telnet www.google.com 80'' and asking for "http://www.slashdot.org http/1.1". The tech support folks seem to be stonewalling me: the main contact tells me that the behavior is "not broken" even though it clearly violates RFC 1812, the standard set of rules for IP routing.

"The practice of ``transparent'' proxy routing seems to be growing more widespread. It appears to break the internet standard in a way that works for most folks for now, but that breaks port 80 usage in general. Looking ahead, this breakage seems like a growing nightmare waiting to happen. At the very least, I expect more instances of my particular problem to appear as folks give up on the corporate hegemony of ICANN. More insidiously, transparent proxy routers break the layered nature of the internet protocol and restrict the flexibility that made it work in the first place. One would hope that such proxies would at least act like routers when the fancier proxying fails, but at least my ISP's doesn't. What about your ISP's?"

satch89450 writes: "SecurityFocus had a column that I missed when it was first published a few days ago, titled 'Responsible Disclosure' Draft Could Have Legal Muscle, but I discovered it when researching an answer to a comment on the CYBERIA mailing list. In this article, Mark Rasch discusses how the Draft would set the rules for reporting security vunerabilities, and in particular define the boundaries of liability assumed by bug-disclosers. By adopting a "Best Practices" RFC, the IETF could help the reporters of security-related bugs do their job, and put the onus of fixing the bugs on the vendors who make the mistakes, where it belongs. (The RFC draft described in the article, 'Responsible Vulnerability Disclosure Process, is here at the ISI repository.) This is, of course, in direct opposition to the process that Microsoft's Scott Culp, Manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center, would like to see. As Microsoft is more part of the problem than part of the solution, I believe that the path to a formal process would better serve the entire community - and that community includes Microsoft's customers. I'm taking this seriously because the mainstream press is talking about the issue, and what it's going to take to fix it. Here is an example from BusinessWeek that scares me silly. I'm glad I'm looking to change careers from software development to something safe, like law."

Newsbytes has a story about a critical vulnerability in all recent versions of Internet Explorer, which leaves your computer completely open any time you browse the web with IE. Microsoft has known about it since November 19; they refuse to provide any information about when a patch might be made available, if ever. This bug has been successfully handled by Microsoft's "Security through Obscurity" policies - since there's no public notice, Microsoft has no need to actually patch this hole which renders several hundred million computers vulnerable any time they access a web page or parse an HTML email.

For readers who care, this vulnerability results from Microsoft's integration of IE and the operating system. Files received via HTTP are supposed to be handled by examining the Content-Type header sent by the webserver - for instance, the Content-Type sent with this webpage is "text/html", identifying it as a text (non-binary) document which is marked up with HTML.

Netscape and most other browsers have no problem with this.

You will notice, however, that this method is rather different than how a Microsoft operating system determines how to handle a local file - by its three-letter extension. A file named "foo.txt" is handled as a text file, even if it is a binary image file that has been renamed for some reason.

Now, what happens when you integrate your web browser and your local browsing, say to render moot an anti-trust suit filed against your company? Will local files get a Content-Type? Will remote files be handled by examining their file extension?

IE handles files in an odd mish-mash of looking at the Content-Type sometimes for some purposes, looking at file extension sometimes for some purposes. It's hardly surprising that the bug-hunter in the above story has found a way to feed it a Content-Type at odds with the file extension - the Content-Type may be innocuous, but the extension says "execute me", so when the "integrated" IE engine gets ahold of it, the malicious content is automatically executed.

Now Microsoft has a problem. Because they chose to ignore the standard for handling downloaded files, Microsoft has painted themselves into a corner. If Microsoft suddenly changes how their browser handles downloaded files, tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands? any webpage which downloads files) of webpages "designed for IE" will have to be rewritten. No doubt this is the issue their programmers are wrestling with right now. It's a fundamental design issue - Microsoft designed their web browser with the goal of doing what was best for Microsoft (evading anti-trust charges) rather than doing what was best for their users. In fact a proper "fix" of this hole probably involves de-integrating their browser and local file handling to some extent.

If you routinely browse with Internet Explorer or read mail with Outlook, keep in mind that any web page you visit or any email you open can take over your computer, steal sensitive files, destroy your machine, anything. This has been true for at least two and half years. And keep in mind that you can't fix the problem, you must rely on Microsoft to do it, if they so choose. And keep in mind that Microsoft is in no hurry to do anything about it, because it doesn't even consider it a vulnerability. Happy browsing!

gseidman writes: "Have you ever needed to simulate a network? Tired of old ns? Do you just hate dealing with hardware in general? Take a peek at Utah's Emulab.Net. They have over 300 PCs, some StrongARM devices, roughly 5 miles of cabling, a huge and expensive switch, and great software for setting up a virtual LAN. They also have a gallery showing the machine room in various stages of completion (did I mention five miles of cabling?)."

Nick Towers sends news of a nifty new RFC that has just come out - RFC 3093, the Firewall Enhancement Protocol, promises to reduce the hassle of setting up a firewall by tunneling any TCP/IP application over HTTP.

Trebor the Mad Overlord writes: "The CONRO project is an attempt to design robots that automatically build themselves out of small component modules and reconfigure themselves as needed. Sort of like Legos that build themselves. Interesting idea, just in the initial stages, but lots of cool videos on the site."

This is Slashback. You don't have to read it if you don't want to. But if you want to, read below some interesting bits on: the first digital computers (who sez?!); neural nets with the ability to whip your behind; your chance to bring your ideal OS to life, under adult supervision; and Yes, a note on Mir, which has so far failed to hit my new loft.

(This item ceremonially closer to orbit) pcidevel writes: "According to this page at Mirstation.com there is no plans to down Mir and in fact a launch has been approved to make sure Mir has a long stay in orbit." I'm sure everyone with plans to visit (James Cameron on down / up) will be cheered to the cockles. I think I'll wait till the .1 release;)

To hell with anyone who won't help out ;) jonathan_atkinson writes: "The V2_OS (www.v2os.cx) that you featured twice a while back is currently undergoing a kernel rewrite. Having taken on some of the criticisms that Slashdot readers threw at us at the time (it hurt back then... but this is our baby :P), the kernel is being rewritten from scratch, using a fully modular architecture. An interesting project to be involved with ... So, any Slashdot readers who have wanted to get involved with a cool project like this, contact one of the project leaders in #v2os on EFnet or visit the website. Plenty of you had criticisms and ideas the last time this story was posted, lets see if anyone wants to put them into practise!"

"I was here first! No I was here first! Mom!" afrop writes: "Like Tesla vs Marconi in the field of radio, history seems to have already sealed the fate of ENIAC vs ABC. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is almost always overlooked when people say 'first digital computer', despite the 1973 court decision invalidating the ENIAC patents, and declaring Atanasoff the inventor of the first digital computer. History may have forgotten the ABC, but we shouldn't."

Similarly, An unnamed correspondent writes: "You've posted several things recently about the computing history, and you always claim the ENIAC or whatever was first. You really should post this link to the first electronic digital computer, from which the creators of ENIAC got some of their ideas. http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml"

Interesting links, both. Of course, there are a lot of interesting devices which predate both of these, including the mysterious bronze computing device found aboard an Agean wreck.

And if you feel like turning over the rocks of history to find those little bugs that curl into balls, and wondering what the ancients would have called them, wonder, if not no more, at least a bit less -- GE Bickford writes: "While there is certainly a distinction between various individuals who hack, I have found a very early usage of "hacker" that demonstrates that the artificial semantic distinction between "cracker" and "hacker" is a vain conceit. This citation proves that the term "hacker" from the very beginning involved an implicit violation of 'territory' (trespassing) and threat to system integrity (vandalism). It also shows that hackers were considered at least a potential threat from the earliest days of the internet (then ARPANET). I note that the term 'cracker' didn't come into use until at least the late 1980s if not 1990s:
"We feel that this change will be sufficient to discourage "hackers", although it is obviously insufficient to protect a node against a determined and malicious attack." - RCF521."

Bring me the head of Michelle Pong! You may have thought it was cool that a neural net could be taught to recognize the spoken word "one," but how about one that does useful work instead? Specifically, LinuxBand writes: "http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/~watta/MM/pong/pong5.html this thing is pretty cool, teach it by hitting the ball for awhile and then try playing against it and watch it kick yer arse."

PacketMaster writes: "The United States Commerce Department is accepting proposals to change how the .US domain is administered and registered. Basically they want to know why the .US domain is unpopular, what can be done with it, and who should administer it. According to this AP story on CNN.com even the U.S. Postal Service didn't want anything to do with .US. The request for comments on the changes is here. The .US domain is governed by RFC 1480. It sounds like they want to rekindle interest in the .US domain. I think this change is interesting because I wanted to register in the .US domain earlier this year. The organization that holds the administration function for my geographic 3rd level domain wanted $40 a year to register my 4th level domain. I got a .net cheaper elsewhere but I wouldn't have minded a .US if it was cheaper or free like many .US's are and also shorter -- www.domain.city.state.us anyone? Many other countries give out domain.ccTLD or domain.com.ccTLD; why can't the U.S.?"

Paul Boutin writes "The Industry Standard talked to Kerberos' principal author and all-around ubergeek Clifford Neuman about his proposed rewrite of the IETF Kerberos standard (RFC 1510) to close the loophole Microsoft has been using to create a non-interoperable version. " It also looks like Apple will be bringing Kerberos to OSX, in partnership with MIT.

DarkSword writes "The X-Bone system for automated deployment of VPN / overlay networks is now publicly available. This is the first major public release, v1.2. X-Bone dynamically deploys and manages Internet overlays to reduce configuration effort and increase network component sharing. X-Bone discovers, configures, and monitors network resources to create overlays over existing IP networks. It's available for both Linux and BSD."

thaJungle was the first to pass along the buzz. "Looks like owning all the bandwidth in America isn't good enough for Verio; they apparently want to own WHOIS as well. In fact, they trademarked it..." Well, not exactly. I talked to Verio PR and legal. They own "whois.net," and when they filed to trademark that, they filed for the standalone name too as a matter of course. Since there's just a bit of prior use, the registration was rejected; aware now of its history, they're dropping the application. Update: 02/05 by J : Brian McWilliams has a more informative and skeptical story at internetnews.com.

Ben Galliart writes "The Internet Software Consortium released on Monday another patchlevel to their ever popular BIND software package. The ISC has recommended that everyone using BIND upgrade to this latest version (BIND v8.2.2 patchlevel 3) due to security holes existing in previous versions. If you are using a version previous to BIND 8.2.1 then pay special attention to the ISC configuration hints on a new required TTL setting which should be added to every zone file. More information on the TTL setting is also available in RFC 2038. On a side note, those who enjoy the bleeding edge should read the ISC future plans page which now has information on the thread-safe/multi-processor ready BIND version 9 (major rewrite) going beta in January. "

Armin writes "Thirty years ago today, the first Request for Comments document, RFC 1, was published at UCLA. RFC 2555 contains history and reflections on the Request for Comments (RFC) document series, and the people who made it possible, on its 30th anniversary." Thanks again Jon.

Tom Rothamel writes "A few new RFCs were released today, including rfc 2549: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service, rfc 2550: Y10K and Beyond, and rfc 2551: The Roman Standards Process. "

Tom Rothamel writes "A few new RFCs were released today, including rfc 2549: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service, rfc 2550: Y10K and Beyond, and rfc 2551: The Roman Standards Process. "

Tom Rothamel writes "A few new RFCs were released today, including rfc 2549: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service, rfc 2550: Y10K and Beyond, and rfc 2551: The Roman Standards Process. "

Psarchasm wrote in to note that NetStat has recieved a makeover, no MCI, but 15 other spots are generating good net traffic reports. Mike Evans wrote in to send us a link to RFC2441, A tribute to Jon Postel by Danny Cohen. An anonymous reader wrote in to send us an article where you can read about a biochemist who is now in legal trouble for distributing genetically altered seeds that grow Oranges containing THC. He designed them because cops confiscated his car 15 years earlier. Bill Bumgarner wrote in to say that A Sherlock Plugin for searching Slashdot is now available. Bob McCown sent us a link to an interesting Pen Based Computer. Another anonymous reader wrote in to send us a link to an excellent Linux Introduction Series over at Avault on Penguin Games. Nick sent in an oldy but goodie, a link to the Unix Haters Handbook. It comes with its own Unix Barf Bag.

Over 30 of you wrote in to tell us that Jon Postel, died of complications after heart surgery at the age of 55. For those who don't know who Postel, he's the DNS admin (as head of the IANA), controlling the root name server setup and being a guiding force in the current government domain name wrangling. He was the voice of reason against many of the government's less-than-intelligent proposals for restructuring DNS. He was also editor of most of the 2500 RFCs. His PhD thesis adviser and his friend Vint Cerf sum up the feelings of the Internet community in this DejaNews post. The New York Times' obituary is here. You can also find an interview with Jon Postel from July. His homepage is simple and to the point.

I'd like to thank Idcmp, Claude Johnson, and Jeff Garzik whose material was used to compile this report.

Philipp Koehn wrote in with a piece addressing something that always seems to come up any time you start talking about free software. His piece is called Who is the Software Communist. It's a pretty interesting read, although I suspect that most readers will disagree with it. I figure we'll hear some opinions on this one. The following essay was written by Slashdot Reader Philipp Koehn Who is the Software Communist?

In the debate about open source software the term 'communism' comes up quite freuently. The funny thing is that both sides accuse each other of being the red danger. So what is going on?

Communism is this nice idea that a human society should not be ruled by greed and egoismus, but rather by everybody contributing an equal amount of work and sharing the results. Famous society hacker Karl Marx made the blue print, and we tried it. Now, after millions of people masacred, demoralized, and empoverished, it doesn't seem such a good idea after all.

One problem is: to insure equal and distribution everything has to be centrally planned by someone. Descisions are handed down just like by Bill Gates' Kremlin in Redmond: The proclamation of standards and software to be used from the Microsoft politburo. Leaving the trade press busy guessing the next steps of the big brother, but not questioning them.

So here we are the software freedom fighters, bringing back the right to speak up and tearing down the Berlin Wall of non disclosure agreements and closed source code. Winning back the power to the marketplace of ideas (or bazaar of ideas, if you want). Fighting the evil empire that is set to enslave us.

But there is also the other side of communism: the original idea of sharing, the distribution of goods to whoever needs them. And here the history lesson turns sour: The failure of communism indicates that this does not work. Most people don't want their equal share, and give without profiting. They want to have more. They want better cars, better houses and more shiny desktops than their neighbors. In this light the open source community is suddenly the ideal communist society that never worked on a large scale. It is too easily ripped apart by the capitalist world with its cheesy marketing appeal and cell phone envy.

So this will haunt the future of open source. The current idealism will not sustain. Historically, every spiritual movements is consequently taking over by people who take it for granted and use it for their advantage. Or, as put in "Trainspotting" more generally: everything ultimately turns to shit.

Right now we are still in the spiritual phase of the movement, with the main motivation being to build up the wave. Every big company domino that falls to Linux is greeted by cheer and excitement. Soon it will be everywhere. And then?

Cold realism will kick in. The most likely exploit of Linux will be in the field of distributions. Red Hat? Caldera? Suse? Debian? Well, nobody got ever got fired for choosing IBM Linux - of course with added value and glitzy marketing. Linux might shift away the power from Microsoft, but only into other - only argueable better - hands. Will the world be a better place? Maybe slightly, but this revolution, too, will eat its children.

Philipp Koehn wrote in with a piece addressing something that always seems to come up any time you start talking about free software. His piece is called Who is the Software Communist. It's a pretty interesting read, although I suspect that most readers will disagree with it. I figure we'll hear some opinions on this one. The following essay was written by Slashdot Reader Philipp Koehn Who is the Software Communist?

In the debate about open source software the term 'communism' comes up quite freuently. The funny thing is that both sides accuse each other of being the red danger. So what is going on?

Communism is this nice idea that a human society should not be ruled by greed and egoismus, but rather by everybody contributing an equal amount of work and sharing the results. Famous society hacker Karl Marx made the blue print, and we tried it. Now, after millions of people masacred, demoralized, and empoverished, it doesn't seem such a good idea after all.

One problem is: to insure equal and distribution everything has to be centrally planned by someone. Descisions are handed down just like by Bill Gates' Kremlin in Redmond: The proclamation of standards and software to be used from the Microsoft politburo. Leaving the trade press busy guessing the next steps of the big brother, but not questioning them.

So here we are the software freedom fighters, bringing back the right to speak up and tearing down the Berlin Wall of non disclosure agreements and closed source code. Winning back the power to the marketplace of ideas (or bazaar of ideas, if you want). Fighting the evil empire that is set to enslave us.

But there is also the other side of communism: the original idea of sharing, the distribution of goods to whoever needs them. And here the history lesson turns sour: The failure of communism indicates that this does not work. Most people don't want their equal share, and give without profiting. They want to have more. They want better cars, better houses and more shiny desktops than their neighbors. In this light the open source community is suddenly the ideal communist society that never worked on a large scale. It is too easily ripped apart by the capitalist world with its cheesy marketing appeal and cell phone envy.

So this will haunt the future of open source. The current idealism will not sustain. Historically, every spiritual movements is consequently taking over by people who take it for granted and use it for their advantage. Or, as put in "Trainspotting" more generally: everything ultimately turns to shit.

Right now we are still in the spiritual phase of the movement, with the main motivation being to build up the wave. Every big company domino that falls to Linux is greeted by cheer and excitement. Soon it will be everywhere. And then?

Cold realism will kick in. The most likely exploit of Linux will be in the field of distributions. Red Hat? Caldera? Suse? Debian? Well, nobody got ever got fired for choosing IBM Linux - of course with added value and glitzy marketing. Linux might shift away the power from Microsoft, but only into other - only argueable better - hands. Will the world be a better place? Maybe slightly, but this revolution, too, will eat its children.

Get ready to rumble as the tidal wave continues. First off, Andrew Mobbs sent us an important list of must-read RFCs. RFC2321, RFC2322, RFC2323, RFC2324, RFC2325. He also reminds everyone that ds.internic.net is no longer the canonical RFC archive. Luis Villa sent us Important news on the Java API. Gernot asked us to check This directory on ftp.gimp.org. Lastly, james sent us this one and Raj Dutt sent us this one.

Get ready to rumble as the tidal wave continues. First off, Andrew Mobbs sent us an important list of must-read RFCs. RFC2321, RFC2322, RFC2323, RFC2324, RFC2325. He also reminds everyone that ds.internic.net is no longer the canonical RFC archive. Luis Villa sent us Important news on the Java API. Gernot asked us to check This directory on ftp.gimp.org. Lastly, james sent us this one and Raj Dutt sent us this one.

Get ready to rumble as the tidal wave continues. First off, Andrew Mobbs sent us an important list of must-read RFCs. RFC2321, RFC2322, RFC2323, RFC2324, RFC2325. He also reminds everyone that ds.internic.net is no longer the canonical RFC archive. Luis Villa sent us Important news on the Java API. Gernot asked us to check This directory on ftp.gimp.org. Lastly, james sent us this one and Raj Dutt sent us this one.

Get ready to rumble as the tidal wave continues. First off, Andrew Mobbs sent us an important list of must-read RFCs. RFC2321, RFC2322, RFC2323, RFC2324, RFC2325. He also reminds everyone that ds.internic.net is no longer the canonical RFC archive. Luis Villa sent us Important news on the Java API. Gernot asked us to check This directory on ftp.gimp.org. Lastly, james sent us this one and Raj Dutt sent us this one.

Get ready to rumble as the tidal wave continues. First off, Andrew Mobbs sent us an important list of must-read RFCs. RFC2321, RFC2322, RFC2323, RFC2324, RFC2325. He also reminds everyone that ds.internic.net is no longer the canonical RFC archive. Luis Villa sent us Important news on the Java API. Gernot asked us to check This directory on ftp.gimp.org. Lastly, james sent us this one and Raj Dutt sent us this one.