Slashdot Mirror

An Anonymous Reader writes: "Jonas Oberg announced the launch of GNU-Friends, a news site for friends of the GNU Project based on the Kuro5hin Scoop-backend. GNU-Friends is intended to provide news from and by the Free Software community, especially such news that does not generally make it to onto other news channels. Also started with GNU-Friends is the Free Software Development Network. More info on how to join it can be found here."

An Anonymous Reader writes: "Jonas Oberg announced the launch of GNU-Friends, a news site for friends of the GNU Project based on the Kuro5hin Scoop-backend. GNU-Friends is intended to provide news from and by the Free Software community, especially such news that does not generally make it to onto other news channels. Also started with GNU-Friends is the Free Software Development Network. More info on how to join it can be found here."

buzzcutbuddha asks: "I have been tasked with creating/finding a Collaboration and Knowledge Management tool for work, and while there are some good commercial ones out there like Intraspect and Microsoft Sharepoint, but I want to look at it from another angle. Most people are aware of online community models like Slashdot, Kuro5hin.org, Everything2.org, it's Perlmonks derivative, and Wikki Wikki Web. Some may even remember SixDegrees from before it was retired. But are there any other notable online communities that have similar functions to the systems described above? I'm looking for a way to let people load documents or link to documents, discuss the documents, moderate the submissions and comments, and do searches. At this point, the underlying technology is not important."

mrgrumpy contributes this review of a book which, despite the interesting subject matter, he says comes with some forgiveable but hard-to-ignore shortcomings. Emergence still sounds like an interesting read and broad introduction to the theories and subject matter at hand, but read on for more of his take on the book. Emergence - The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software author Steve Johnson pages 288 publisher Penguin rating 6 reviewer Jim Richards ISBN 0-713-99400-2 summary Seeing order and patterns in apparent chaos.

This book covers the theory of emergence, which states that within a system of what seems to be anarchy, there are underlying rules that govern the pattern of behaviour and bring order out of chaos.

This books serves as an introduction to the field of emergence. It is something that is already happening around us, but we usually cannot see. The reason for this is that you need to look at a higher level then the individual organism. Ants can not see the society as a whole that they are members of. Just as we humans may have an understanding of the local community we are in and of ourselves, we need to step outside (or above) the city to understand how it functions. A city, like an ant colony does not have rules from the top as such, but rules that each occupant obeys, and it is these rules that give order to the chaos and make the resultant community behave like an organism as a whole.

I really wanted to like this book. But the level of information within it will make me put in into the light, popular fiction section of my bookshelf. One of the aspects of the book that really wanted me to give a good review is that the author makes a good introduction to the theory behind the comments system of Slashdot, the way people are chosen to rate comments and how good comments filter to the top. As such, I would have liked a review of the editorial process on Kuro5hin as well, since the two systems as fairly similar. In fact, I think the Kuro5hin system is better, because long time readers will see that the stories have moved away from an open source/linux focus to more cultural aspects, thus reflecting the change and growth of the community. But the idea of a Daily Me portal, that serves information that would suit us is explored heavily.

As I read the book though, an uneasiness came upon me, just as I do when reading books on neo-Darwinism. There is no mention of where these rules as such come from except through evolutionary survival or initial chance. If anything, the author implies that we are in a universe that had the initial conditions set, and left running. So we'd evolve or grow into who or what we are.

The idea that a God figure could be there, tweaking the parameters as the model runs, or even setting the initial conditions works against his ideas. This view is however explored in the chapter Control Artist, where the author comments on the development of software models, notably computer games. Games such as SimCity are discussed where the rules are set, but as a player we get to choose what gets built, what gets destroyed. Although here we are playing the Mayor of the City, the notion is the same; we control the macro level and not the micro level. But at the micro level, the software developer who built the game in the first place controls each inhabitant. Nothing really, is left to chance. Given the exact same initial conditions and same set of instructions the computer will create the same environment.

So, like most popular science books currently available it will educate you, entertain you and keep you occupied while reading it or totally bore you. But it is not a book of philosophy to base life on, which thankfully, the author has not tried to provide. It is very well researched, and the author seems on top of current trends and ideas. His writing style jumps around quite a bit, and some of the connections between topics might seem a little far fetched but it is an entertaining read as an introduction to the field of emergence theory.

Pet peeve 1: Notes. The notes section at the end is fairly extensive. But there are no foot notes in the book. The notes are indexed by page and quote. So as a reader you have to constantly check the notes section to see if there is a note or reference for the page you are reading.

Pet peeve 2: There was (for me) a glaring technical error on page 120.

"Ironically, it is precisely this feedback that the Web lacks, because HTML-based links are one-directional. You can point to ten other sites from your home page, but there's no way for those pages to know that you're pointing to them, short of you taking the time to fire off an e-mail to their respective webmasters."

You can see who is visiting your site, unless they are using an anonymizer proxy, or other system to hide your headers. The HTTP-REFERER header gives you exactly this information.

You can purchase Emergence at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the book review guidelines first, then use the web submissions form.

Slashback tonight with a look at Microsoft's OEM practices, the true nature and size of the Apple iPod, IBM drives (and hard drives in general), and the RIAA's alleged lobbying efforts for a license to invade machines looking for copyright infringement. All below, all now.

Drive-n to strong drink and harsh words. Kenneth Yu writes: "You might recall the overwhelming response to a recent 'Ask Slashdot' regarding the abnormally high failure rates of IBM 75GXP Hard drives, and the pulling of all 75GXP from Pair Networks' Servers. A class action lawsuit has been filed by Michael Granido, Jr., on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated. You can view the complaint in PDF format at http://www.sheller.com/IBM_complaint.pdf. This story was initially reported by Tech Report (http://www.tech-report.com)."

Apropos that, jriskin writes: "Storagereview.com has its new reliability database up and running. I have no affiliation with the site, but it only benifits the community to have as many people contribute as possible. The database is a listing of hard drives and whether or not they have failed, when they were purchased, etc. So get over there and put in all your HD data!" Things like this could help eliminate the anecdotal-only nature of many of hardware complaints, especially if people who are happy with their hardware bother to report it.

Falling far from a tree has nothing to do with it. Majik writes "A quick correction - the iPod has *10* gigs of storage, not 5 (or 6 like the Nomad). And with the Firewire interface you can move an entire CD in under a minute. Although I admit I was hoping for more out of the product announcement, it's still pretty darn cool ... "

On the other hand, jchristopher writes: "Love it or hate it, Apple's new iPod digital music player is here. Yesterday, many people commented that "at least it has no copy protection" and praised Apple's attitude toward digital music. Unfortunately, this may not be the case - according to this New York Times article, the iPod does indeed have copy protection - MP3 files copied to the iPod from one Mac to the iPod CAN'T be offloaded onto a different computer. Ouch!" That means (at least without further hacking) it can't be used as a transfer medium between the G3 and work and the iMac kept hidden in your darkest closet, which is sort of a shame considering that it has all the right things built in to be even better than the several portable firewire drives on the market.

Unorginal Equipment Makers. An Anonymous Coward writes: "This is a follow-up on a previous story posted to Slashdot about Microsoft's anti-competitive OEM contracts." It's a report by German journalist Erik Möller (hi, Erik!), who too an extremely thorough look at the details of OEM bundling deals, and what they mean to customers. Möller's conclusion: "No operating system will ever be able to compete with Microsoft Windows on the desktop market as long as OEMs cannot legally install it besides Windows without losing their license."

'Technical meaures' covers a pretty broad swath. Robotech_Master writes "The RIAA has responded to the 'license to virus' story, calling it a false Internet rumor and explaining their side of the story." So the RIAA officially does not want a license to hack, at least on paper.

Slashback tonight with updates on the long-absent Carnivore (which has so far failed to eat itself), David McOwen, Dmitry, and an alternative to the recently discussed Reptile.

Please let the shock penetrate the numbness. sethbc writes: "Well, it looks like the House has passed the DOJ Appropriations bill, giving the DOJ authority to use Carnivore for surveillance. The Tech Law Journal outlines the provisions for using Carnivore. I'm just glad I still have public key encryption."

Doesn't "DCS 1000" have sort of a nice homey ring to it? Maybe it reminds you of your Brother. Remember, encrypt your public key encryption software, and keep a copy with the other munitions.

That bandwidth rate is a little ... unusual. David's McOwen's case has raised quote a stir. If you missed word of this the first time, McOwen is being sued, and threatened with jail time, for installing the distributed.net client.

polymorf points to this article at Van's Hardware Journal, which features links to an online petition at petitiononline containing the comments of over 1800 people, and to relevant sites at tacube and freemcowen.

Cleverly disguise your hidden attraction to the DMCA. fenix down writes: "Lawrence Lessig has written an excellent op-ed piece in the NY Times (yeah, yeah, gotta register) on Dmitri Sklyarov and the DMCA. It nicely summarizes the problems with the DMCA as well as the Sklyarov and Felten cases. The dead-tree version gives me hope that this will be read. Big, eye-catching cartoon, center page, right under an article by Ehud Barak."

And since (despite? because of) all the attention he's gotten, Dmitry's wife's husband is still in jail, zlern writes: "Pictures from the protest to Free Dmitry in San Francisco today are available at sf.freesklyarov.org. Looks like about 150 people. Have you sent letters to your congresscritters yet?"

Stubborn contributor Chris DiBona contributes a link to an interesting DMCA resource, his DMCA Declaration, noting that it already has nearly 10,000 signatures, and that if people haven't signed up yet, they should as it becomes more useful the more people sign on.

Burning, Green -- fyuze or reptile? In response to the recent discussion of the Reptile content syndication system, ikarus-fallen writes:

"I was particularly intrigued by the post on the Reptile project today, because I run and develop a similar project, fyuze. The idea behind fyuze is similar to the idea behind Reptile: automate the process of retrieving, organizing and sifting through data. This eliminates the need to hop from site to site to collect information, and provides a certain level of convenience. Add in features that make it possible to have the system automatically scan for content that matches a particular criteria, along with the ability to search arbitrarily, and you've got a great way to collect all the news you want, and quickly find all the latest reviews for, say, 'Planet of the Apes.'

fyuze differs from Reptile significantly in that it is a web-based system, not a client P2P application, meaning there is no software to install, simply log on, create an account, and then re-logon from anywhere else. This means that (in the future) it will be possible to use fyuze via a cell phone, or PDA, or any other web enabled device, like the flat-screen mounted to your fridge.

To simply list a couple of features, fyuze allows users to add content/feeds to the system, it supports RDF/RSS as well as plain old HTML, it has a skinnable interface via CSS, it allows for real-time content collection and related intelligent caching mechanisms, and has an advanced (content can span multiple rows and columns) layout system.

The real-time collection mechanism allows for fyuze to retrieve user specific information from a site. This means that a weblog could provide a user with not only the latest posts, but also information on recent replies to that user's comments, status of pending posts, karma, etc.

fyuze is only about a month old, so you may find it's selection of content a little small, but many popular sites are available. Besides, users can add content, so if you run a site, add it!

For more info, it might be helpful to read the following k5 article: Quest for the Ultimate Homepage"

jwales writes: "Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief of the Nupedia and Wikipedia sister projects, has written a fabulous response on k5 to Britannica's decision to start charging fees for access. It's all about freedom (in the sense of free speech), but there are implications for freedom (in the sense of free beer)."

Dare Obasanjo contributed this piece about a subject that probably only a very few people have ever taken the time to consider, or had to. Below he asks the musical question "Why aren't you using an Object Oriented Database Management System?"Update: 05/04 02:11 PM by H :This is also running on K5 - yes, that's on purpose, and yes, Dare, myself and Rusty all know. *grin*

Why Aren't You Using An Object Oriented Database Management System?

In today's world, Client-Server applications that rely on a database on the server as a data store while servicing requests from multiple clients are quite commonplace. Most of these applications use a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) as their data store while using an object oriented programming language for development. This causes a certain inefficency as objects must be mapped to tuples in the database and vice versa instead of the data being stored in a way that is consistent with the programming model. The "impedance mismatch" caused by having to map objects to tables and vice versa has long been accepted as a necessary performance penalty. This paper is aimed at seeking out an alternative that avoids this penalty.

What follows is a condensed version of the following paper; An Exploration of Object Oriented Database Management Systems, which I wrote as part of my independent study project under Dr. Sham Navathe.

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to provide answers to the following questions

• What is an Object Oriented Database Management System (OODBMS)?
• Is an OODBMS a viable alternative to an RDBMS?
• What are the tradeoffs and benefits of using an OODBMS over an RDBMS?
• What does code that interacts with an OODBMS look like?

Overview of Object Oriented Database Management Systems

An OODBMS is the result of combining object oriented programming principles with database management principles. Object oriented programming concepts such as encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance are enforced as well as database management concepts such as the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) which lead to system integrity, support for an ad hoc query language and secondary storage management systems which allow for managing very large amounts of data. The Object Oriented Database Manifesto [Atk 89] specifically lists the following features as mandatory for a system to support before it can be called an OODBMS; Complex objects, Object identity, Encapsulation , Types and Classes ,Class or Type Hierarchies, Overriding,overloading and late binding, Computational completeness , Extensibility, Persistence , Secondary storage management, Concurrency, Recovery and an Ad Hoc Query Facility.

>From the aforementioned description, an OODBMS should be able to store objects that are nearly indistinguishable from the kind of objects supported by the target programming language with as little limitation as possible. Persistent objects should belong to a class and can have one or more atomic types or other objects as attributes. The normal rules of inheritance should apply with all their benefits including polymorphism, overridding inherited methods and dynamic binding. Each object has an object identifier (OID) which used as a way of uniquely identifying a particuler object. OIDs are permanent, system generated and not based on any of the member data within the object. OIDs make storing references to other objects in the database simpler but may cause referential intergrity problems if an object is deleted while other objects still have references to its OID. An OODBMS is thus a full scale object oriented development environment as well as a database management system. Features that are common in the RDBMS world such as transactions, the ability to handle large amounts of data, indexes, deadlock detection, backup and restoration features and data recovery mechanisms also exist in the OODBMS world.

A primary feature of an OODBMS is that accessing objects in the database is done in a transparent manner such that interaction with persistent objects is no different from interacting with in-memory objects. This is very different from using an RDBMSs in that there is no need to interact via a query sub-language like SQL nor is there a reason to use a Call Level Interface such as ODBC, ADO or JDBC. Database operations typically involve obtaining a database root from the the OODBMS which is usually a data structure like a graph, vector, hash table, or set and traversing it to obtain objects to create, update or delete from the database. When a client requests an object from the database, the object is transferred from the database into the application's cache where it can be used either as a transient value that is disconnected from its representation in the database (updates to the cached object do not affect the object in the database) or it can be used as a mirror of the version in the database in that updates to the object are reflected in the database and changes to object in the database require that the object is refetched from the OODBMS.

Comparisons of OODBMSs to RDBMSs

There are concepts in the relational database model that are similar to those in the object database model. A relation or table in a relational database can be considered to be analogous to a class in an object database. A tuple is similar to an instance of a class but is different in that it has attributes but no behaviors. A column in a tuple is similar to a class attribute except that a column can hold only primitive data types while a class attribute can hold data of any type. Finally classes have methods which are computationally complete (meaning that general purpose control and computational structures are provided [McF 99]) while relational databases typically do not have computationally complete programming capabilities although some stored procedure languages come close.

Below is a list of advantages and disadvantages of using an OODBMS over an RDBMS with an object oriented programming language.

Advantages

1. Composite Objects and Relationships: Objects in an OODBMS can store an arbitrary number of atomic types as well as other objects. It is thus possible to have a large class which holds many medium sized classes which themselves hold many smaller classes, ad infinitum. In a relational database this has to be done either by having one huge table with lots of null fields or via a number of smaller, normalized tables which are linked via foreign keys. Having lots of smaller tables is still a problem since a join has to be performed every time one wants to query data based on the "Has-a" relationship between the entities. Also an object is a better model of the real world entity than the relational tuples with regards to complex objects. The fact that an OODBMS is better suited to handling complex,interrelated data than an RDBMS means that an OODBMS can outperform an RDBMS by ten to a thousand times depending on the complexity of the data being handled.
   
   
2. Class Hierarchy: Data in the real world is usually has hierarchical characteristics. The ever popular Employee example used in most RDBMS texts is easier to describe in an OODBMS than in an RDBMS. An Employee can be a Manager or not, this is usually done in an RDBMS by having a type identifier field or creating another table which uses foreign keys to indicate the relationship between Managers and Employees. In an OODBMS, the Employee class is simply a parent class of the Manager class.
   
   
3. Circumventing the Need for a Query Language: A query language is not necessary for accessing data from an OODBMS unlike an RDBMS since interaction with the database is done by transparently accessing objects. It is still possible to use queries in an OODBMS however.
   
   
4. No Impedence Mismatch: In a typical application that uses an object oriented programming language and an RDBMS, a signifcant amount of time is usually spent mapping tables to objects and back. There are also various problems that can occur when the atomic types in the database do not map cleanly to the atomic types in the programming language and vice versa. This "impedance mismatch" is completely avoided when using an OODBMS.
   
   
5. No Primary Keys: The user of an RDBMS has to worry about uniquely identifying tuples by their values and making sure that no two tuples have the same primary key values to avoid error conditions. In an OODBMS, the unique identification of objects is done behind the scenes via OIDs and is completely invisible to the user. Thus there is no limitation on the values that can be stored in an object.
   
   
6. One Data Model: A data model typically should model entities and their relationships, constraints and operations that change the states of the data in the system. With an RDBMS it is not possible to model the dynamic operations or rules that change the state of the data in the system because this is beyond the scope of the database. Thus applications that use RDBMS systems usually have an Entity Relationship diagram to model the static parts of the system and a seperate model for the operations and behaviors of entities in the application. With an OODBMS there is no disconnect between the database model and the application model because the entities are just other objects in the system. An entire application can thus be comprehensively modelled in one UML diagram.
   
   

Disadvantages

1. Schema Changes: In an RDBMS modifying the database schema either by creating, updating or deleting tables is typically independent of the actual application. In an OODBMS based application modifying the schema by creating, updating or modifying a persistent class typically means that changes have to be made to the other classes in the application that interact with instances of that class. This typically means that all schema changes in an OODBMS will involve a system wide recompile. Also updating all the instance objects within the database can take an extended period of time depending on the size of the database.
   
   

Who is currently using an OODBMS to handle mission critical data

The following information was gleaned from the ODBMS Facts website.

• The Chicago Stock Exchange manages stock trades via a Versant ODBMS.
  
  
• Radio Computing Services is the world's largest radio software company. Its product, Selector, automates the needs of the entire radio station -- from the music library, to the newsroom, to the sales department. RCS uses the POET ODBMS because it enabled RCS to integrate and organize various elements, regardless of data types, in a single program environment.
  
  
• The Objectivity/DB ODBMS is used as a data repository for system component naming, satellite mission planning data, and orbital management data deployed by Motorola in The Iridium System.
  
  
• The ObjectStore ODBMS is used in SouthWest Airline's Home Gate to provide self-service to travelers through the Internet.
  
  
• Ajou University Medical Center in South Korea uses InterSystems' Cachè ODBMS to support all hospital functions including mission-critical departments such as pathology, laboratory, blood bank, pharmacy, and X-ray.
  
  
• The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland uses an Objectivity DB. The database is currently being tested in the hundreds of terabytes at data rates up to 35 MB/second.
  
  
• As of November, 2000, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) stored 169 terabytes of production data using Objectivity/DB. The production data is distributed across several hundred processing nodes and over 30 on-line servers.

Interacting With An OODBMS

Below are Java code samples for accessing a relational database and accessing an object database. Compare the size of the code in both examples. The examples are for an instant messaging application.

1. Validating a user.
   
   Java code accessing an ObjectStore(TM) database
   
import COM.odi.*;
import COM.odi.util.query.*;
import COM.odi.util.*;
import java.util.*;

try {

//start database session
Session session = Session.create(null, null);
session.join();

//open database and start transaction
Database db = Database.open("IMdatabase", ObjectStore.UPDATE);
Transaction tr = Transaction.begin(ObjectStore.READONLY);

//get hashtable of user objects from DB
OSHashMap users = (OSHashMap) db.getRoot("IMusers");

//get password and username from user
String username = getUserNameFromUser();
String passwd = getPasswordFromUser();


//get user object from database and see if it exists and whether password is correct
UserObject user = (UserObject) users.get(username);

if(user == null)
System.out.println("Non-existent user");
else
if(user.getPassword().equals(passwd))
System.out.println("Successful login");
else
System.out.println("Invalid Password");

//end transaction, close database and retain terminate session
tr.commit();
db.close();
session.termnate();
}
//exception handling would go here ...


   Java JDBC code accessing an IBM's DB2 Database(TM)
   
   import java.sql.*;
import sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver;
import java.util.*;


try {

//Launch instance of database driver.
Class.forName("COM.ibm.db2.jdbc.app.DB2Driver").newInstance();

//create database connection
Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:db2:IMdatabase");

//get password and username from user
String username = getUserNameFromUser();
String passwd = getPasswordFromUser();

//perform SQL query
Statement sqlQry = conn.createStatement();
ResultSet rset = sqlQry.executeQuery("SELECT password from user_table WHERE username='" + username +"'");


if(rset.next()){
if(rset.getString(1).equals(passwd))
System.out.println("Successful login");
else
System.out.println("Invalid Password");
}else{
System.out.println("Non-existent user");
}

//close database connection
sqlQry.close();
conn.close();

}
//exception handling would go here ...

   There isn't much difference in the above examples although it does seem a lot clearer to perform operations on a UserObject instead of a ResultSet when validating the user.
   
   
2. Getting the user's contact list.
   
   Java code accessing an ObjectStore(TM) database
   
   import COM.odi.*;
import COM.odi.util.query.*;
import COM.odi.util.*;
import java.util.*;


try {

/* start session and open DB, same as in section 1a */

//get hashmap of users from the DB
OSHashMap users = (OSHashMap) db.getRoot("IMusers");

//get user object from database
UserObject c4l = (UserObject) users.get("Carnage4Life");
UserObject[] contactList = c4l.getContactList();

System.out.println("This are the people on Carnage4Life's contact list");

for(int i=0; i <contactList.length; i++)
System.out.println(contactList[i].toString()); //toString() prints fullname, username, online status and webpage URL

/* close session and close DB, same as in section 1a */
}//exception handling code
   
   Java JDBC code accessing an IBM's DB2 Database(TM)
   
   import java.sql.*;
import sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver;
import java.util.*;


try {

/* open DB connection, same as in section 1b */
//perform SQL query
Statement sqlQry = conn.createStatement();
ResultSet rset = sqlQry.executeQuery("SELECT fname, lname, user_name, online_status, webpage FROM contact_list, user_table" + "WHERE contact_list.owner_name='Carnage4Life' and contact_list.buddy_name=user_table.user_name");

System.out.println("This are the people on Carnage4Life's contact list");


while(rset.next())
System.out.println("Full Name:" + rset.getString(1) + " " + rset.getString(2) + " User Name:" + rset.getString(3) + " OnlineStatus:" + rset.getString(4) + " HomePage URL:" + rset.getString(5));

/* close DB connection, same as in section 1b*/
}//exception handling code

   
   The benefits of using an OODBMS over an RDBMS in Java slowly becomes obvious. Consider also that if the data from the select needs to be returned to another method then all the data from the result set has to be mapped to another object (UserObject).
   
   
3. Get all the users that are online.
   
   Java code accessing an ObjectStore(TM) database
   
   import COM.odi.*;
import COM.odi.util.query.*;
import COM.odi.util.*;
import java.util.*;

try{
/* same as above */

//use a OODBMS query to locate all the users whose status is 'online'
Query q = new Query (UserObject.class, "onlineStatus.equals(\"online\"");
Collection users = db.getRoot("IMusers");
Set onlineUsers = q.select(users);

Iterator iter = onlineUsers.iterator();

// iterate over the results
while ( iter.hasNext() )
{
UserObject user = (UserObject) iter.next();

// send each person some announcement
sendAnnouncement(user);

}

/* same as above */

}//exception handling goes here

   
   Java JDBC code accessing an IBM's DB2 Database(TM)
   import java.sql.*;
import sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver;
import java.util.*;

try{
/* same as above */

//perform SQL query
Statement sqlQry = conn.createStatement
();
ResultSet rset = sqlQry.executeQuery
("SELECT fname, lname, user_name, online_status,
webpage FROM user_table WHERE
online_status='online'");

while(rset.next()){

UserObject user = new UserObject
(rset.getString(1),rset.getString
(2),rset.getString(3),rset.getString
(4),rset.getString(5));
sendAnnouncement(user);

}


/* same as above */
}//exception handling goes here



List of Object Oriented Database Management Systems
Proprietary

• Object Store
• O2
• Gemstone
• Versant
• Ontos
• DB/Explorer ODBMS
• Ontos
• Poet
• Objectivity/DB
• EyeDB
  
  Open Source
• Ozone
• Zope
• FramerD
• XL2

Conclusion

The gains from using an OODBMS while developing an application using an OO programming language are many. The savings in development time by not having to worry about separate data models as well as the fact that there is less code to write due to the lack of impedance mismatch is very attractive. In my opinion, there is little reason to pick an RDBMS over an OODBMS system for newapplication development unless there are legacy issues that have to be dealt with.

Rusty of Kuro5hin has a written a great Op-Ed piece about reality and belief. It deserves the widest possible dissemination - tell your friends, make them think about it.

Rusty of Kuro5hin has a written a great Op-Ed piece about reality and belief. It deserves the widest possible dissemination - tell your friends, make them think about it.

lines writes "I was amazed to find out that the Mandelbrot Set was discovered by a 13th century monk -- way, way before the advent of non-human computers. Apparently, a mathematician spied a mini-mandelbrot masquerading as the Star of Bethlehem in an illuminated manuscript's depiction of the Nativity scene. It turns out that this particular monk, Udo of Aachen, was attempting to mathematically describe a soul's path to Heaven. (For those unfamiliar with it, here's a quick introduction to the Mandelbrot Set.)" Update 30 mins later by J : Yes, this is an old April Fool's joke - and a cleverly done one, too.

Slashback tonight brings you more on how to find good books, how to have your car snipped off the Golden Gate Bridge, and what's up in the world of Linux audio and video, through an interview with GStreamer developers. Enjoy!

Can you read me? Over. With both feet in the stream of continuing evolution and convergence of distributed voting, online metaknowledge and probably a few other things, Johnathan Nightingale has created a site called Canonical Tomes, lately featured on Kuro5hin.

It's a really cool way to approach the "top picks" in a given subject, and fun to browse especially in the fields you're not very familiar with: the trick is a community voting system -- visit it and pick your favorites.

It also raises the question, though, of how to avoid an early lead from remaining permanent; how do new but excellent books gain a foothold? And what about situations where the popular books aren't the best ones? Kudos to Johnathan for putting this together, now it's your turn to point out the best books in your field to others.

Gee, Wally, I can colorize you from this "Linux" machine! starlady writes "Linux.com has an interview up with the developers of GStreamer. GStreamer, as mentioned here before, is a full featured multimedia framework with functionality for everything from mp3 playback to audio and video editing."

An excerpt, quoting developer Wim Taymans: "First of all, GStreamer is a real framework. This means that it can be used for a generic media player as well as serve as the core of large multimedia render farms. The GStreamer core is built in such a way that it is media agnostic, it doesn't know or care what media data it is handling. The interpretation of the media types is entirely handled by the plug-ins."

And though everyone is excited about video, things like this will make Linux a lot more capable as an audio capturing and manipulation platform, too.

The real question is, did you get in trouble? Regarding the dangling beetle which caused the city fathers of San Francisco some small consternation, Ms Golden Gate 2001 writes: "In case you're still fretting, or wondering, here are a few first-hand pieces of info about the stunt (I hope you guys weren't really believing what you read in the papers, now were you? ;-)

• the Bug was hung by cable and nylon webbing from a two-point suspension system (check the math -- that's not so easy: you try figuring out how to sling cable from *both* sides of the bridge to hang something nicely centred!)
  
• the Bug was never in sight of any commmuter after the initial 1-minute deployment (*under* the bridge!)
  
• the first to be informed were the traffic helicopters
  
• the Ironworkers who cut it down (in minutes) thought the job was well done ("They could probably get a job as ironworkers")
  
• the Bug was stripped of nasties, and as the Ironworkers said, it's a new habitat (just like when they sink a ship to create an artificial reef, only smaller, MUCH smaller)

Not the Mother-of-all-stunts, but worthy of some kudos - maybe for the most enthusiastic bunch of hard-working students who want the world to know they love what they do (and where the heck Vancouver is!). Even the website is there to promote engineering (seriously) to students.

All that technology, and it's still nigh impossible to get the facts heard over the Brownian noise :-P At least this is a good forum for venting without swords!

P.S. It's National Engineering Week in Canada! (Look out below!)"

The unusually-seen Kurt Gray wrote this; it's funny, to the point and more honest than may make everyone comfortable. Everyone knows banner ads suck; Kurt tells you a little more about why they're still around, explores some things that might make them better, and generally straightens the dope. We're doing this in conjunction with K5, who's also got the story. So, hop back and forth, and we can all get a merry meta-discussion going.

My name is Kurt Gray, I'm the lead programmer for OSDN's ad system which serves ad banners on sites like Slashdot, Freshmeat, SourceForge, Themes, and partnering deal with Kuro5hin, etc. I open sourced our ad delivery code sometime last year and have been maintaining it in-house here as well. My quest now is to create a better ad banner delivery system, not only better for you the audience but also more useful to our sponsors. So I have some ideas about our ad system that we want to pitch to you all sitting out there reading this and your feedback on these ideas would be of great value to us. Note that this is being posted to both K5 and Slashdot because we want to get feedback from everyone we can.

First let me address two issues that have been discussed on Slashdot just recently on Micropayments instead of ads and Ad banners may soon get bigger and how these issues pertain to ad banners on the OSDN sites.

Why run ad banners? What about a tip-jar, or subscription fees, or micropayments, or donations, or bill-the-ISPs instead of ad banners?

When you're running a web site, depending on your content, your audience, the size of your staff, your overhead costs, the size and nature of your audience, and many other factors, it might be possible to get by on just subscription fees, or micropayments, or some other revenue model that does not involve selling banner ads. But the size of the audience on OSDN's web sites and the nature of the content within is such that the subscription models break down. For a network of this size and content ad banners are the only realistic way to cover costs and hopefully earn a little profit (someday we hope). Another way of looking at it is to ask yourself why does Yahoo, CNet, and ZDNet still rely on banner ads? Because for a web sites that have a lot of traffic no one has proven that there is a better way to earn more revenue with less overhead. In any large media company, advertising is it. Even with print magazines the subscription fees and cover prices don't come close to covering the costs for a large circulation magazine: the subscription fees and cover price is just a barrier-of-entry to assure the advertisers that the readership paid to read the content and therefore is the right audience to see their ads.

....but ad banners don't work! There's too many ad filters now days!

Yes, a lot of people, even entire ISPs, have ad filters and proxy rules to block out banner ads but even still there are plenty enough ad impressions delivered every day. In fact those who filter ads are doing web publishers and advertisers a favor by making sure that no time, bandwidth, or impressions are wasted on people who definately will not respond to any kind of ad. So please, filter the ads out if you feel that strongly about it, in fact, I'll pitch you some ideas further on in this article in which our ad system could help you filter out the ads which is why I'm posting this.

...but too many people ignore banner ads, and nobody clicks on them! Advertising sucks! Free your head! Prioritize, man!

Yes, many people, including myself, scroll right past banner ads and ignore them completely. But chances are you did glance at many of the ads in a web given page, perhaps you saw a logo or brand name. In that sense the ad delivered just what it intended. It's called "branding": advertising for the sake of increased brand recognition and its most of what large advertisers hope for when advertsing in any medium including the web. Smaller advertisers will obsess over response to each ad, whether that be a click, or even a sale, and thus they become very unhappy when the click-thru is not to their satisfaction. So just because click-thru percentages are low across the board doesn't mean Internet advertising is doomed, but rather advertisers expectations and ad pricing schemes are changing accordingly. The smallest fish in the pond may be doomed but the pond remains.

What can we expect from OSDN web sites as far as ad banners? Bigger fatter ads? More ads per page? Flashing noisy ads that will read my browser cache and report all suspicous keywords to the NSA?

As you might expect, we are debating internally what OSDN sites can do to stay competitive in the ad banner business. Right now we are not competitive in many areas: we only accept the most basic ad formats, most OSDN sites only accept one ad size, our average click-thru rate is as low as anywhere else, and our rate card prices are higher than most. We've been able to get away with it so far because our web sites are very well known and our audience has just the kind of demographics advertisers drool over, but lately its become a buyers market, the ad budgets are drying up and the few big advertisers still spending online are having their way with the web publishers left groveling for the business. It's times like these when advertisers can force outrageous new ad formats down the throats of the web publishers, and other web publishers are stepping up their ad offerings to entice advertisers to their space -- it's a free market economy after all.

So what are we doing about it? First we're telling our sales people to go after more main stream advertising accounts: entertainment, auto makers, food and beverage, whatever we think fits our audience. Second, we're looking at which newer ad formats and what we're willing to accept. Third, I have to rewrite our ad delivery system to improve our ad targeting: platform targeting, geotargeting, and topic targeting at the very least. Along these lines I also have some ideas I want to bounce off you there reading this here article...

Let the users control the ad delivery. User preferences. Ad filtering. User feedback. Interactive, or as George W. would say "Interactivfulness"

Here's a few scenerios, ideas I've been pitching around:

Comment forums for each ad banner:

What if you could comment on the ad banners, such as each ad banner has its own discussion forum? So if an ad bothers you, offends you, confuses you, entices you, anything about that ad, you can speak and be heard. Let's face it, many ad banners suck because nobody tells the ad agency that the creative needs improvement. On the other hand the ad may be messing with your browser and you just want someone to know about it. Or maybe you wanted whatever was being advertised, you clicked, and you still didn't get the information you were looking for, the ad feedback forum would be the place to get a response on that.

Turning off annoying ads:

Suppose you become absolutely sick and tired of seeing that "Fawking DSL!" ad or that "Punch the monkey" banner, suppose you could click a link right next to the banner "Never show me this ad again or I swear I will lose it and someone will have to call security." And you just click that link and bam, you'll never see that ad again. The number of people who turn off a particular ad could be a way of truly knowing how counter productive certain ads are.

Choice of ad topics and categories:

What if you could select which kinds of ads you want to see, and which kinds of ads you don't want to see? For example what if you could explicately set your ad preferences so that you're are more about networking, movies, gadgets, and events but you don't want to see ads for alcohol, web design, or luxury items... and these ad preferences would apply to you within whole OSDN network of web sites. Would we use your information to for demographic studies? Yes absolutely, we'd tell advertisers that we have X number of people over here who explicately told us that they'd prefer to see ads about their kind of product. The overall effect we won't waste our effort chasing after advertsiers that have nothing of interest to our community and we won't waste your bandwidth downloading ads you don't want.

What about ad system karma?

I'm thinking there could be a point-based reward system that gives you credit for everything you do that helps our advertising business. As you accumulate karma points in our ad system you could redeem them gain access to an extended set of features in the ad system itself...

To increase your ad system karma you could (Hypothetical examples)

• 1 point for every time you load a paid ad
• 0 points for clicking on an ad (I don't want to encourage excessive ad clicking)
• 50 points for loading bigger ads
• 100 points for loading a pop-up ad
• 500 points for filling out an advertiser's survey
• 100 points for loading a Flash ad
• 300 points for posting a meaningful critique on an ad
• 200 points for alerting us if an ad is broken
• 500 points for helping us test an ad before it goes live

(Just assume for the sake of this disussion that this point system is mostly immune to people running bots to accumulate points. We're still in hypothetical land here.)

Redeem your points to gain access to such features as (Hypothetical examples)

• Turn off all ads
• Upload your own ads
• Get stats on the ads you uploaded
• Specify which sites you want your ads to run on
• Whetever else anyone can think of...

Note that this entire karma point system is just my own personal ideas and not officially sanctioned by anyone else working here. I figured I'd bounce this off you all out there in the audience and see how it plays with you all.

How would ad system karma affect web site user karma?

It wouldn't. The ad system is totally disconnected from any web site user database. Our ad system runs ads on many web sites, so even if we felt compelled to tie it into the user accounts of any web site it would be a lot of work, too much work, and I don't see any reason to even attempt it.

So the ad system would have its own user accounts independant and unrelated to web site accounts. Does that complicate things? No, the ad system user account is low maintenance, transparent, maybe as simple as cookie, nothing too visible, not in your face all the time nagging you to come play. The ad system preferences web page could be one click away, simple web form, nothing too fancy.

Hey I don't like you spying on me! I'm going to wear a metal bowl on my head and warn the others that you're all sneaky opportunist-type people. You are one of them.

That's OK. I have my metal bowl on too. As far as these ad system ideas go, you wouldn't need to have an ad system user account if you want to be anonymous and outside the loop as far as the ad delivery goes that's fine. This user account would be something you'd actively choose to create, and if you don't bother doing so then fine, you're anonymous, unknown, you'll see the normal general rotation of banner ads, and maybe later hopefully you'll find that out food tastes better when you try out some of these features and take advantage of the bonuses.

We're a community, damnit! We're not your ad-clicking sheep! If you can't sell ads then that's your problem! One day this web site will be free of your commercial opportunist tryannical business, all the trolls will leave, this site will be cool again, and then food will taste better!

These web sites have grown way beyond the realm of affordable to operate by volunteers and donors. If OSDN and/or VA collapsed someday then the OSDN web sites would not be simply released back into the wild but rather be liquidated as assets to the highest bidder, and you can bet the new owners would gladly run these sites into the ground for every last penny they can quickly earn from them. So at least you can be glad the original founders of these web sites still work here and they care a lot about how this web site works for you, the community. And if we're not able to turn a profit here despite our best efforts, whoever ends up grabbing our helm here will most likely toss this whole crew overboard, and I can assure you that the new crew will care far less about "community" then we ever did. But that's not your problem anyway because there are plenty of other web sites out there like this one, and if you log off now you may even discover that there is whole world of amazing life outside the Internet, I don't know much about that myself so I can't descibe it to you but I've downloaded pictures of it. So is this as good as it gets for these web sites? No, we can do better here, and last week resolved to be a lot more focused. We're determined not to give Jesse Berst and his ilk any reason to gloat.

So I can't think of what else I was going to pitch here. So please if you have feedback on any of the ideas pitched above then post them here.

Kurt Gray, OSDN, ad system engineer

Janus Daniels writes: "Kuro5hin has a story about how to use Linux tools to capture any video to a hard drive, edit it, and then copy it to the long term media of your choice."

BeFiend writes "Looks like Amazon is trying to develop a "micro-payment" tip jar system for Web sites. They're calling it the Amazon Honor System and looks like you can give as little as a buck, while that's not really a micropayment it is a step in the right direction. I've only seen a couple of sites BBspot and SatireWire with the pay box already, but I'm sure we'll see them popping up all over the place with banner ad revenue plummeting." Amazon says says they don't track you on sites that use this system, even though since the payment box is served from their servers, they easily could (indeed, Amazon's regular No-Privacy Policy directly conflicts with the above page - which one controls?). And Amazon takes a hefty chunk of each payment in processing fees. But perhaps this model could be useful for sites which need cash but don't want to serve advertising.

An interesting article about a web-based discussion system we've mentioned before: nebby writes "A while back Slashdot ran an article which pointed to a k5 submission by myself which discussed ideas about a proposal I had for a new moderation system. Half-empty is an online community with an open submission queue I've been building over the past year which implements this moderation system, among other things, and has been growing steadily with interesting posts and discussion about topics such as government, poetry, stories, and technology. Well, I'm proud to announce that the engine that drives Half-empty, Glasscode, is now available for download. It has advanced features such as distributed skins, category filtering and permissions, and the said global moderation system. Hit the link for how this all came to be, and what I'm hoping for the future."

BBSes, Half-Empty, Glasscode, and my sanity.

Just a bit more than a year ago, me and my good friend Isaac Oates (author of the Eternity BBS software from long ago) sat down and decided to create a website. We were missing the days of BBS yore, where discussion flowed with intellectual posts about all kinds of topics, trolls were sparse, and flames were hearty. We wanted it back. The root of all evil seen in online posting today, Isaac and I decided, was that people were not caring what all of their peers thought of them, and were not in anyway motivated to think through their posts. We also saw alot of the current weblogs out there restricted in what could be posted, and by whom. They were also confusing to the newbie (granted, half-empty is overwhelming right now), and we wanted anyone and everyone with a Internet connection to be able to stop sucking information out and start dumping some back in.

We wanted to create an online community (the kind that Katz has recently been raving about) that would have no limits on discussion and would by its nature make people want to get involved. It would allow the users to get an ongoing rush of content, or eliminate the content down to just being about, say, Birds. It would let the users know what other people thought of them. It would allow for the obvious identification and silencing of blatant trolls. It would be fun to use, and would be addictive.

We started chipping away last January, at the turn of the millenium. Unfortunately, Isaac was sucked away into the depths of UIUC, unable to continue the project. Fortunate or not for myself, this was a project stuck in my head and would not leave me alone until it was finished.. I'm sure most of you can relate. I became addicted to it, adding piece after piece, rethinking the architecture and rating/point system over and over again.. making myself a self-proclaimed psychologist of my users-to-be. "Should points be a reward, or a punishment?" .. "Will they rate stuff down they disagree with?" .. "How much of a focus should be on points, and how much on content?"

I spent most of my second semester freshman year at Cornell (when not doing homework or intoxicating myself) coding this beast. I rebuilt it from the ground up several times, and knew the source code much better than my Chemistry book (and boy, do my grades show this fact..) Summer came and went, and every night after seeing friends I would return home and sit in front of the screen hacking and tweaking away. I saved some cash and got it running on a overclocked Celeron off of e-bay. Half-empty had only one user, one voice, but this would all change soon enough.

I forget the exact day in September, probably the day after we got our cable modem, when I proclaimed to my housemates that we were going to test roadrunner's bandwidth and see what would happen. Knowing that I couldn't afford a real connection, my plan was to open the site, get a gigantic flood of users somehow, and pray that one of them sees what I'm trying to do and decides to help me out. I plugged it in, started it up, set up the DNS, and half-empty.org became live.

Now I needed some users.. I decided the most complicated part of the system (and the most discussable) was the moderation system, which still wasn't perfected. I wanted feedback about both the setup I was doing and the site itself, so I posted a kuro5hin article announcing the site and briefly mentioning the system. I had a steady stream of people checking it out then, the server was stable, and I was happy. A request was made for more information about the specific math involved, so I bit and typed up the in depth explanation linked above. A bunch of "Ideas" (half-empty's content) got posted, and discussion took place with only a few minor bumps.

About 100 people signed up that night. The next day, I was minding my own business when I heard a "Oh shit." from my housemate in the other room.. sure enough, we were about to get semi-Slashdotted (mind you, this was a cable modem) I killed my PC, grabbed the RAM out of it, slapped it into the server, prayed, and surprisingly it survived. I had 500 new users in two hours. The posts were coming in at a pretty crazy rate. (This was the only time that I saw the rate of input that I've envisioned since I started working on the project.)

Within a week or so, roadrunner took notice, and pulled the plug. I thought it was over for a while until I got an e-mail from Tim Wilde of dyndns services.. he had been a member of half-empty during the time it was up, and didn't want to see it fade away. Putting me into their slice of "cool stuff" on their budget (as Tim put it), half-empty would survive. I went into a coding spree for 48 hours, fixing any big bugs I could since the site was going to be dead for a few days. Tim arrived, put the box into the cage and plugged it in, and half-empty was back.

Of course, most of the folks who had been there originally had drifted away because of the downtime. The site has managed to addict a handful of people, however, and we've been trudging on ever since. There have been creative stories and plays discussed, politics, coding, and even a dirty joke or three :) It's become apparent that the moderation system, if nothing else, has caused people to read, preview, edit, and post their thoughts. I'm happy with what it's become, and can only hope that the mentality there will remain the same while the userbase gets larger.

So, today I've reached the end of this road, and probably the beginning of another. I've released the source to Glasscode, and (hopefully) have made it straightforward to setup and install. It's a Java-based servlet application, with many of the features seen in slashcode, with additions such as skinning, appending to posts, selective archiving, user tiers, category permissions and overviews, and plenty more. It provides a component based system for adding new types of content, and there is even an skin development kit to aid in the creation of new skins (which when accepted by the central server will be available to all Glasscode based sites.)

Hopefully this hasn't been too drawn out of a story to culminate in a software release.. I'm hoping that you've been entertained by my struggle against the need to code that most of us have learned to accept and embrace. One thing that many hackers need to learn that computers are just tools, tools which will be ultimately used by people. Linux, Gnome, Glasscode, and all software is there to help people do things or think in ways they couldn't before. With this in mind, Happy Hacking :)"

Christopher Thomas writes "A common theme in science fiction is the "replicator"; a device that can build anything on demand. An extension of this idea is the self-replicating factory, that grows in size geometrically to produce goods or to terraform hostile environments. It turns out that both of these miraculous devices are closer than they seem - in fact, to some extent they're already here. I've posted an article summarizing things."

nd writes: "Harry Browne has agreed to a roundtable discussion with everyone in a Kuro5hin Feature. He'll be responding to messages himself under his own account." It's been going on for a few days now, and is an amazing look at the future of political coverage. Reflecting a sentiment I hope is accurate, Jim Madison writes: "Despite the apathy, I think slashdot's members are actually quite well-informed, politically speaking. Our friends, however, are not. According to this article, 25% of citizens 18-24 cannot name both major party presidential candidates and 70% cannot name their running mates. Wow. This discussion at Quorum.org (disclaimer: a site I co-founded) questions whether online forums (like this one) can help make politics more accessible or whether it's going to take structural change in Washington before it gets any better. What's the point of the $200 mm spent on advertising if they can't even get unaided brand recall?" For whose pathologically opposed to the letter "W," CaptainZ asserts that "This guy [Jamin Raskin] over at MSN has a pretty good article about how Nader and Gore can both 'win.'" Finally, wallstrum writes with word of yet another worthy candidate (still, I'm more of a Quimby man).

NEdit is a Linux/Unix "point and click" text editor that gets almost no press but has a dedicated (if small) band of devoted users, including rusty at kuro5hin and myself. We get lots of news about high-profile Open Source and free software projects, but rarely hear about ones like NEdit or the people who lead them -- like Mark Edel, NEdit's original author, who is still the project's integration "gatekeeper." This is a good opportunity for anyone who is thinking about starting a free software project to ask what it's like to toil in the shadow of giants. Please post your questions below. We'll forward about 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Mark tomorrow, and will post his answers next week.

Kuro5hin is running a story with some interesting ideas for "the perfect moderation system". I'm not sure I care for the overall system but the idea behind it (of 'balancing' out parts of the site with strategic bonuses/penalties) is intriguing.

TheTomcat writes "Kuro5hin is back up and better than ever, with its new server from VA Linux. At 2pm(1pm EST) today, the site went live, after a month or so of downtime." Well, this was the first submission in the bin to actually say it was up. Congrats to the whole gang and welcome back. And everyone else stop submitting their return, 'k? *grin* Update: 09/19 01:53 PM by CN : SlashNET will be hosting a forum with Rusty and Inoshiro on Saturday at 5:00 PM PDT (0:00 GMT). Looks like a good opportunity to welcome k5 back, as well as learn how they've overcome the issues that kept them down.

bob|hm was one of the group of people who wrote to us with an update from Kuro5hin. The donated server from VA has been packaged and sent out - now it's a matter of hooking it back up and "kicking the tires."

More below on what is surely one of the slowest patents ever granted (to our inquisitive friends with the radar domes, no less), and smidgeons of news on such various and sundry as Napster (perhaps you've heard of it?) and Iridium (perhaps you wish you'd never heard of it?), not to mention more on the destruction of the submarine Kursk.

The (cryptographic) wheels of government grind slowly. JOEL-V writes: "In August 2000, the United States Patent Office issued patent #6097812 to the National Security Agency, for 'Cryptographic System.' The patent application was filed in the year 1933, and this invention and patent are actually one version of the famous Enigma machine."

On a similar note, Paul Maud'Dib writes: "The Slashdot crew might be interested in checking out Enigmatic. They have java emulators for the Purple, Sigaba, Enigma, Russian Espionage Cipher and a public domain Bombe. They also have rather lucid descriptions of the various systems used. Interesting reads all."

That which does not kill him makes him stronger. You may recall that some maladjusted script kiddies threw a spanner in the works of the excellent kuro5hin a little while ago. Emmett told you more about the attack and its aftermath shortly thereafter. Looks like it's time for the (all volunteer, cool-content, graphically appealing) kuro5hin to emerge from a quick breather.

pope nihil writes: "kuro5hin.org has an update on their page. things should be back up (according to the update) by Sept 15 or so. check it out." Yes, Go there! Congratulations, guys.

88 bottles of bits on the wall, 88 bottles of bits ... NoWhere Man writes "The bankrupt Iridium venture has received another bid to save the wireless phone company's $5 billion satellite system from being pulled from space and destroyed. A California-based organization named CMC International is offering to pay $30 million to acquire Iridium's 88 satellites and other assets, according to a court filing submitted Friday."

It certainly would be nice if someone could eke out (even a meager) connection from Iridium rather than incinerating the satellites in the atmosphere, but honestly, the Will Burn / Will Fly status of these birds flip-flops enough to put a politician to shame. I'd like them to stay up, if only not to spook other folks from putting data-bouncing satellites up for our browsing pleasure.

In a nutshell, this is the problem with carrying around cavitation weapons. aleclee writes "It now appears that the Kursk was indeed carrying cavitation weapons and that she was sunk by a misfiring rocket. Supposedly, the rocket/torpedo can travel at 200 knots! Details can be found here."

Update: any port in a storm, and this one sounds nice. Patrick Ryan wrote: " Hello, I wanted you to know that CDSA [as mentioned in this slashdot story] has been updated at Intel and now includes a Linux port." Visit http://developer.intel.com/ial/security/ for more information about CDSA, and then the download site for your free-downloading pleasure.

Yenya writes: "It seems that Kuro5hin is being shut down as a result of the automated "spam" attacks in previous three days. It is a shame that good work of Rusty and other volunteers can be destroyed by some clueless attackers. I hope they will not give up and try to resurrect the site soon." Yenya was one of many who wrote about this - I personally like kuro5hin and I hope they can find a way to get things working again. Hopefully we'll get more news on it today - stayed tuned.

Yenya writes: "It seems that Kuro5hin is being shut down as a result of the automated "spam" attacks in previous three days. It is a shame that good work of Rusty and other volunteers can be destroyed by some clueless attackers. I hope they will not give up and try to resurrect the site soon." Yenya was one of many who wrote about this - I personally like kuro5hin and I hope they can find a way to get things working again. Hopefully we'll get more news on it today - stayed tuned.

Well, we held or deleted the first few hundred submissions, because we were hoping the situation would clear up and we could figure out what was going on. But it hasn't cleared up, so we're posting it and hopefully there are some readers out there who know what's going on and can shed some light. It seems that the anti-spammers at MAPS and ORBS have gone from a cold war into a shooting one, with MAPS listing ORBS on their blackhole list. ORBS accuses MAPS of doing it for financial gain, MAPS accuses ORBS of attacking systems, Alan Cox gets peeved about spam, kuro5hin.org has the obligatory "Slashdot is censoring the story!" postings but has at least one seemingly clueful post, and the U.S. House passed an anti-spam bill yesterday - coincidence, or devious conspiracy?

Well, we held or deleted the first few hundred submissions, because we were hoping the situation would clear up and we could figure out what was going on. But it hasn't cleared up, so we're posting it and hopefully there are some readers out there who know what's going on and can shed some light. It seems that the anti-spammers at MAPS and ORBS have gone from a cold war into a shooting one, with MAPS listing ORBS on their blackhole list. ORBS accuses MAPS of doing it for financial gain, MAPS accuses ORBS of attacking systems, Alan Cox gets peeved about spam, kuro5hin.org has the obligatory "Slashdot is censoring the story!" postings but has at least one seemingly clueful post, and the U.S. House passed an anti-spam bill yesterday - coincidence, or devious conspiracy?

melaniemad writes: "I haven't seen this story anywhere else but kuro5hin. Microsoft has set up a user account on eBay: msoft@buddy.ebay.com. They apparently use this account to shut down auctions of Microsoft software. This has resulted in a lot of negative feedback, which has been changed to 'neutral' by eBay. This does not coincide with their policy about removing feedback. But then, do the rules ever apply to Microsoft?" (read more...)

(Boy, a ten-day-old story. I need to start reading kuro5hin more often.)

Anyway, I know from experience that my chances of getting through to a real eBay person are approximately nil, especially on Memorial Day, so I'm not even going to try. Here are the questions I'd like to ask, and if some eBay staffer would like to answer them, feel free.

1. Regarding "VeRO," the Verified Rights Owner Program. Comments from sellers who have had their auctions yanked include:

• "I own this software. It is mine to sell."
• "Ended my perfectly legit sale."
• "I was forced to buy it from Dell, I should be able to sell it. www.linux.org"
• "I have the right to sell the Windows 98 I BOUGHT.. this is BULL SHIT....."
• "ended 2 of my legit auctions. won't respond to emails."
• "Legit auction canceled."
• "MS & Ebay Cancelled my perfectly legit auction."
• "copyright violation - on unopened retail box!"

These are not spurious complaints; they come from over a hundred eBay sellers with positive feedback ratings like 40, 253, even 476! Clearly these people are not scammers, they are legitimate and frequent eBay sellers who know the rules and who feel angry that they've been ripped off.

It is already apparent that eBay is ending perfectly legal auctions of E-Meters based on illogical and unfounded claims of copyright violation from the Church of Scientology. So "Verified Rights" doesn't mean much.

Can anyone at eBay confirm that each and every software auction terminated by Microsoft was illegal? And if not, shouldn't VeRO be renamed the "Unverified Rights Owner Program"?

2. EBay claims that, upon receiving VeRO complaints, it "reviews the reported items and, unless there is an obvious error, ends the auction." Were any of Microsoft's reports so reviewed, or were the auctions just immediately terminated?

3. Where on Questionable Items: Software is it indicated that software, unopened in the box, purchased at retail, cannot be resold?

4. Has Microsoft invoked a particular law - UCITA would be an obvious guess - in terminating these auctions? Or has it pointed to its license agreements (which for many of these auctions, apparently, would not apply)?

5. EBay's page about removing feedback doesn't mention cancelling rating of feedback, which is obviously a very important part. Isn't that misleading?

6. What did Microsoft do to get this special favor done for them - neutralization of their negative feedback? Does eBay do this for all their VeRO program members, or just Microsoft?

Update, 25 minutes later: gehrehmee pointed out Microsoft's internet piracy webpage (the URL got chopped, but deserves to be seen). Scroll to the bottom to read (emphasis added):

Microsoft and eBay have initiated an aggressive program to stop auction sites that Microsoft believes may be distributing infringing product. Microsoft monitors all auction sites and conducts daily searches to identify auctions suspected of offering counterfeit or infringing software. The company notifies eBay of suspect auctions and asks them to terminate the auctions within 24 hours.

Phrases like "due process" and "guilty until proven innocent" are coming to mind.

melaniemad writes: "I haven't seen this story anywhere else but kuro5hin. Microsoft has set up a user account on eBay: msoft@buddy.ebay.com. They apparently use this account to shut down auctions of Microsoft software. This has resulted in a lot of negative feedback, which has been changed to 'neutral' by eBay. This does not coincide with their policy about removing feedback. But then, do the rules ever apply to Microsoft?" (read more...)

(Boy, a ten-day-old story. I need to start reading kuro5hin more often.)

Anyway, I know from experience that my chances of getting through to a real eBay person are approximately nil, especially on Memorial Day, so I'm not even going to try. Here are the questions I'd like to ask, and if some eBay staffer would like to answer them, feel free.

1. Regarding "VeRO," the Verified Rights Owner Program. Comments from sellers who have had their auctions yanked include:

• "I own this software. It is mine to sell."
• "Ended my perfectly legit sale."
• "I was forced to buy it from Dell, I should be able to sell it. www.linux.org"
• "I have the right to sell the Windows 98 I BOUGHT.. this is BULL SHIT....."
• "ended 2 of my legit auctions. won't respond to emails."
• "Legit auction canceled."
• "MS & Ebay Cancelled my perfectly legit auction."
• "copyright violation - on unopened retail box!"

These are not spurious complaints; they come from over a hundred eBay sellers with positive feedback ratings like 40, 253, even 476! Clearly these people are not scammers, they are legitimate and frequent eBay sellers who know the rules and who feel angry that they've been ripped off.

It is already apparent that eBay is ending perfectly legal auctions of E-Meters based on illogical and unfounded claims of copyright violation from the Church of Scientology. So "Verified Rights" doesn't mean much.

Can anyone at eBay confirm that each and every software auction terminated by Microsoft was illegal? And if not, shouldn't VeRO be renamed the "Unverified Rights Owner Program"?

2. EBay claims that, upon receiving VeRO complaints, it "reviews the reported items and, unless there is an obvious error, ends the auction." Were any of Microsoft's reports so reviewed, or were the auctions just immediately terminated?

3. Where on Questionable Items: Software is it indicated that software, unopened in the box, purchased at retail, cannot be resold?

4. Has Microsoft invoked a particular law - UCITA would be an obvious guess - in terminating these auctions? Or has it pointed to its license agreements (which for many of these auctions, apparently, would not apply)?

5. EBay's page about removing feedback doesn't mention cancelling rating of feedback, which is obviously a very important part. Isn't that misleading?

6. What did Microsoft do to get this special favor done for them - neutralization of their negative feedback? Does eBay do this for all their VeRO program members, or just Microsoft?

Update, 25 minutes later: gehrehmee pointed out Microsoft's internet piracy webpage (the URL got chopped, but deserves to be seen). Scroll to the bottom to read (emphasis added):

Microsoft and eBay have initiated an aggressive program to stop auction sites that Microsoft believes may be distributing infringing product. Microsoft monitors all auction sites and conducts daily searches to identify auctions suspected of offering counterfeit or infringing software. The company notifies eBay of suspect auctions and asks them to terminate the auctions within 24 hours.

Phrases like "due process" and "guilty until proven innocent" are coming to mind.

kuro5hin writes "Seeing TRUSTe chairman Lori Fena's name in the list of members of DoubleClick's new Consumer Privacy Advocacy Board was quite a surprise, but perhaps it shouldn't have been. In my opinion, TRUSTe has done more harm than good for online privacy. I explain why in an Open Letter to Lori Fena, which she, and anyone else who cares about their privacy on the web, would do well to read carefully. "

The source code for this news story is the bugzilla report, so read the source if you really want to know what's going on. Mozilla's M15 build has a feature to block webpage images that come from another site: it blocks banner ads. The feature's a little buggy, but it could probably be worked out. Four weeks ago, the feature was removed: "it went the way of management decree" says a Netscape employee. It sounds like AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape didn't want an ad-unfriendly feature in the web browser they're financing. But Mozilla contributors say this has been misinterpreted. What's the real story?

"Please don't jump to conclusions." That's the advice from the developer whose bugzilla postings got people concerned in the first place. OK, so let's take this slow.

Oh, and - this is the second story on Slashdot today that puts generous, overworked open-source contributors under the microscope, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope they understand we're not denigrating their efforts, and that we are grateful for their work.

The feature at issue here lets you block images from a webpage if they come from a foreign site. If you're reading www.slashdot.org, any images from www.foreignsite.net will simply not be loaded. Say, hypothetically, www.doubleclick.net. That would be one example.

Is this the most important feature in the world? Not really. But is it important? Yes. Not just because it blocks most ad banners. It also eliminates what Richard Smith calls web bugs: a technique which can track you across the net without your knowing. The extra privacy is probably a good thing.

(On the bright side, the feature that blocks foreign-site cookies is still in place; this is a very good idea.)

One thing that complicates the issue is that the image-blocking feature was having a few problems. The example given was that, on AltaVista's homepage, the "submit" button graphic comes from a domain owned by the same parent company - but because the domain name is different, the button does not appear. There was concern that users might not understand this. A proposed alternative was to add a dialog warning of such unexpected behavior, and/or to give users more options for how graphics would be blocked.

My thinking is that the problems could have been solved. The person in charge of UI design issues suggested a design workaround that probably would have made the feature quite usable.

I should point out that just because this bug has been marked as WONTFIX, that doesn't mean it won't be reopened; this has happened thousands of times. Actually, now the bug has been marked INVALID, indicating the removal of the feature from the menu is not considered a bug but ... a feature. Well, OK, so its removal was intentional; will the feature be re-added later? Possibly.

But why was this feature removed? In mid-April, shortly after it had disappeared from the current build, one volunteer spoke to a Netscape employee and summarized events as "management had told them to strip the feature."

This sounded uncomfortably like AOL influencing the browser design to suit their needs. I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative /etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.

As one might expect, the preview release of Netscape6, the "AOL version" of the browser that was spun off of the Mozilla project, has a preferences dialog that looks a lot like Mozilla's except when it comes to this feature. The foreign-cookie blocker is in place; the foreign-image blocker is not. (But they spun it off an earlier release - maybe the feature wasn't written then; I don't know.)

One of the volunteer developers, at least, has been loudly protesting the implication that anything is wrong. On kuro5hin.org, they are free to state their case and there's some good discussion. And this morning, the same volunteer who originally logged the "went the way of management decree" message appended another log entry, worth reading in full:

"This has gotten a little out of control. The only thing Steve Morse informed me was that as of now, the image blocking prefs have been *publicly* removed from the build. This means that though you CAN still retrieve the feature if you so desire, the menu options and interface are not -- by default -- accessible. This is done often for testing purposes; if something you're working on seems to be conflicting with the image blocking module, you can simply opt to turn it off to complete your work. Who the heck said anything about it being removed permanently? Admittedly, my note wasn't clear, but I think blaming AOL for the supposed 'removal' of this feature is absurd and a little conspiracist, don't you think? To the news sites carrying this: I'm sorry, but what we have here is a nonissue. [...]

"To clarify: the ONLY piece of information Steve gave me was that the feature, as of now, did not appear to be in the latest builds, but really was. His words that the feature 'went the way of management' decree simply refer to the fact that 'management' (NOT AOL management or even AOL-related, mind you) told him to turn the image blocking preference off by default in the latest nightly builds (probably so some technical issues that the feature's causing can be ironed out). That's it - I apologize for the ambiguity of my original words, but they never meant to imply the removal of this feature. Nor did Steve's."

I'm a little skeptical of what would be accomplished by removing this feature from the menu and dialog, but then I'm not the one who's working on the source, am I?

I'm less skeptical about all this now than I was this morning. Part of what worried me was this same volunteer's earlier comment on kuro5hin.org:

"...there's still quite a easy way to get the image blocking preferences back (IMHO, I believe they were removed in the first place because it is ads that heavily supports Netcenter), by adding a certain line in your prefs.js file."

But in email today, he said that this was just a guess and he no longer believes it's true. Fair enough.

Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.

What's important to understand is that having to restore the preferences by editing a Javascript preferences text file isn't the same as having it in the right-click menu. If people could block ads with a right-click and just a little poking around, the nature of the web would change drastically.

Finally, here's the same volunteer, again on kuro5hin.org:

"This has been blown way out of proportion.

"I am now hearing from other NSCP employees that this feature has only been taken out temporarily due to complications with the PSM module.

"Furthermore, can you all _please_ stop assuming things from Steve's statement? Steve said it went the way of management decree. This means whatever happened to the image prefs, it came by way of a couple people labeled 'management' (not AOL management, nor AOL-related in any way, mind you). _I_ was the one who suggested the feature was stripped. In reality, this feature may be being improved on, may have been removed temporarily (this happens often to many commonly used features in testing), or a number of other things that would explain its current disappearance.

"Please don't jump to conclusions."

OK. And those are nice hypotheticals for what could be something perfectly ordinary. If the explanation is that simple, though, I wish that someone else had just answered my email to say so.

The nice thing about an open-source web browser is that, even if M16 comes out with a NoPrivacy(tm) feature that uploads everything you do directly to whitehouse.gov, we're all free to fork our own project with the M15 source. We can include this feature or any other.

Conversely, Mozilla is not Netscape 6; AOL is free to add or remove whatever features they like when they release 6.0.1.

But, the official release of Mozilla will be widely distributed. I hope its functionality will be all it could be. If you want the Mozilla development team to make this feature work, and keep it in the next builds, post a comment below to let them know it's important to you. And be nice. They work hard.

The source code for this news story is the bugzilla report, so read the source if you really want to know what's going on. Mozilla's M15 build has a feature to block webpage images that come from another site: it blocks banner ads. The feature's a little buggy, but it could probably be worked out. Four weeks ago, the feature was removed: "it went the way of management decree" says a Netscape employee. It sounds like AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape didn't want an ad-unfriendly feature in the web browser they're financing. But Mozilla contributors say this has been misinterpreted. What's the real story?

"Please don't jump to conclusions." That's the advice from the developer whose bugzilla postings got people concerned in the first place. OK, so let's take this slow.

Oh, and - this is the second story on Slashdot today that puts generous, overworked open-source contributors under the microscope, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope they understand we're not denigrating their efforts, and that we are grateful for their work.

The feature at issue here lets you block images from a webpage if they come from a foreign site. If you're reading www.slashdot.org, any images from www.foreignsite.net will simply not be loaded. Say, hypothetically, www.doubleclick.net. That would be one example.

Is this the most important feature in the world? Not really. But is it important? Yes. Not just because it blocks most ad banners. It also eliminates what Richard Smith calls web bugs: a technique which can track you across the net without your knowing. The extra privacy is probably a good thing.

(On the bright side, the feature that blocks foreign-site cookies is still in place; this is a very good idea.)

One thing that complicates the issue is that the image-blocking feature was having a few problems. The example given was that, on AltaVista's homepage, the "submit" button graphic comes from a domain owned by the same parent company - but because the domain name is different, the button does not appear. There was concern that users might not understand this. A proposed alternative was to add a dialog warning of such unexpected behavior, and/or to give users more options for how graphics would be blocked.

My thinking is that the problems could have been solved. The person in charge of UI design issues suggested a design workaround that probably would have made the feature quite usable.

I should point out that just because this bug has been marked as WONTFIX, that doesn't mean it won't be reopened; this has happened thousands of times. Actually, now the bug has been marked INVALID, indicating the removal of the feature from the menu is not considered a bug but ... a feature. Well, OK, so its removal was intentional; will the feature be re-added later? Possibly.

But why was this feature removed? In mid-April, shortly after it had disappeared from the current build, one volunteer spoke to a Netscape employee and summarized events as "management had told them to strip the feature."

This sounded uncomfortably like AOL influencing the browser design to suit their needs. I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative /etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.

As one might expect, the preview release of Netscape6, the "AOL version" of the browser that was spun off of the Mozilla project, has a preferences dialog that looks a lot like Mozilla's except when it comes to this feature. The foreign-cookie blocker is in place; the foreign-image blocker is not. (But they spun it off an earlier release - maybe the feature wasn't written then; I don't know.)

One of the volunteer developers, at least, has been loudly protesting the implication that anything is wrong. On kuro5hin.org, they are free to state their case and there's some good discussion. And this morning, the same volunteer who originally logged the "went the way of management decree" message appended another log entry, worth reading in full:

"This has gotten a little out of control. The only thing Steve Morse informed me was that as of now, the image blocking prefs have been *publicly* removed from the build. This means that though you CAN still retrieve the feature if you so desire, the menu options and interface are not -- by default -- accessible. This is done often for testing purposes; if something you're working on seems to be conflicting with the image blocking module, you can simply opt to turn it off to complete your work. Who the heck said anything about it being removed permanently? Admittedly, my note wasn't clear, but I think blaming AOL for the supposed 'removal' of this feature is absurd and a little conspiracist, don't you think? To the news sites carrying this: I'm sorry, but what we have here is a nonissue. [...]

"To clarify: the ONLY piece of information Steve gave me was that the feature, as of now, did not appear to be in the latest builds, but really was. His words that the feature 'went the way of management' decree simply refer to the fact that 'management' (NOT AOL management or even AOL-related, mind you) told him to turn the image blocking preference off by default in the latest nightly builds (probably so some technical issues that the feature's causing can be ironed out). That's it - I apologize for the ambiguity of my original words, but they never meant to imply the removal of this feature. Nor did Steve's."

I'm a little skeptical of what would be accomplished by removing this feature from the menu and dialog, but then I'm not the one who's working on the source, am I?

I'm less skeptical about all this now than I was this morning. Part of what worried me was this same volunteer's earlier comment on kuro5hin.org:

"...there's still quite a easy way to get the image blocking preferences back (IMHO, I believe they were removed in the first place because it is ads that heavily supports Netcenter), by adding a certain line in your prefs.js file."

But in email today, he said that this was just a guess and he no longer believes it's true. Fair enough.

Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.

What's important to understand is that having to restore the preferences by editing a Javascript preferences text file isn't the same as having it in the right-click menu. If people could block ads with a right-click and just a little poking around, the nature of the web would change drastically.

Finally, here's the same volunteer, again on kuro5hin.org:

"This has been blown way out of proportion.

"I am now hearing from other NSCP employees that this feature has only been taken out temporarily due to complications with the PSM module.

"Furthermore, can you all _please_ stop assuming things from Steve's statement? Steve said it went the way of management decree. This means whatever happened to the image prefs, it came by way of a couple people labeled 'management' (not AOL management, nor AOL-related in any way, mind you). _I_ was the one who suggested the feature was stripped. In reality, this feature may be being improved on, may have been removed temporarily (this happens often to many commonly used features in testing), or a number of other things that would explain its current disappearance.

"Please don't jump to conclusions."

OK. And those are nice hypotheticals for what could be something perfectly ordinary. If the explanation is that simple, though, I wish that someone else had just answered my email to say so.

The nice thing about an open-source web browser is that, even if M16 comes out with a NoPrivacy(tm) feature that uploads everything you do directly to whitehouse.gov, we're all free to fork our own project with the M15 source. We can include this feature or any other.

Conversely, Mozilla is not Netscape 6; AOL is free to add or remove whatever features they like when they release 6.0.1.

But, the official release of Mozilla will be widely distributed. I hope its functionality will be all it could be. If you want the Mozilla development team to make this feature work, and keep it in the next builds, post a comment below to let them know it's important to you. And be nice. They work hard.

The source code for this news story is the bugzilla report, so read the source if you really want to know what's going on. Mozilla's M15 build has a feature to block webpage images that come from another site: it blocks banner ads. The feature's a little buggy, but it could probably be worked out. Four weeks ago, the feature was removed: "it went the way of management decree" says a Netscape employee. It sounds like AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape didn't want an ad-unfriendly feature in the web browser they're financing. But Mozilla contributors say this has been misinterpreted. What's the real story?

"Please don't jump to conclusions." That's the advice from the developer whose bugzilla postings got people concerned in the first place. OK, so let's take this slow.

Oh, and - this is the second story on Slashdot today that puts generous, overworked open-source contributors under the microscope, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope they understand we're not denigrating their efforts, and that we are grateful for their work.

The feature at issue here lets you block images from a webpage if they come from a foreign site. If you're reading www.slashdot.org, any images from www.foreignsite.net will simply not be loaded. Say, hypothetically, www.doubleclick.net. That would be one example.

Is this the most important feature in the world? Not really. But is it important? Yes. Not just because it blocks most ad banners. It also eliminates what Richard Smith calls web bugs: a technique which can track you across the net without your knowing. The extra privacy is probably a good thing.

(On the bright side, the feature that blocks foreign-site cookies is still in place; this is a very good idea.)

One thing that complicates the issue is that the image-blocking feature was having a few problems. The example given was that, on AltaVista's homepage, the "submit" button graphic comes from a domain owned by the same parent company - but because the domain name is different, the button does not appear. There was concern that users might not understand this. A proposed alternative was to add a dialog warning of such unexpected behavior, and/or to give users more options for how graphics would be blocked.

My thinking is that the problems could have been solved. The person in charge of UI design issues suggested a design workaround that probably would have made the feature quite usable.

I should point out that just because this bug has been marked as WONTFIX, that doesn't mean it won't be reopened; this has happened thousands of times. Actually, now the bug has been marked INVALID, indicating the removal of the feature from the menu is not considered a bug but ... a feature. Well, OK, so its removal was intentional; will the feature be re-added later? Possibly.

But why was this feature removed? In mid-April, shortly after it had disappeared from the current build, one volunteer spoke to a Netscape employee and summarized events as "management had told them to strip the feature."

This sounded uncomfortably like AOL influencing the browser design to suit their needs. I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative /etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.

As one might expect, the preview release of Netscape6, the "AOL version" of the browser that was spun off of the Mozilla project, has a preferences dialog that looks a lot like Mozilla's except when it comes to this feature. The foreign-cookie blocker is in place; the foreign-image blocker is not. (But they spun it off an earlier release - maybe the feature wasn't written then; I don't know.)

One of the volunteer developers, at least, has been loudly protesting the implication that anything is wrong. On kuro5hin.org, they are free to state their case and there's some good discussion. And this morning, the same volunteer who originally logged the "went the way of management decree" message appended another log entry, worth reading in full:

"This has gotten a little out of control. The only thing Steve Morse informed me was that as of now, the image blocking prefs have been *publicly* removed from the build. This means that though you CAN still retrieve the feature if you so desire, the menu options and interface are not -- by default -- accessible. This is done often for testing purposes; if something you're working on seems to be conflicting with the image blocking module, you can simply opt to turn it off to complete your work. Who the heck said anything about it being removed permanently? Admittedly, my note wasn't clear, but I think blaming AOL for the supposed 'removal' of this feature is absurd and a little conspiracist, don't you think? To the news sites carrying this: I'm sorry, but what we have here is a nonissue. [...]

"To clarify: the ONLY piece of information Steve gave me was that the feature, as of now, did not appear to be in the latest builds, but really was. His words that the feature 'went the way of management' decree simply refer to the fact that 'management' (NOT AOL management or even AOL-related, mind you) told him to turn the image blocking preference off by default in the latest nightly builds (probably so some technical issues that the feature's causing can be ironed out). That's it - I apologize for the ambiguity of my original words, but they never meant to imply the removal of this feature. Nor did Steve's."

I'm a little skeptical of what would be accomplished by removing this feature from the menu and dialog, but then I'm not the one who's working on the source, am I?

I'm less skeptical about all this now than I was this morning. Part of what worried me was this same volunteer's earlier comment on kuro5hin.org:

"...there's still quite a easy way to get the image blocking preferences back (IMHO, I believe they were removed in the first place because it is ads that heavily supports Netcenter), by adding a certain line in your prefs.js file."

But in email today, he said that this was just a guess and he no longer believes it's true. Fair enough.

Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.

What's important to understand is that having to restore the preferences by editing a Javascript preferences text file isn't the same as having it in the right-click menu. If people could block ads with a right-click and just a little poking around, the nature of the web would change drastically.

Finally, here's the same volunteer, again on kuro5hin.org:

"This has been blown way out of proportion.

"I am now hearing from other NSCP employees that this feature has only been taken out temporarily due to complications with the PSM module.

"Furthermore, can you all _please_ stop assuming things from Steve's statement? Steve said it went the way of management decree. This means whatever happened to the image prefs, it came by way of a couple people labeled 'management' (not AOL management, nor AOL-related in any way, mind you). _I_ was the one who suggested the feature was stripped. In reality, this feature may be being improved on, may have been removed temporarily (this happens often to many commonly used features in testing), or a number of other things that would explain its current disappearance.

"Please don't jump to conclusions."

OK. And those are nice hypotheticals for what could be something perfectly ordinary. If the explanation is that simple, though, I wish that someone else had just answered my email to say so.

The nice thing about an open-source web browser is that, even if M16 comes out with a NoPrivacy(tm) feature that uploads everything you do directly to whitehouse.gov, we're all free to fork our own project with the M15 source. We can include this feature or any other.

Conversely, Mozilla is not Netscape 6; AOL is free to add or remove whatever features they like when they release 6.0.1.

But, the official release of Mozilla will be widely distributed. I hope its functionality will be all it could be. If you want the Mozilla development team to make this feature work, and keep it in the next builds, post a comment below to let them know it's important to you. And be nice. They work hard.

The source code for this news story is the bugzilla report, so read the source if you really want to know what's going on. Mozilla's M15 build has a feature to block webpage images that come from another site: it blocks banner ads. The feature's a little buggy, but it could probably be worked out. Four weeks ago, the feature was removed: "it went the way of management decree" says a Netscape employee. It sounds like AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape didn't want an ad-unfriendly feature in the web browser they're financing. But Mozilla contributors say this has been misinterpreted. What's the real story?

"Please don't jump to conclusions." That's the advice from the developer whose bugzilla postings got people concerned in the first place. OK, so let's take this slow.

Oh, and - this is the second story on Slashdot today that puts generous, overworked open-source contributors under the microscope, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope they understand we're not denigrating their efforts, and that we are grateful for their work.

The feature at issue here lets you block images from a webpage if they come from a foreign site. If you're reading www.slashdot.org, any images from www.foreignsite.net will simply not be loaded. Say, hypothetically, www.doubleclick.net. That would be one example.

Is this the most important feature in the world? Not really. But is it important? Yes. Not just because it blocks most ad banners. It also eliminates what Richard Smith calls web bugs: a technique which can track you across the net without your knowing. The extra privacy is probably a good thing.

(On the bright side, the feature that blocks foreign-site cookies is still in place; this is a very good idea.)

One thing that complicates the issue is that the image-blocking feature was having a few problems. The example given was that, on AltaVista's homepage, the "submit" button graphic comes from a domain owned by the same parent company - but because the domain name is different, the button does not appear. There was concern that users might not understand this. A proposed alternative was to add a dialog warning of such unexpected behavior, and/or to give users more options for how graphics would be blocked.

My thinking is that the problems could have been solved. The person in charge of UI design issues suggested a design workaround that probably would have made the feature quite usable.

I should point out that just because this bug has been marked as WONTFIX, that doesn't mean it won't be reopened; this has happened thousands of times. Actually, now the bug has been marked INVALID, indicating the removal of the feature from the menu is not considered a bug but ... a feature. Well, OK, so its removal was intentional; will the feature be re-added later? Possibly.

But why was this feature removed? In mid-April, shortly after it had disappeared from the current build, one volunteer spoke to a Netscape employee and summarized events as "management had told them to strip the feature."

This sounded uncomfortably like AOL influencing the browser design to suit their needs. I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative /etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.

As one might expect, the preview release of Netscape6, the "AOL version" of the browser that was spun off of the Mozilla project, has a preferences dialog that looks a lot like Mozilla's except when it comes to this feature. The foreign-cookie blocker is in place; the foreign-image blocker is not. (But they spun it off an earlier release - maybe the feature wasn't written then; I don't know.)

One of the volunteer developers, at least, has been loudly protesting the implication that anything is wrong. On kuro5hin.org, they are free to state their case and there's some good discussion. And this morning, the same volunteer who originally logged the "went the way of management decree" message appended another log entry, worth reading in full:

"This has gotten a little out of control. The only thing Steve Morse informed me was that as of now, the image blocking prefs have been *publicly* removed from the build. This means that though you CAN still retrieve the feature if you so desire, the menu options and interface are not -- by default -- accessible. This is done often for testing purposes; if something you're working on seems to be conflicting with the image blocking module, you can simply opt to turn it off to complete your work. Who the heck said anything about it being removed permanently? Admittedly, my note wasn't clear, but I think blaming AOL for the supposed 'removal' of this feature is absurd and a little conspiracist, don't you think? To the news sites carrying this: I'm sorry, but what we have here is a nonissue. [...]

"To clarify: the ONLY piece of information Steve gave me was that the feature, as of now, did not appear to be in the latest builds, but really was. His words that the feature 'went the way of management' decree simply refer to the fact that 'management' (NOT AOL management or even AOL-related, mind you) told him to turn the image blocking preference off by default in the latest nightly builds (probably so some technical issues that the feature's causing can be ironed out). That's it - I apologize for the ambiguity of my original words, but they never meant to imply the removal of this feature. Nor did Steve's."

I'm a little skeptical of what would be accomplished by removing this feature from the menu and dialog, but then I'm not the one who's working on the source, am I?

I'm less skeptical about all this now than I was this morning. Part of what worried me was this same volunteer's earlier comment on kuro5hin.org:

"...there's still quite a easy way to get the image blocking preferences back (IMHO, I believe they were removed in the first place because it is ads that heavily supports Netcenter), by adding a certain line in your prefs.js file."

But in email today, he said that this was just a guess and he no longer believes it's true. Fair enough.

Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.

What's important to understand is that having to restore the preferences by editing a Javascript preferences text file isn't the same as having it in the right-click menu. If people could block ads with a right-click and just a little poking around, the nature of the web would change drastically.

Finally, here's the same volunteer, again on kuro5hin.org:

"This has been blown way out of proportion.

"I am now hearing from other NSCP employees that this feature has only been taken out temporarily due to complications with the PSM module.

"Furthermore, can you all _please_ stop assuming things from Steve's statement? Steve said it went the way of management decree. This means whatever happened to the image prefs, it came by way of a couple people labeled 'management' (not AOL management, nor AOL-related in any way, mind you). _I_ was the one who suggested the feature was stripped. In reality, this feature may be being improved on, may have been removed temporarily (this happens often to many commonly used features in testing), or a number of other things that would explain its current disappearance.

"Please don't jump to conclusions."

OK. And those are nice hypotheticals for what could be something perfectly ordinary. If the explanation is that simple, though, I wish that someone else had just answered my email to say so.

The nice thing about an open-source web browser is that, even if M16 comes out with a NoPrivacy(tm) feature that uploads everything you do directly to whitehouse.gov, we're all free to fork our own project with the M15 source. We can include this feature or any other.

Conversely, Mozilla is not Netscape 6; AOL is free to add or remove whatever features they like when they release 6.0.1.

But, the official release of Mozilla will be widely distributed. I hope its functionality will be all it could be. If you want the Mozilla development team to make this feature work, and keep it in the next builds, post a comment below to let them know it's important to you. And be nice. They work hard.

dlc writes "I'm sure Rusty has already submitted this, but just in case he hasn't, part 2 of "Encryption Matters" is now available on Kuro5hin.org. Part 1 was featured on Slashdot last week, and, if the lack of trolling is any indication, was well-received. "

dlc writes "I'm sure Rusty has already submitted this, but just in case he hasn't, part 2 of "Encryption Matters" is now available on Kuro5hin.org. Part 1 was featured on Slashdot last week, and, if the lack of trolling is any indication, was well-received. "

kuro5hin writes, "Kuro5hin.org is running a series of articles introducing cryptography to the non-expert. The first, Encryption Matters, Part I provides an overview of basic crypto concepts: what cryptography is, and the different ways crypto is useful. It also discusses some basic algorithms, and how they may be broken. Future articles will discuss public key cryptography, and provide a tutorial on PGP/GPG for the beginner. "

kuro5hin writes, "Kuro5hin.org is running a series of articles introducing cryptography to the non-expert. The first, Encryption Matters, Part I provides an overview of basic crypto concepts: what cryptography is, and the different ways crypto is useful. It also discusses some basic algorithms, and how they may be broken. Future articles will discuss public key cryptography, and provide a tutorial on PGP/GPG for the beginner. "