Slashdot Mirror

Slashed back tonight: The (slight) return of the Y2K behemoth, good news for those locked out of port 80 by the recent unpleasantness, one interested party's response to Stephen Hawking's genetic-engineering ideas, and even an update on the Scarfo key-logging story.

Better than world-wide anarchy and privation. kejoki writes: "I came into work today and nobody had voicemail. We use an ancient AT&T system 25 (Merlin) with the Audix automated attendant/voice mail system ... not my bailiwick but the boss was going nuts trying to figure it out.

He finally called his System 25 guy and found out that quite a few people were having the same problem. Inspiration hit, and he set the system date back before 31 Dec 1999 ... whammo! The voice mail returneth.

AT&T->Lucent->Avaya, of course, no longer supports the system...as a matter of fact the boss seems to recall getting a letter from AT&T saying that they'd be taking care of the Y2K problems which might be in their equipment; but another soon after saying that support for the System 25 would be dropped as of 31 Dec 1999 ... hmmm.

Oddly enough, he's had a problem with the system giving a database I/O error for a while, but since he reset the date that has also vanished.

All very interesting. At any rate, if you have a System 25 and you can't get your voice mail, set back the date!"

And in related news, Che Fox writes :"The OpenLDAP project is one of the first to be hit by a major bug due to the S1G (one billion seconds) Unix time rollover. The slurpd replication daemon, which pushes changes from the master LDAP server to the slaves, no longer works now that time has rolled over to 1 billion seconds. This means that all LDAP-using networks in the world that use OpenLDAP and slave servers to replicate the data (very common) are now broken. There is a fix available against both the 1.2 and 2.x OpenLDAP releases in the OpenLDAP CVS repository."

You may assume your former activities for the moment. Agent Green writes: "I was checking out my firewall logs this morning and noticed an unusual amount of port 80 traffic and come to find out...it seems that AT&T Broadband has lifted their port 80 restrictions on its residential network. Let's see how long this lasts ..."

Probably until the next worm that takes over everyone's port 80, whatever OS it runs under.

So what did one giant say to the other? jshep writes: "Inventor Ray Kurzweil recently responded to physicist Stephen Hawking's concerns regarding the progression of AI (previous Slashdot story can be viewed here). Kurzweil takes aim at Hawking's suggestion that we use genetic engineering to augment the power of the human brain."

The man behind the curtain is ... uh, vital to national security! camusflage writes: "Reuters has a story (courtesy of Yahoo) that says the judge in the Nicodemo Scarfo believes the "national security" gambit about as much as the /. community does regarding the use of keyloggers. The most choice quote is "I don't know what it means. It's gobbledygook. More gobbledygook," referring to the argument put forth that the keylogger is a sensitive piece of national security. An assistant U.S. Attorney indicated he would provide "classified and unclassified summaries of the system's operation and more affidavits detailing the national security aspects at stake," next Friday."

rho writes "Stephan Somogyi at MacWEEK trumpets everybody's favorite security-concious *nix OpenBSD with an article telling why he likes it. Pretty plain jane, but introduces OpenBSD to a new audience (i.e. Mac users)."

rho asks: "Reading the MacOS on x86 article from Sunday, specifically the part where Apple engineers were offered $16-25K bonuses for finishing a proof of concept and I got to thinking about applying this to outside contractors in other applications. Are there companies who offer 'bounties' for working code for back-burner or skunk-works projects? Ideally, a company would post a project with specs and any appropriate code/APIs/flowcharts, enveloped by an NDA, which could be accessed by bounty-coders. The bounty goes to the first coder (or team of coders) that produce working code that meets specifications. Could this be a source of income for good open-source programmers, or would coporate secrecy issues interfere with the operation?" An interesting thought...would something like this work? If not, why not?

Black Dog writes: "It seems like we're hearing about the 'Extra-Solar Planet of the Week" lately. I thought it might be useful for everyone to bone up on planet detection techniques. Two of JPL's projects are at: The Terrestrial Planet Finder and techniques for planet detection."

mwknight asks: "The school district where I work has servers that were patched together with different versions of Novell and NT over the past few years. Management is ready to start over and re-design our network from scratch using Novell 5 servers and Win95/98 clients. I would rather see us go with Linux for the servers, but my biggest opposition is Novell's Z.E.N. Works. Is there a Linux program that behaves similar to ZEN? Mainly something that can remote update software to Win95 boxes? "

pmsyyz sent us a news.com story that talks about the new alpha based Compaq Servers. Lots of interesting tidbits (and hardware specs to drool over) but it reveals that the compiler and libs will not be open source, although they will be cheap. Just read it- its interesting, but frusterating to read about putting Digital's excellence and Compaq's marketing together, and stirring in a PHB decision like a closed source compiler.

In a flurry of news about MS, Brian Baggett sent an email saying that- Gates says Windows 98 is still on track, despite the DOJ decision. However, Bill Gates said Tuesday the Department of Justice was seeking to have the software company "cripple" its products, sent to us by Mike T, who also sent us on interesting article about another effort to broaden technology access for seniors, Microsoft Corp. has donated $150,000 worth of new software and hardware to senior centers across the nation. This donation will supplement a Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) program announced in September 1997, through which more than 500 computers were loaned to senior centers across the country to provide access to important health-care and Medicare information via the Internet.

Whew-busy day for Microsoft.