Slashdot Mirror

New submitter windcask asks "Every New Year's Day, I assemble and memorize a random collection of seven to ten mixed-case alphanumeric characters and proceed to change every password I have on the interwebs to these characters (plus a few extra characters unique to the site). The problem is I only change them on the sites I visit. Once in a while, I'll come across a site I haven't visited for a few years, and I may end up not being able to guess the password before the try-lockout takes effect. What are your password-changing rituals, and how do they deal with situations like mine? I do use Keepass for work, but it is sometimes impractical for times I'm at other computers."

Rogier van Vlissingen writes to tell us Paul Murphy has an interesting writeup on his blog about the continued Linux versus Windows debate with regards to some of the recent insights provided by various groups. From the article: "Disinformation comes in three major forms: innocent mistakes, intentional disinformation (aka FUD), and (self) delusion. Delusions are easily the most dangerous of these. In the IT context the most common delusion is simply that what we know is right in general or applicable to some specific issue when, in reality, it isn't. We know, and we act accordingly - with frequently catastrophic results."

AnonymousStudent writes "Details are out about the reported broken SHA-1 hash function. The findings are that SHA-1 is not collision free and can be broken in 2^69 attempts instead of 2^80. This is about 2000 times faster. With todays computing power and Moores Law, a SHA-1 hash does not last too long. Using a modified DES Cracker, for the small sum of up to $38M, SHA-1 can be broken in 56 hours, with current computing power. In 18 months, the cost should go down by half. Jon Callas, PGP's CTO, put it best: 'It's time to walk, but not run, to the fire exits. You don't see smoke, but the fire alarms have gone off.' As Schneier suggests, 'It's time for us all to migrate away from SHA-1.' Alternatives include SHA-256 and SHA-512."

turkmenistani writes "It's about time. After much complaining from iPod owners, Apple has finally started an official Official iPod Battery replacement (requires a free Apple ID). Although battery replacements have been available for older iPods for some time now, Apple has finally taken heed to their user requests and are now offering the service. From the Support page: 'If your iPod fails to hold a charge and it's more than a year old, you may need a new battery. Click Continue to order iPod battery service for $99 USD. This program is not available in Europe at this time.' Although the service is $99, they state in the article 'iPod equipment that is sent in for battery service or service requiring other repairs will be replaced with functionally equivalent new, used, or refurbished iPod equipment. You will not receive the same iPod that was sent in for service.' So make sure you back up that music before shipping it off!"

Pascal de Bruijn asks: "I recently started to use NetBSD, the first thing I noticed was that it didn't have a command-line history. So I immediately wanted to switch my shell, being on BSD my first instinct was to change to tcsh, but many people told me it wasn't any good. Others recommended zsh. I would really like to hear your opinions about shells." The submitter is particularly interested in shell memory usage, and the features you like...and dislike...from the current options that are available, today.

Black_Macrame asks: "I have recently moved from 10 years of working with the net in various capacities (read all) to a slightly more analog field. I am now the curator of a Historical Site in Texas which is essentially, a relatively isolated, old (1875) family home. It once was a school, and is now currently a tax shelter for the family, and a fertile wildlife sanctuary. No-one has opened many of the drawers of the furniture here since they were last shut. There are letters of love, war, death, and all the usual human experiences, plus alot of antiques and many old books. It's a big historical database and I want to archive -everything- digitally: letters, furniture, books, 360 VRML of the rooms and even old 78 rpm records. Does anyone out there have any experience with similar projects? Any suggestions for tracking the antiques (books, furniture, knick-knacks) online? Suggestions for archiving the 78's? Anything in general?"

nafmo writes "In this day and age of quadruple-dvd games with amazingly big 3D worlds, one might think that the science of compact coding has been lost forever. Well, not so, ast the 2002 MiniGame competition proves. There are 62 games for 14 different vintage computer platforms, of which none take up more than 1024 bytes. The vote for this year's best minigame ends on 7th of October, so you'd better grab the votepack and start playing!"

kraven_73 writes "According to some Taiwanese sources, AMD will officially reveal its Athlon XP 2700+ processor on the 7th of October. Most interesting is that this CPU will have a 333 MHz FSB. The first implementation of this increased FSB on Athlon platform. It is expected that the novelty will be based on the latest Thoroughbred core stepping 1, just like the current Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+, and will work at 2.17GHz."

thebrix asks: "I've acquired a Dell OptiPlex GX150. It's a pleasant machine to use - small, quiet and uses only 145 watts at full tilt with my flat panel - but its Achilles heel is the feeble i815 on-board graphics which steals RAM from main memory and plasters black bars onto my KDE desktop at inconvenient moments. There's a 4xAGP slot, but it's low-profile because of the small chassis and finding a low-profile graphics card is proving difficult because, invariably, manufacturers are more interested in listing whizzo features than how big the card is. So far, the Matrox G550 Dual DVI is the only card I've come across which definitely fits. Does anyone know of others?"

Chuck Chunder asks: "I've recently been looking at getting some wireless headphones of the RF rather than infra-red variety. After looking around for a bit it struck me that I don't actually want a whole new set of headphones. I already have a nice pair of headphones as well as earphones. What I really want is an RF transmitter and a small clip on receiver that I can plug my existing headphones/earphones into. The problem is, I can't find anyone selling what I am describing, even geeky places don't quite have what I'm looking for. Does anyone know/have experience of such a product?"

"I see several advantages to this:

• Adaptability: I can then use earphones/headphones as appropriate for the activity, or possibly use it as an RF link between hardware in different rooms
• Replacability: If I damage the headphones I only have to replace them, not the whole headphone/receiver unit; this bit will hopefully lead to...
• Lower costs

Has anyone seen something like this, before?"

jx100 writes: "I've been following the Mac emulation community for awhile, and, apparently, Mac PPC emulators are about to be unveiled for the PC. Emaculation.com says that Microcode Solutions and Emulators Inc. are planning on showing their emulators at MacWorld Tokyo 2002."

D Anderson n'Swaart writes: "As the BBC reports in this article, Napster is set to return shortly, as a subscription-based sharing service, a concept facing a less-than-rosy future. The report gives a brief history of Napster, and the current state of the various lawsuits that were brought against it. The briefs: Napster is going to have to fork over a total of around $36M USD, $10M of which is downpayment on future royalties." And whatAnotherAolUser writes that the company "agreed to pay $26 million to settle a copyright lawsuit with songwriters and music publishers, and to make royalty payments to the writers and publishers once it started a fee-based service." Guess it depends where you start counting.

D Anderson n'Swaart writes: "BBC News is reporting that a recent experiment called Project Boomerang, conducted with a super-sensitive telescope suspended 40 km above Antarctica, has provided powerful new evidence to support the current trend in scientific thinking that the fabric of space is essentially flat, and not curved as Einstein postulated. The one billion measurements gathered took three weeks to analyse on a Cray T3E supercomputer, and have provided insights on the creation of the universe, and suggest that it will continue to expand indefinitely without collapsing in a Big Crunch."

Slashback tonight with more from hardware co-op Spindl3top; the name of that protocol which bests telnet in all sorts of ways; censorware discussion for Californians; and even bigger LAN party; and more. Please enjoy :)

A cool black cube. mattdm writes: "For those skeptical about the non-profit nature of Spindl3top (see earlier slashdot story), hopefully this will address some of your concerns. Lucas has posted a public draft of the nonprofit Articles of Organization/Incorporation [pdf format]. This is a really cool project -- it's nice to see it moving forward."

2300-upmanship. DaAdder writes: "There's a multi-million dollar gaming event in Germany. It's huge, it's sponsored, it's probably the biggest LAN anywhere accorind to themselves. They happen to be wrong.

The Gathering in norway was even in guiness book of records in '99, and they've kept growing ever since, peaking at 5300 atendees in '99. Under the about menu on their site you can follow the progress of this LAN, all but this years numbers, that for some reason aren't up yet.
You still have to do some back-breaking exercise, lugging your computer half way across the world to scandinavia if you want to participate, and pay a fee for your efforts, even though most of us think it's a small price to pay for 4+ days of funfillad LAN-o-rama."

The post-leap look, with safety goggles. Bill Sommerfeld of Sun was one of several people to politely point out that there's no evident danger of needing to call "secsh" instead of "ssh," as hinted in the last story down in the previous Slashback.

He writes: "... As several followups stated, this is not a recent change; the drafts and working group have always contained the 'secsh' abbreviation -- because 'ssh' was already taken by a different, now concluded, working group known as Site Security Handbook.

quick score card:
ssh: command name
SSH: protocol name
Secure Shell: full name of working group
secsh: IETF abbreviation for Secure Shell working group
ssh: IETF abbreviation for Site Security Handbook working group.
ietf-ssh: name of the Secure Shell working group mailing list.

Nothing has changed on this since the secure shell working group was founded in 1997 or so."

Never has the phrase "say it ain't so" been so effective. Thank you, Bill.

A preemptive slashback -- please go and report from the future! Katina Bishop invites anyone who can make it to a panel discussion this May 6th (a Sunday) on Internet Blocking in Schools and Libraries. The discussion even has a subtitle -- "Law, Litigation, and Community Response" -- and will kick off at 2:00 PM Pacific Time in the Koret Auditorium of the San Francisco Public Library, at 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco. (That's near Civic Center BART/Muni) You can call 415-557-4400 for directions.

BayFF rocks, and censorware does not. And it sounds a lot more interesting than sitting around waiting for the blackout; go here to pick up argument ammunition next time someone brushes off objections to widescale net-filtering.

Bonus picture for long-time subscribers: Remember the not-quite-politic spray-painted Tux ad campaign which upset some folks in San Francisco? Kurt Gray contributes "some interesting photos of a Cambridge, MA resident testing the PeaceLoveLinux logos spraypainted on the sidewalk ... and it's not washing off! Doh!

Prozzaks asks: "As junior developers, one of the task we will likely be called to do in a company is system maintenance (updating, bugfixing, adding functions to a existing system). I've already had a situation where it was necessary to do some maintenance, and after working a few hours on the system, I realized I was redesigning it from the ground up. The problem is that companies don't want to allocate the necessary resources to redesign a system. What are we to do when we discover code in the companies products that -really- needs a rewrite and management staunchly refuses to realize this fact?" There are times when I can understand the desire to go in and rip out code that you feel isn't operating as well as it could, and there are times when you have to sit back and weigh the benefits of a rewrite against any possible gains. The adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," applies here, but there are times when badly designed code that works now, will break later. Under what situations are rewrites necessary, and how can you get management to understand the need if it arises?

The move to patent anything, everything, and all that remains after those categories are exhausted continues apace. rozzin writes: "ColorMax, who makes colour-blindness-compensatory lenses, has acquired a "patent for the human genes responsible for common, hereditary, red-green colorblindness"." Read below for a longer take on another disputed patent, which raises the all-important issue of actually determining what all those words in a patent application really mean. We can probably agree on whether something is a sphere, but what about whether something is "type data," or what constitutes the act of location? How patentable ought such things be? (I suggest browsing The League for Programming Freedom site for some cogent thoughts on this, including RMS's "The Anatomy of a Trivial Patent." Can anyone point to the best online apologia favoring software patents, or perhaps suggesting higher thresholds for them?)

Jim Lochowitz writes "A friend of mine just sent me this ( posted with permission) :

I just looked at Judge Zagel's ruling from yesterday in Eolas Technologies, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation, 99 C 0626, which is currently pending in federal court in the Northern District of Illinois. Eolas alleges that Microsoft has infringed its patent, #5,838,906, issued November 18, 1998. If memory serves, the gist of the suit is that both Windows and Internet Explorer infringe the patent.

If you want to look at the text of the patent again, it can be found on the PTO's website [here]. (Or search for the patent #5,838,906 from [this] page.)

At this point in the case, the court is trying to resolve exactly *what* the patent covers before it can consider whether or not whatever Microsoft did infringed it. Yesterday's ruling had to do with what was meant by the following key language in the patent (found in Claim 1 and Claim 6):
"wherein said object has type information associated with it utilized by said browser to identify and locate an executable application".

As Judge Zagel put it,
"What is an executable application? What is type information that must be associated with the object? What does it mean for the type information to be utilized by said browser to identify and locate the executable application?"

Experts testified as to the answers to these questions. Eolas' expert was Edward Felten, who is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton. Microsoft's experts were H.E. Dunsmore, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, and Michael Wallent, Product Unit Manager for Internet Explorer.

Judge Zagel found that (as used in the patent language), an "executable application" is computer program code which is launched to enable an end-user to directly interact with data, and one which is not an operating system or utility. He found that "type information" "may include the name of an application associated with the object." Finally, he found that "utilized by said browser to identify and locate" meant that those functions are performed by the browser.

Now that Judge Zagel has determined what this key language in the patent means, the court is now in a position to determine whether Microsoft has, in fact, infringed the patent. Trial could be the next step. It will be interesting to see what happens! I suspect that no matter who wins at the trial court level, there is likely to be an appeal. It will be a while yet before we learn what the resolution will be.

If you want to read the text of the opinion yourself, you can find it on CourtWeb as [this] pdf file.

Many of the rulings thus far in the case are available online. Put in "Northern District of Illinois," hit the "proceed to CourtWeb" button, and then enter the case number on the next screen. (The case # is 99cv0626.) Put in the date range you want- note that the case was filed in February 1999.

"

Cownonymous Award asks: "The company I work for recently gave me a laptop. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But: with it came a huge (and I really mean _huge_) laptop case, big enough to carry an RS/6000. Anyway, I look like a complete idiot when I take this humonguous "I'm a laptop, please steal me"-case with me. So I'm looking for an alternative, preferably a back pack. My question is: Has anyone had any (good) experiences with laptop back packs, especially ones like Eastpak's PC Pak'R or Timberland's HAKK?"

NoWhere Man writes "Just surfed into Wired and read an article about a theif using email to get AOL passwords. Using OperaMail and a program similar to those used to hack ICQ, the sender can get the password to anyone's account on AOL; all the user has to do is open the email. " You've Got A Password! (Done in sing-song voice).