Slashdot Mirror

harryjohnston writes "The Register points out that the takedown of a significant number of Zeus command-and-control servers, which we discussed earlier, was a short-lived victory, as about one-third of the affected servers were back on the net in less than 48 hours." Adds itwbennet: "Just hours after network connectivity to Troyak was severed the ISP peered with a new upstream Internet service provider named Ya. The next step will be to 'de-peer' Troyak from its new service provider, either an ISP named Nassist or its upstream provider, Hurricane Electric, said a researcher familiar with the matter. 'We have taken some of their territory, they are trying to out flank us,' the researcher said via IM. 'We are going to win this one — we have 'em boxed in.'"

itwbennett writes "Ninety of the 249 Zeus command-and-control servers were knocked offline overnight when two ISPs, named Troyak and Group 3, were taken offline. Whoever was behind the takedown 'just decided to knock out a large area of cyber-crime, and this was probably one of the easiest ways to do it,' said Kevin Stevens, a researcher with SecureWorks. As with the McColo takedown of just over a year ago, Troyak's upstream providers seem to have knocked it off the Internet, Cisco said in a statement. 'The ISP was "De-peered,"' Cisco said. 'Troyak's upstream network providers effectively pulled the plug on Troyak's router, refusing to transmit its traffic.'"

SkinnyGuy writes "The only thing more remarkable than NewEgg shipping fake Core i7 CPUs to customers is getting your hands on one and checking it out. Apparently there are only a couple hundred of these things in existence and Gearlog somehow managed to get and unbox one. The images are fascinating."

astroengine follows up to a story about the LHC shutting down that seems to have hit all the news replicators today. "It's to be expected when pushing the frontiers of physics, but the LHC's epic 'will it or won't it' saga continues. Due to an unforeseen construction mistake, the LHC will cease experiments for a year (starting around late-2011) so repairs and upgrades can be carried out. For now, accelerated particles will have a maximum energy of 7TeV (half the power of the LHC's design maximum), which is ample for at least 18 months of experiments before shutdown."

Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that professors have banned laptops from their classrooms at George Washington University, American University, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Virginia, among many others, compelling students to take notes the way their parents did: on paper. A generation ago, academia embraced the laptop as the most welcome classroom innovation since the ballpoint pen, but during the past decade it has evolved into a powerful distraction as wireless Internet connections tempt students away from note-typing to e-mail, blogs, YouTube videos, sports scores, even online gaming. Even when used as glorified typewriters, laptops can turn students into witless stenographers, typing a lecture verbatim without listening or understanding. 'The breaking point for me was when I asked a student to comment on an issue, and he said, "Wait a minute, I want to open my computer,"' says David Goldfrank, a Georgetown history professor. 'And I told him, "I don't want to know what's in your computer. I want to know what's in your head."' Some students don't agree with the ban. A student wrote in the University of Denver's newspaper: 'The fact that some students misuse technology is no reason to ban it. After all, how many professors ban pens and notebooks after noticing students doodling in the margins?'"

adeelarshad82 writes "After originally rejecting the story, online retailer NewEgg confirmed that a shipment of Core i7s were indeed fake, and apologized for the affair. NewEgg has also broken off its relationship with IPEX, the supplier of the phony lot. The retailer said that it has already contacted affected customers and would continue to reach out and replace the counterfeit parts. We discussed the fake Core i7s over the weekend."

Trailrunner7 writes "Security researchers have found that Vodafone, one of the world's larger wireless providers, is distributing some HTC phones with malware pre-installed on them. The phone, HTC's Magic, runs the Google Android mobile operating system, and is one of the more popular handsets right now. A researcher at Panda Software received one of the handsets recently, and upon attaching it to her PC, found that the phone was pre-loaded with the Mariposa bot client. Mariposa has been in the news of late thanks to some arrests connected to the operation of the botnet."

nigham writes "The EFF is publicly disclosing a version of Apple's iPhone developer program license agreement. The highlights: you can't disclose the agreement itself (the EFF managed to get it via the Freedom of Information Act thanks to NASA's recent app), Apple reserves the right to kill your app at any time with no reason, and Apple's liability in any circumstance is limited to 50 bucks. There's also this gem: 'You will not, through use of the Apple Software, services or otherwise create any Application or other program that would disable, hack, or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by the iPhone operating system software, iPod Touch operating system software, this Apple Software, any services or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so.' The entire agreement (PDF) is up at the EFF's site."

geek4 sends in an analysis indicating that Microsoft may have the most to lose if hedge-fund operator Elliot buys Novell. (The eWeekEurope piece is based on a longer and geekier writeup by Andy Updegrove on how the mechanics of unsolicited tender offers can play out in the tech world.) To avoid meltdown or asset-stripping, Novell can try and find a preferred bidder — a company with some interest in running Novell as a business, and preferrably a tech company. Or another company may make a move independently. But who might that be? A couple of analysts have suggested IBM, Oracle, or SAP. These all have problems... Microsoft is in a similar category, with one added problem. ... Microsoft has staked any open source credibility that it has on Novell's SUSE distribution. If Novell falls to bits, then Microsoft's efforts to gain open source cred pretty much disappear with it. It's something that would have been impossible to imagine a few years back, but if we're looking for someone to prop Novell up, Microsoft would now be a prime candidate."

gollum123 tips an article at the NY Times on the progress of the European Windows browser choice screen that we have been discussing recently. "Rivals of Microsoft's market-leading Web browser have attracted a flurry of interest since the company, fulfilling a regulatory requirement, started making it easier for European users of its Windows operating system to switch. Mozilla, whose Firefox browser is the strongest competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer worldwide, said that more than 50,000 people had downloaded Firefox via a 'choice screen' that has been popping up on Windows-equipped computers in Europe since the end of last month. ... Opera Software, based in Oslo, said downloads of its browser in Belgium, France, Britain, Poland, and Spain had tripled since the screen began to appear. Microsoft said it was too early to tell whether the choice screen might prompt significant numbers of users to change. The digital ballot is being delivered over the Internet with software updates, and it is expected to take until mid-May to complete the process. The browser choice will also be presented to buyers of new Windows computers across the European Union for five years."

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister takes a deeper look at HTML5, outlining what developers should expect from this overhaul of HTML — one that some believe could put an end to proprietary Web technologies such as Flash and Silverlight. Among the most eagerly anticipated additions to HTML5 are new elements and APIs that allow content authors to create rich media using nothing more than standards-based HTML. The standard also introduces browser-based application caches, which enable Web apps to store information on the client device. 'But for all of HTML5's new features, users shouldn't expect plug-ins to disappear overnight. The Web has a long history of many competing technologies and media formats, and the inertia of that legacy will be difficult to overcome. It may yet be many years before a pure-HTML5 browser will be able to match the capabilities of today's patchwork clients,' McAllister writes. 'In the end, browser market share may be the most significant hurdle for developers interested in making the most of HTML5. Until these legacy browsers are replaced with modern updates, Web developers may be stuck maintaining two versions of their sites: a rich version for HTML5-enabled users, and a version for legacy browsers that falls back on outdated rendering tricks.'"

VJ42 writes "With the 2010 UK general election fast approaching, the Pirate Party of the United Kingdom will be fielding elections for the first time. The Digital Economy bill and ACTA are hot topics for UK geeks, and the Pirate Party is looking to pick up some votes. Their leader, Andrew Robinson, has agreed to answer your questions. Normal Slashdot interview rules apply."

An anonymous reader notes a long piece up at BusinessInsider.com accusing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of hacking into the email accounts of rivals and journalists. The CEO of the world's most successful social networking website was accused of at least two breaches of privacy. In a two-year investigation detailing the founding of Facebook, Nicholas Carlson, a senior editor at Silicon Alley Insider, uncovered what he claimed was evidence of the hackings in 2004. "New information uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that some of the complaints [in a court case ongong since 2007] against Mark Zuckerberg are valid. It also suggests that, on at least one occasion in 2004, Mark used private login data taken from Facebook's servers to break into Facebook members' private email accounts and read their emails — at best, a gross misuse of private information. Lastly, it suggests that Mark hacked into the competing company's systems and changed some user information with the aim of making the site less useful. ... Over the past two years, we have interviewed more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of this story — including people involved in the founding year of the company. We have also reviewed what we believe to be some relevant IMs and emails from the period. Much of this information has never before been made public. None of it has been confirmed or authenticated by Mark or the company." The single-page view doesn't have its own URL; click on "View as one page" near the bottom.

ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

A month back we discussed an article in GQ on the alarmist side of the cellphone-radiation question. Now reader pgn674 passes along a PopSci feature article looking at the current state of cellphone radiation research. It profiles people who claim to be electro-hypersensitive, "who are reluctant to subject themselves to hours in an electronics-laden facility" for studies. The limited research on that condition is still showing that sufferers, in blind tests, are unable to detect radiation at levels better than chance. The article also touches on the relationship of non-ionizing radiation to cancer. The conclusion is that while it seems unlikely high-frequency fields in consumer devices directly cause cancer, they might promote it, and might also indirectly cause other health deficits beyond simply heating nearby tissue — though one skeptical researcher cautions, "The gap between a biological effect and an adverse health effect is a big one."

grimwell sends in the news that after Cryptome's little run-in with Microsoft and NetSol, the activist site has now had its funds frozen by PayPal. Cryptome founder John Young notes, "Google lists thousands of instances of this asymmetrical high-handedness." "We have reviewed your PayPal Account, and due to the excessive risk involved, we would like to begin parting ways in a manner that is least disruptive to your business."

Last year we discussed news that an Xbox Live gamer was banned for identifying herself as a lesbian on her profile. Microsoft said at the time that nothing sexual in nature could appear in Gamertags or profiles. Now, they seem to have reconsidered their stance, and they've updated their Code of Conduct accordingly. Xbox Live General Manager Marc Whitten wrote: "[The update] will allow our members to more freely express their race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation in Gamertags and profiles. Under our previous policy, some of these expressions of self-identification were not allowed in Gamertags or profiles to prevent the use of these terms as insults or slurs. However we have since heard feedback from our customers that while the spirit of this approach was genuine, it inadvertently excluded a part of our Xbox LIVE community. This update also comes hand-in-hand with increased stringency and enforcement to prevent the misuse of these terms."

zapakh writes "A federal appeals court this week upheld a lower court decision that accused DISH Network and EchoStar of continuing to infringe on TiVo patents.' This is a follow-on to a Slashdot story from October. Despite a 'Herculean effort' by EchoStar in redesigning its DVR software, the ruling agrees with the district court that that was not a major redesign of the software. The patent in question is titled 'Multimedia time warping system.' TiVo is pleased with the ruling."

eldavojohn writes "Enough rumors, Portal 2 is due out for 2010. Valve also let users know through an announcement on Steam. Game Informer seems to be the de facto provider of Portal 2 information so far. Prepare yourselves for more aperture science! Notice anything funny about the underlined letters in Steam's announcement?"

Several readers have written with a fun followup to yesterday's IE6 funeral. Apparently Microsoft, in a rare moment of self-jest, took the time to send flowers, condolences, and a promise to meet at MIX. The card reads: "Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven. The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft."

krebsonsecurity writes "Three Spanish men were arrested last month for allegedly building an international network of more than 12 million hacked PCs that were used for everything from identity theft to spamming. But according to Spanish authorities and security experts who helped unravel the crime ring, the accused may very well never see the inside of a jail cell even if they are ultimately found guilty, due to insufficient cyber-crime legislation in Spain. 'It is almost impossible to be sent to prison for these kinds of crimes in Spain, where prison is mainly for serious crime cases,' said Captain Cesar Lorenzana, deputy head technology crime division of the Spanish Civil Guard. ... Spain is one of nearly three dozen countries that is a signatory to the Council of Europe's cybercrime treaty, but Spanish legislators have not yet ratified the treaty by passing anti-cybercrime laws that would bring its judicial system in line with the treaty's goals."

crowfeather notes an interview with cybersecurity czar Howard Schmidt that Wired's Threat Level conducted this week. "Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration, has a short answer for the drumbeat of rhetoric claiming the United States is caught up in a cyberwar that it is losing. 'There is no cyberwar,' Schmidt told Wired.com in a sit-down interview Wednesday at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. 'I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,' Schmidt said. 'There are no winners in that environment.' Instead, Schmidt said the government needs to focus its cybersecurity efforts to fight online crime and espionage. His stance contradicts Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence who made headlines last week when he testified to Congress that the country was already in the midst of a cyberwar — and was losing it. ... There's been much ink spilled in recent years over the turf battles in D.C. over whether the NSA (representing the military) or DHS (on the civilian side) takes the lead role in cybersecurity. But... "I haven't seen that tension," Schmidt said. As for which will take the cybersecurity lead, Schmidt simply says it's a shared effort."

angry tapir writes "RealNetworks has agreed to pay $4.5 million and permanently stop selling its RealDVD software as part of a legal settlement with six Hollywood movie studios. The lawsuits date back to 2008 and Slashdot has previously discussed them. RealDVD is an application that lets people make copies of their DVDs."

eldavojohn writes "Activision has announced new Call of Duty titles while fired Infinity Ward Developer leads Jason West and Vince Zampella sue them for the rights to the name. According to Activision, 'The company intends to expand the Call of Duty brand with the same focus seen in its Blizzard Entertainment business unit. This will include a focus on high-margin digital online content and further[ing] the brand as the leading action entertainment franchise in new geographies, new genres and with new digital business models.' Ars opines that Activision is set to over-saturate the market with tons of CoD titles similar to how it expertly brought down Guitar Hero."

Colonel Korn writes "Ubisoft's recent announcement that upcoming games would require a constant internet connection in order to play has been discussed at length on Slashdot ('The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work'). Many were of the opinion that this new, more demanding DRM would have effectiveness to match its inconvenience, at least financially justifying its use. Others assumed that it would be immediately cracked, as is usually the case, leaving the inconvenience for paying customers and resulting in a superior product for pirates. As usual, the latter group was right. Though Ubisoft won't yet admit it, Skid-Row managed to crack the new DRM less than a day after it was first released."

eldavojohn writes "The highly anticipated Joel Tenenbaum trial ended in a disaster for Tenenbaum. But worse for his highly publicized lawyer, Charles Nesson, they are both liable for payment of the court's decision to the RIAA. Nesson's pro bono agreement with Tenenbaum may turn out to be a seriously expensive experiment for the Harvard Law Professor." As the Ars story points out, though, it's "some fees incurred by the RIAA during the trial" for which he'd be liable, not the whole judgment amount.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton contributes the following piece on trying to get some measure of satisfaction in the struggle against pop-up ads, writing "The most annoying thing about some pop-up ads, is that you have no way of knowing which ad-serving network served them or who the responsible parties are. Could we reduce the incidence of illegal or deceptive pop-up ads, by giving users an easier way to trace their origin and figure out where to send complaints? Here's one way to do it with a simple right-click." Read on for the rest.

Occasionally while I'm surfing the web and a pop-up ad opens, my Norton Anti-Virus will alert me that it blocked an "attack" on my computer, and then in Norton's logs of recently blocked attacks, it gives the URL of the content inside the pop-up ad that was blocked. Sometimes it indicates whether the "threat" was blocked under the category "scareware" (an ad that mimics a program scanning your PC for viruses and then claiming to find "infections," which you have to remove by purchasing the advertiser's software) or "malware" (an advertiser's page that tries to infect your computer directly by using JavaScript tricks to get around the browser's security features). I'm glad that Norton blocks the malware attacks, since even though I always have all the latest security patches installed for Internet Explorer, it's always possible that an attacker could be using an exploit that hasn't been patched yet. I don't really care about blocking the "scareware" ads, because I'm not going to fall for an ad that claims to be scanning my PC for viruses, but most Norton customers probably appreciate blocking those ads as well.

The problem in both cases is that it's hard even for an experienced user, and almost impossible for a novice user, to know where to send a complaint about the content in a pop-up window. You can usually figure out the URL of the content in the pop-up window (just right-click the window content and pick "Properties" in Internet Explorer or "View Page Info" in Firefox), but often the content itself is being served from an IP address in a jurisdiction like China or Cyprus where malicious operators are hard to shut down. What you really want is for them to stop serving their dangerous ads on reputable websites through the ad network. You could complain to the owner of the website that you're browsing, and say that a pop-up ad window from their site got blocked by Norton as a "virus," but if their site rotates ads from different providers, the site owner would have no way of knowing which advertising network served the ad. Even if you know the URL of the malicious content that was in the pop-up window, that's not enough to tell which advertising network it was served from (because ad networks typically don't serve the ads from their own domain; they just serve a redirect, which causes the browser to load the pop-up ad's contents from the advertiser's domain).

And even if you know which advertiser network served the ad, and the URL that the malicious pop-up content was served from (say, http://www.evilsite.cn/popup.html), so you can take your complaint directly to the advertising network, that may still not be enough information for them to figure out which of their advertisers served the malicious content and needs to be booted out of the network. Because all the advertiser network has is a list of ad pages for their different advertisers (http://www.advertiser-1.com/ad.html, http://www.adveritser-2.com/ad.html, etc.) — the advertiser buys the right to show ads, and the ad network displays ads that load content from those ad content pages. If one of those pages — say, http://www.adveritser-2.com/ad.html — redirects the user's browser to http://www.evilsite.cn/popup.html, the advertiser network has no way of knowing which advertiser is doing that. They would have to go through and check the ad-serving pages (http://www.advertiser-1.com/ad.html, http://www.adveritser-2.com/ad.html, and so one one at a time) for each of their advertisers, to see which of those pages redirect to http://www.evilsite.cn/popup.html — and by the time they do that, the advertiser might have altered the page so that it no longer redirects to the malicious content. While it's pretty straightforward to figure out what URL the malicious content is being loaded from, it's very difficult to figure out the chain of events that redirected you there, and who the responsible parties are.

So here's an idea for a simple browser feature that would make it a lot easier to hold malicious advertisers accountable, and get them kicked out of honest ad-serving networks. Simply give the user a way to right-click on the top of a browser window, and pick "View window origin" or something similar. This would display the sequence of redirects that opened the window, something like this:

Browser was visiting http://www.cnn.com/
http://www.cnn.com/ loaded JavaScript from http://www.advertiser-network.com/ads.js
http://www.advertiser-network.com/ads.js redirected browser to http://www.advertiser-2.com/ad.html
http://www.advertiser-2.com/ad.html redirected browser to http://www.evilsite.cn/popup.html

Then, if the user views an ad that is obviously scareware (or if Norton blocks the contents from loading and gives that as a reason), then the user can just right-click on the window and see the list of redirects. The user could then e-mail that to the website owner with a suggestion to do something about it ("The ad network on your page, has been infiltrated by an advertiser who is using the ad network to serve malicious content"), or the user could take the complaint to the advertiser network. The advertiser network would be able to see from the log, exactly which of their advertisers' ad.html pages served the malicious content.

(Yes, this comes on the heels of my article arguing that we should allow more intrusive ads as a way to help pay for services that can't finance themselves with normal pop-up ads. This may strike some people as "ironic" who haven't thought about it very carefully. Getting users to give larger amounts of their attention in exchange for premium service, is an honest and mutually beneficial transaction; scaring users with deceptive ads, or using ad space to try to infect their computer, is not. I think that Starbucks has the right to charge whatever they want for coffee; that doesn't mean they have the right to pee in your coffee.)

In order for this window-history-tracing feature to make a difference, at least the following two conditions also have to be true:

• The advertiser network has to be honest (honest enough to kick out advertisers who they know are serving malicious content), or at least, be located in a jurisdiction where they have to worry about being sued or prosecuted if they don't kick bad apples out of their network.
• When the malicious ads are served, enough users have to complain about them that the advertiser network takes notice. You wouldn't want the advertiser network to take action just based on a single complaint, since then anyone with a grudge could file a phony complaint against an advertiser in order to get them shut down, but if complaints start coming in from several sources, then they should investigate.

Fortunately, these would be likely to be true in many if not most cases where malicious pop-up windows are being served. With regard to the first condition, I've dealt with several advertising networks to find ads to serve on the proxy sites that I run, and they were all based out of law-and-order countries (the U.S., Canada, Israel, i.e. not China or Kazahkstan). As for the second condition, the advertiser would probably have to serve the ad to many different users in order to achieve their goal -- whether their goal is to infect users' machines, or to get them to buy the advertiser's fake anti-virus software, or whatever -- and as long as a fixed percentage of users viewing the malicious ads are inclined to file complaints about them, then the more the ads are served, the more complaints will come in until the ads are taken out of rotation.

Of course, if the URL that's actually serving the malicious content, is located in a law-and-order country, you could always just complain to the admins of the network where the content is being hosted. But that's likely to be less effective, since (a) the actual URLs that I've seen serving the malicious content, usually are located in cybercrime-infested nations like China, and (b) even if you get one of those sites shut down, the advertiser can instantly rotate in other sites with the same content, and make that the new URL that users are redirected to.

It is also of course true that some pop-up ads are spawned not by websites, but by malicious programs that actually infect your machine and force your browser to display pop-up windows. If some browser maker adopted the feature I'm suggesting, and stored a user-viewable "history" associated with each pop-up window, then a malicious program running on your machine might even be able to spoof the history associated with a pop-up window, so that the user would right-click on it and think it came from http://www.cnn.com/ instead of being spawned by malware. Once the user has their machine infected by a rogue program, nothing that any other application tells them can really be trusted after that point. So an advertiser network would have to be careful not to take action against an innocent third party, just based on a flood of complaints that were sent in by people whose machines were infected by malware that spoofs the origin of the pop-up windows. Fortunately, if the allegedly malicious ad is still in rotation, it would be easy for the advertiser network to check the validity of the complaint, by simply going to the advertiser's ad-content page, and seeing if it redirects to the malicious content. If it does, then you have grounds to boot the advertiser out of the network.

(You'd want to check the page's content from some anonymous IP address not affiliated with the advertiser network though. Otherwise, the advertiser might try to fool the ad network people, by showing "innocent" content when the page is loaded from the IP addresses associated with the ad network's office, and serving the scareware content to everybody else. Just trying to think of everything here.)

I'm sure there are other counter-strategies and counter-counter-strategies that would have to be taken into account, and kinks to be worked out, but probably not fatal to the whole idea. If a pop-up window opens on the user's computer that is possibly illegal, it is probably a good thing to give the user the tools to figure out where the ad came from, and which advertiser network to complain to. Right now, the ad window just floats there, and it's maddening not to have any way of knowing which ad-serving network put it there, or even if you can identify the ad-serving network, which of their advertisers created the content.

The main obstacle standing in the way of a major browser maker implementing this, may be that it doesn't bring any particular benefit to the users of that browser. When Microsoft adds SmartScreen to Internet Explorer, they can now claim that IE users are better-protected than users of other browsers. On the other hand, if the Mozilla Foundation adds the pop-up window right-click-history feature to their browser, they can't legitimately claim that Firefox users are better protected, since this feature wouldn't actually block anything. Firefox users would simply be better equipped to complain about malicious pop-up windows, and increase the chances of those rogue advertisements being taken down, or at least kicked out of ad networks where they would do the most damage. However, the benefits of that increased policing, would accrue to all Internet users, not just Firefox users.

Still, abuse desks get so many complaints about spam and spammers, that there are apparently plenty of people out there who get enough satisfaction from complaining about net abuse, that they would make use of the pop-up window-tracing feature if they had it. I know that when I see a stupid ad pretending to "scan" my computer for viruses, I get unreasonably disgusted, not from seeing the ad itself (which I can easily ignore), but from knowing that the advertiser has probably fleeced people of thousands of dollars with that ad. It would be nice to be able to help stop them before they cheat the next person.

eldavojohn writes "The Japanese computer manuracturer IO Data is the latest in line to license Microsoft's so-called 'Linux patents,' following the likes of Novell, Samsung, and Amazon. Yes, even the press releases use the word 'Linux' to describe these patents. From the press release: 'Specifically, the patent covenants apply to I-O Data's network-attached storage devices and its routers, which run Linux. Although the details of the agreement have not been disclosed, the parties indicated that Microsoft is being compensated by I-O Data.'"

eldavojohn writes "The Japanese computer manuracturer IO Data is the latest in line to license Microsoft's so-called 'Linux patents,' following the likes of Novell, Samsung, and Amazon. Yes, even the press releases use the word 'Linux' to describe these patents. From the press release: 'Specifically, the patent covenants apply to I-O Data's network-attached storage devices and its routers, which run Linux. Although the details of the agreement have not been disclosed, the parties indicated that Microsoft is being compensated by I-O Data.'"

eldavojohn writes "The Japanese computer manuracturer IO Data is the latest in line to license Microsoft's so-called 'Linux patents,' following the likes of Novell, Samsung, and Amazon. Yes, even the press releases use the word 'Linux' to describe these patents. From the press release: 'Specifically, the patent covenants apply to I-O Data's network-attached storage devices and its routers, which run Linux. Although the details of the agreement have not been disclosed, the parties indicated that Microsoft is being compensated by I-O Data.'"

eldavojohn writes "New observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveal that our assumptions about the 'fog' of gamma rays in our universe are not entirely explained by black hole-powered jets emanating from active galaxies — as we previously hypothesized. For now, the researchers are representing the source of unaccounted gamma rays with a dragon (as in 'here be') symbol. A researcher explained that they are certain about this, given Fermi's observations: 'Active galaxies can explain less than 30 percent of the extragalactic gamma-ray background Fermi sees. That leaves a lot of room for scientific discovery as we puzzle out what else may be responsible.' And so we reopen the chapter on background gamma-rays in the science textbooks and hope this eventually sheds even more light on other mysteries of space — like star formation and dark matter."

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the BBC has yielded to critics of its aggressive expansion, and is planning to make sweeping cuts in spending on its Web site and other digital operations. Members of the Conservative Party, which is expected to make electoral gains at the expense of the governing Labor Party, have called for the BBC to be reined in and last year James Murdoch criticized the BBC for providing 'free news' on the internet, making it 'incredibly hard for private news organizations to ask people to pay for their news.' Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, said 'After years of expansion of our services in the UK, we are proposing some reductions.' The BBC is proposing a 25 percent reduction in its spending on the Web, as well as the closure of several digital radio stations and a reduction in outlays on US television shows. The Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union, which represents thousands of workers at the BBC, says that instead of appeasing critics, the proposed cuts could backfire. 'The BBC will not secure the politicians' favor with these proposals and nor will the corporation appease the commercial sector, which will see what the BBC is prepared to sacrifice and will pile on the pressure for more cuts,' says Gerry Morrissey, general secretary of the union."

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia provides an update on the City of San Francisco's trial against IT admin Terry Childs, which — at eight weeks and counting — hasn't even seen the defense begin to present its case. The main spotlight thus far has been on the testimony of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. 'Many articles about this case have pounced on the fact that after Childs gave the passwords to the mayor, they couldn't immediately be used. Most of these pieces chalk this up to some kind of secondary infraction on Childs's part,' Venezia writes. 'Just because you give someone a password doesn't mean that person knows how to use it. Childs's security measures would have included access lists that blocked attempted logins from non-specified IP addresses or subnets. In short, it was nothing out of the ordinary if you know anything about network security.' But while the lack of technical expertise in the case is troubling, encouraging is the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle's 'breathless piece reporting on the mayor's testimony' drew comments 10-to-1 in Childs's favor, which may indicate that 'public opinion of this case has tilted in favor of the defense,' Venezia writes. Of course, 'if [the trial] drags into summer, Childs will have the dubious honor of being held in jail for two full years.' This for a man who 'ultimately protected the [City's] network until the bitter end.'"

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia provides an update on the City of San Francisco's trial against IT admin Terry Childs, which — at eight weeks and counting — hasn't even seen the defense begin to present its case. The main spotlight thus far has been on the testimony of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. 'Many articles about this case have pounced on the fact that after Childs gave the passwords to the mayor, they couldn't immediately be used. Most of these pieces chalk this up to some kind of secondary infraction on Childs's part,' Venezia writes. 'Just because you give someone a password doesn't mean that person knows how to use it. Childs's security measures would have included access lists that blocked attempted logins from non-specified IP addresses or subnets. In short, it was nothing out of the ordinary if you know anything about network security.' But while the lack of technical expertise in the case is troubling, encouraging is the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle's 'breathless piece reporting on the mayor's testimony' drew comments 10-to-1 in Childs's favor, which may indicate that 'public opinion of this case has tilted in favor of the defense,' Venezia writes. Of course, 'if [the trial] drags into summer, Childs will have the dubious honor of being held in jail for two full years.' This for a man who 'ultimately protected the [City's] network until the bitter end.'"

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia provides an update on the City of San Francisco's trial against IT admin Terry Childs, which — at eight weeks and counting — hasn't even seen the defense begin to present its case. The main spotlight thus far has been on the testimony of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. 'Many articles about this case have pounced on the fact that after Childs gave the passwords to the mayor, they couldn't immediately be used. Most of these pieces chalk this up to some kind of secondary infraction on Childs's part,' Venezia writes. 'Just because you give someone a password doesn't mean that person knows how to use it. Childs's security measures would have included access lists that blocked attempted logins from non-specified IP addresses or subnets. In short, it was nothing out of the ordinary if you know anything about network security.' But while the lack of technical expertise in the case is troubling, encouraging is the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle's 'breathless piece reporting on the mayor's testimony' drew comments 10-to-1 in Childs's favor, which may indicate that 'public opinion of this case has tilted in favor of the defense,' Venezia writes. Of course, 'if [the trial] drags into summer, Childs will have the dubious honor of being held in jail for two full years.' This for a man who 'ultimately protected the [City's] network until the bitter end.'"

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia provides an update on the City of San Francisco's trial against IT admin Terry Childs, which — at eight weeks and counting — hasn't even seen the defense begin to present its case. The main spotlight thus far has been on the testimony of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. 'Many articles about this case have pounced on the fact that after Childs gave the passwords to the mayor, they couldn't immediately be used. Most of these pieces chalk this up to some kind of secondary infraction on Childs's part,' Venezia writes. 'Just because you give someone a password doesn't mean that person knows how to use it. Childs's security measures would have included access lists that blocked attempted logins from non-specified IP addresses or subnets. In short, it was nothing out of the ordinary if you know anything about network security.' But while the lack of technical expertise in the case is troubling, encouraging is the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle's 'breathless piece reporting on the mayor's testimony' drew comments 10-to-1 in Childs's favor, which may indicate that 'public opinion of this case has tilted in favor of the defense,' Venezia writes. Of course, 'if [the trial] drags into summer, Childs will have the dubious honor of being held in jail for two full years.' This for a man who 'ultimately protected the [City's] network until the bitter end.'"

Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft's Vice President for Trustworthy Computing, Scott Charney, speaking at the RSA conference in San Francisco, has floated an interesting proposal to deal with infected computers: Approach the problem of dealing with malware infections like the healthcare industry, and consider using 'general taxation' to pay for inspection and quarantine. Using taxes to deal with online criminal activity is not a new idea, as demonstrated by last year's Louisiana House vote to levy a monthly surcharge on Internet access to deal with online baddies."

snydeq writes "A new breed of 'spear phishing' aimed at IT admins is making the rounds. The emails, containing no obvious malicious links, are fooling even the savviest of users into opening up holes in their company's network defenses. The authentic-looking emails, which often include the admin's complete name or refer to a real project they are working on, are the product of tactical research or database hacks and appear as if having been sent by the company's hosting provider. 'In each case, the victim remembered getting a similar sort of email message when they first signed on with a service and, thus, thought the bogus message was legitimate — especially because their cloud/hosting providers keep bragging about all the new data centers they're continuing to bring online.' The phishing messages often include instructions for opening up mail servers to enable spam relaying, to disable their host-based firewalls, and to open up unprotected network shares. Certainly fodder for some bone-headed mistakes on the part of admins, the new attack 'makes the old days of hoax messages that caused users to delete legitimate operating system files seem relatively harmless.'"

eldavojohn writes "Years after you thought it was all over, Groklaw is reporting that Darl McBride (ex-CEO of SCO) has formed a new company that is buying SCO's mobile business for peanuts — but he's also going to get 'certain Intellectual Property' with the deal. You may recall that McBride was the brains behind the Linux lawsuits that SCO launched and it appears he may be orchestrating an exit route where he escapes with some IP intact, in order to wreak havoc once again. Hopefully this is the part at the end of the movie where the zombie comes back to life one last time only to have the hero deliver the final final blow. When this news broke upon the investment world, SCO's stock skyrocketed a blistering 11%, bringing it up seven cents to a full seventy cents — a level which it has not achieved since 2007."

A couple of weeks ago you posed some questions for Matt Asay, who recently moved into the COO role at Canonical. Click below to read his answers.
Adoption stories and influences
by eldavojohn (898314)"Every so often I see an adoption story about so-and-so taking up some open source solution and sometimes I think 'Wow, French government? Now it's really going to take off. This is it. It's time.' And then I wait. And wait. Are these stories at all positive for the project? I mean, you would think with states and governments using Ubuntu or Red Hat that it would catch on like wildfire if the savings are there so why isn't that happening? I know Microsoft sends out a lot of Wormtongues to stick in the ears of important people. Do you plan on targeting governments in a similar manner? Does/will Canonical work on making a presence in things like the EU Commissions where we've seen corporations collecting members in their pockets?"
Matt: No, we have no plans to turn Wormtongue. We do, however, have aspirations to play Frodo. :-)

Ultimately, governments (good ones, anyway) are established to reflect the voice of their citizens. At Canonical, we believe that real, lasting change happens from the bottom up, as citizens within government and IT and those served by it clamor for change. We try to help this along by working with government organizations, including open source-friendly lobbying groups, to promote free markets and expanded choice through free and open-source software, but I personally believe that individuals will make the difference.

Change can be expensive, whether in terms of cost or bother, and so as individuals or organizations we generally try to avoid it. But people are now starting to feel enough pain - be it software costs, inefficient use of hardware, viruses and other malware, etc. - that Linux and open-source software, generally, are getting plenty of attention. The cure, in other words, now outweighs the effort of applying it. Yes, Microsoft will do its part to thwart this progress,but even so I've seen broad and ever-increasing government adoption of open source. It's just that most of it doesn't get reported.

Don't lose heart and, in particular, don't lose "voice." We're being heard. The worst thing we could do is to slacken our pace now.

Revenue
by Enderandrew (866215)"Shuttleworth is still funding Canonical. At some point however, this needs to turn into a profitable venture to endure. How does Canonical create lasting revenue streams, and will those decisions come at the cost of usability and freedom in the distro, such as the recent decision to use Yahoo search (powered by Bing) as the default)?"
Matt: First off, it's critical to understand that Canonical doesn't make decisions at the cost of usability. Ever. Usability is our cardinal virtue.

The Yahoo! deal is not at the cost of usability. Yahoo! is an excellent and wildly popular search engine with many many millions of users. We are very pleased to have reached an agreement that will pump additional revenue into the community compared to the existing default. For those worried about Microsoft's involvement with Yahoo!, it is trivially easy to switch to Google or other alternatives.

We will make more commercial for-pay services available to our users, but we will never make then a requirement to have a full experience of the Ubuntu desktop. If you don't like them don't buy them and nothing will make you need to.

We have very healthy revenue coming from our various businesses, the most visible of which is providing support for our OEM partners like Dell as they roll Ubuntu-based devices globally. Less visible, but also fast growing, include our enterprise business (providing support and other services for Ubuntu in cloud and traditional server deployments) and our Ubuntu One services for Ubuntu client users.

I like to think of our guiding principle as "make money because of the Ubuntu community, not from it." At the scale where we operate, all sorts of financial opportunities become possible, opportunities that don't require us to hold back Ubuntu bits to goad people into purchasing. As we roll new services out, I hope you'll let us know how we're doing, and ensure we never sacrifice usability for financial gain.

Freedom, second?
by TheModelEskimo (968202) "Matt, you were intensely criticized by members of the Free Software community for your critical stance facing 'vague concepts' like software freedom and 'no vendor lock-in.' Reading your blog, it seems to me like you are still a fan of focusing on 'high quality software at a compelling price' rather than these other concepts. How will this position affect your work with Canonical and more specifically, its relationship with freedom-first software advocates?"
Matt: I've never considered myself at odds with the goals of freedom-first software advocates, though I sometimes disagree with the means and the timing. Some, for example, have criticized Canonical in the past for including non-free bits (codecs and such).

I'm not among that number, because I believe that if we ever want to see mainstream adoption of Linux, we need to provide solutions, preferably short-term, that map to users' requirements. How likely is it that the mainstream could adopt a Linux desktop, for example, that doesn't offer support for Flash so that people can watch YouTube videos, as just one example?

It's easy to demand that everyone be like us, right now. But that, to me, is the antithesis of freedom. I'm not interesting in forcing people to make a choice. That's no choice at all. I believe the best way is to consistently offer a better experience, and invite prospective users to try it.

Here's a personal example. In my new role, I have switched from using Mac OS X to Ubuntu Linux. I've been using a Mac since 2002 when I switched off Windows. This switch would have been painful but for the fact that Firefox runs so well on Linux, and gives me access to a range of online services (like Google Calendar) that I was using before on the Mac. It would have been doubly so if I couldn't keep using Tweetdeck and other software to which I'd grown accustomed on my Mac.

Over time, I'm sure I'll migrate to open-source alternatives, for the same reason I used Adium, not iChat, on my Mac: the open-source alternatives are often the best available.

But to force-feed "freedom" on me or anyone else is a foolish, losing proposition. Especially in the short term.

I believe that Canonical and the Ubuntu community are creating software that people will want to use, not that they have to use. In the three weeks I've been with Canonical, I've used my Mac exactly once (still moving music out of old, DRM-encrusted iTunes songs). I haven't missed it.

Your version of their vision
by eldavojohn (898314) "Late last year, you heralded some moves by Shuttleworth and you said:

This, I believe, is an opportunity for Canonical to tighten its focus. While Shuttleworth suggests that Silber's appointment 'doesn't mark a change of direction,' perhaps it should. With over 300 employees and products that span mobile, Netbooks and other personal computers, cloud computing, enterprise servers, and more, Canonical has its fingers in a lot of pots.

As COO, what are you going to do to improve the products you highlighted above? I'm not looking for a soft answer like 'I'm going to promote Ubuntu on netbooks' but more so an itemized list of measurable goals, with milestones, dates and areas of focus (for instance, power minded ARM distributions). Is there anything about their vision you intend to change or influence the most?"
Matt: I don't want to offend you with a "soft-ball" answer, but it would be inappropriate for me to provide the level of detail you request, in part because much of this information is confidential to Canonical and our partners, but also because a big part of our strategy is to undergird and rely upon the community to take Ubuntu into devices that we as a company cannot or choose not to cover.

That said, two things have impressed me in my three weeks with the company. First, there are, as you point out, a lot of things going on with the very real potential for inefficiency and lack of focus.

But two, the company is remarkably consistent in what it does choose to go after. In particular, we are relentlessly focused on improving the Linux user experience. Canonical, in conjunction with the Ubuntu community, builds the industry's best Linux distribution, one that even a (former) Mac user like myself can easily digest.

We intend to take this emphasis and expertise in user design into a wide array of devices, but importantly will continue to focus on those that require a general purpose operating system. The good news is that even despite the increasing diversity of devices, the world is actually converging on fewer platforms, not more.

For areas that require expertise or focus beyond ours, we encourage our community to take Ubuntu into such opportunities, and they have. You might be surprised to learn just how many of the devices out there are powered by Ubuntu, often without Canonical involved. I see this as very healthy. It's the only way to compete with much bigger competitors like Microsoft: beat them with a bigger community like Ubuntu.

This isn't to say that we couldn't focus more. But that was already underway through Mark's and Jane's guidance. My job is to accentuate it and ensure that we stay on track.

Gaming and drivers
by HungryHobo (1314109) "I like Linux, I like programming on a Linux machine, I like learning on a Linux machine but I can't really game on a Linux machine and that's a big thing in the home PC market. What are the plans to induce game makers to port their games to Linux? What moves are being made to try to encourage graphics chip companies to create good drivers for Linux?"
Matt: You're asking the wrong man! My favorite game is Rogue, originally developed for Unix and still going strong in the guise of Qt NetHack and other variants. I'm easy to please, I guess.

As for the general gaming market, yes, gaming is a weakness on Linux, but addressing that is not a priority for Canonical. Games developers will make their decisions based on their market dynamics and those dynamics are pointing more and more towards dedicated consoles rather than the general PC market.

We work very hard with the Linux Foundation and others in the Linux community to encourage component manufacturers to either open source their drivers or make them available for Linux and with considerable success. This is not to enable gaming per so but to make Linux a peer experience on all machines.

Proprietary products
Enderandrew (866215) "You often praise proprietary, closed-source products on your blog (especially products from Apple and IBM). What is your stance on mixing proprietary and open products?"
Matt: Ubuntu is about choice. While we believe that an operating system is best developed with the source code openly available, that does not mean that the applications running on it need to be restricted to only those using the same development method. Our own users tell us, in large numbers, that they would like to see apps become available from the likes of Adobe and the games developers. On server the case is even more apparent where there are excellent proprietary applications that we would love to make available to Ubuntu users and we work to do that.

We can't boil the ocean. We want people to adopt Ubuntu Linux, and part of that requires us to support the applications that the mass market requires. Our focus is to continue to provide the industry's best Linux experience, and to make that Linux experience superior to any other platform. This process is well underway, and will encourage more and more application developers to port their software to Ubuntu.

Along the way, we hope that others will follow our lead and open source their software, but we intend to lead by example, not force-feed the industry. Google, for example, is arguably putting more pressure on Microsoft's closed-source approach than any amount of lobbying ever has or will. You can argue that Google is only doing this out of self-interest, to which I reply, "Exactly." Once the industry recognizes its self-interest in open sourcing software, we'll have even more from which to choose.

I love great software, whatever its license. But I joined Canonical because I believe the open-source development model can create better software than closed alternatives, and I'm determined to prove that.

Enterprise versus desktop emphasis
by eldavojohn (898314) "You used to write a lot about desktop Linux distributions but now that you're COO of Canonical, the revenue comes most from enterprise support. Do you plan on trying to change that or maintain any value in pleasing the at home Ubuntu user? Your blog post talks about your kids achieving basic tasks with Ubuntu, will you still keep them in mind despite the fact your new employer doesn't see a dime from them? Any plans to make it more user friendly or make it more mainstream and less server room?"
Matt: Actually, the majority of Canonical's revenue does not derive from providing support to enterprises, though I of course hope and expect us to continue to grow that area of our business. Our revenue will be a mix of making Ubuntu available to everyone on a wide range of hardware, from selling services direct to users (e.g., Ubuntu One), enabling hardware manufacturers to deliver a solid, supported Ubuntu experience on a wide range of devices, and from selling support and other services to enterprise IT.

Our market opportunity derives from Ubuntu's global user community, but it's a matter of making money with or around that community, not from it. All sorts of business opportunities are possible once a platform becomes ubiquitous, which business opportunities don't depend on charging users for the right to use that platform. That's a 20th-century model that we eschew.

So, yes, you'll see Canonical putting a great deal of effort into making the Linux experience even more user friendly: the more users, the better our revenue opportunities from ancillary services. It's in our interest to have millions upon millions of people happily running Ubuntu, and our unwavering focus is on improving the usability and design of Ubuntu to ensure that they do just that.

Ubuntu and KDE and GNOME
by Enderandrew (866215) "I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrudge people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?"
Matt: I'm new to the Ubuntu party, but I believe we already do this with Kubuntu. No?

Ubuntu and KDE and GNOME (cont.)
by Anonymous Coward "More importantly, we see GNOME falling further and further behind KDE. We need to know exactly when Matt will be pushing for GNOME to be deprecated in favor of KDE (or even XFCE). He really doesn't have a choice; GNOME needs to go, and it needs to go very soon. We're seeing the GNOME community fragmenting, and quite badly. Some people still advocate using C, others are saying that Mono is the way to go. And yet others are pushing for Vala. Frankly, the internal strife will tear the GNOME project apart, much like happened to XFree86. I, for one, sure hope that Ubuntu has moved away from GNOME far before then."
by Enderandrew (866215) "I think Ubuntu is actively hurting the KDE community by giving it a bad name. When Canonical works on new features for each Ubuntu release, they work independently of the Kubuntu team. Kubuntu is constantly trying to play catch-up on base issues. Even worse, they [Ubuntu] put out unstable, buggy, and sometimes flat-out broken KDE packages. Almost every I've talked to that has had really bad experiences with KDE complain about bugs and constant crashes they had when testing KDE packages from Ubuntu. Read KDE forums, mailing lists, etc. You'll see some serious hate and vitriol from users who blame KDE devs... They don't realize it is their distro that is causing their problems. I've seen several KDE devs walk away and stop contributing because of all the hate they're getting. If Ubuntu wasn't putting out broken packages, it would remove a lot of this backlash. That is not to say that 100% of KDE backlash is Ubuntu-created. ... But Ubuntu certainly hasn't done KDE any favors the past two years with the packages they've put out."
Matt: I remember my first taste of the KDE/Gnome divide when I was involved in the Linux Business Office at Novell. It was fractious then and, judging from your "question," it remains so. I don't want to add to this rancorous debate, but do hope you'll continue to talk actively and openly with Canonical and the Ubuntu community to ensure your views are heard and the Ubuntu distribution remains one that you will enjoy using.

Quality control
by davidm2005 (1453017) "I have been using Ubuntu as a software developer for the past several years. I have been extremely disappointed with the most recent release of Ubuntu, 9.10, as it has been extremely buggy and seems like a step backwards. The conclusion of this review also expresses a lot of my thoughts about Ubuntu 9.10. I had so many problems in using 9.10, that did NOT exist in 9.04, that I switched one of the two computers I use at work to Windows 7, for stability (yes, these are crazy days). Do you have any plans to increase quality control in Ubuntu, even if it comes at the cost of delaying the every-six-month release schedule?"
Matt: We are not complacent about bugs or quality. Far from it. In fact, I've been surprised by the level of attention it gets within the company.

You can criticize Canonical and Ubuntu for many things, but the work of the engineers and community in making an incredible operating system for servers and desktops on a huge array of hardware available for free to all is not one of them.

Every release of Ubuntu gets more users and is used on a wider choice of hardware. This creates complexity. Making an operating system entirely independent of the hardware that it is run on is hard and it's harder again when you are trying to push the performance of that product with each release.

As for Ubuntu 9.10, I've heard people call it a buggy release but that has not been my personal experience, and it's an accusation that the data do not support. Yes, we're constantly trying to improve, as Canonical CTO Matt Zimmerman calls out. But I look at this as a very good problem to have.

Why?

Because it's a symptom of a very positive thing: growth. There are more users using Ubuntu on more hardware than any previous release. Millions upon millions of users. Importantly, with our hardware partners we are providing certified, pre-installed, and supported Ubuntu on an ever-widening array of hardware. Dell's XPS 13 is just one awesome example.

For those who prefer to go off the beaten track and install Ubuntu on alternative hardware, as I did recently with a ThinkPad X200s, there may be some manual labor involved, just as there would be if you were running Windows or Mac OS X on unsupported hardware. In my personal experience, however, everything "just works." I've yet to have a single problem. Coming from a former Mac user (motto: two buttons are too hard - just give me one button on my mouse! :-), that's high praise.

Quality control (cont.)
by bcrowell (177657) I've been using ubuntu since edgy eft, and I'm really dismayed by the quality of jaunty and (especially) karmic. The biggest issue is that sound, which worked for me in edgy through intrepid, started working poorly in jaunty, and is now essentially completely broken for me in karmic. I've spent a lot of time surfing ubuntuforms.org, collecting information, trying to write useful and well documented bug reports, etc. But the upshot is that there have been major, major regressions in sound for me.
Matt: I'm sorry to hear that (no pun intended). But see my response above.

Is there a time to fork?
by nine-times (778537) "I've been thinking about the relative lack of success of Linux on the desktop lately. By 'relative lack of success' I don't mean to bash the quality of Linux, but only that it doesn't seem to be very widely used in spite of being pretty good for a lot of purposes. So first, to what do you attribute the relative lack of success, and what plans do you have, if any, to do something about it. It seems to me that a fair amount of the problem isn't the OS itself, but the associate applications. For example, lots of people have complained about GIMP for reasons ranging from lack of specific functionality to an unconventional UI, and even to the awkward connotations of the name 'GIMP.' Even having personally gotten some graphic designers to try the GIMP, I have yet to know any professional designers who find it adequate. I'd like to use Linux, but don't find I can come close replicating an equivalent workflow to what I have available using tools like Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, and Sound Forge. (those are the applications I'm personally stuck with, though I'm sure other people have other applications on their personal lists.)"
Matt: As to the relative lack of market share, it comes down to inertia. I didn't give the Linux desktop much attention until I joined Canonical. I had used it off and on over the years, but there was never a compelling reason to change.

Now that I've switched, I'm surprised by how much my ignorance of desktop Linux was coloring my opinion of it. I've been using it as my dedicated OS for three weeks, and have had only one (minor) reason to revisit my old Mac machine. I simply haven't missed it, and I thought that I would struggle.

Until someone has a compelling reason to shift, however, they're unlikely to discover this. For those picking up new machines, for example, a low-cost netbook, they won't have to overcome this inertia. Email, Internet, IM, etc. all work just as well on Linux as they do on Windows or the Mac. These are the applications we spend 99.9999% of our days in (most of us, anyway). As a result, I think we'll start to see barriers come down.

The irony in this is that these application incompatibility concerns are the exact same ones I had when I started using a Mac in 2002. Years later, application support on the Mac is much better, though still not at the same level as Windows. And yet 99 percent of the time it doesn't matter, just as it doesn't on Linux. As more applications move to the Web and as application developers improve their support for Linux (a trend I've noticed happening), it will matter even less.

In the interim, if you are happy to pay for and need these specific Windows-only applications then Windows is probably the right OS for you. Microsoft Office, however, is not a compelling reason to keep paying the Windows tax for many people. It's one of those applications that we think we use more than we actually do, and which OpenOffice (or Google Docs, if you wish) more than adequately handles.

We would love Creative Suite to be available for Linux but the open source or web-based alternatives are satisfactory for many users.

Mobile platform plans
by abhikhurana (325468) "What are Canonical's plans for mobile platforms? With Maemo, another Debian based distro, now available for smartphones, would Canonical also get involved with either that or maybe develop a completely new Distro? With the desktop Linux market being extremely small and server markets being dominated by Red Hat and Novell, mobiles probably are the sweet spot for Canonical, with its strong focus on usability. Additionally, the lack of standardization means that users are more willing to experiment with interfaces. So what is the relative priority of Mobile, Netbook, Desktop and Server platform in Canonical's roadmap?"
Matt: Mobile is a top priority for Canonical, especially as it looks less and less like the traditional embedded market and more and more like a general-purpose OS market. That's our sweet spot, and given our concern for and expertise in user interface design, we will be leaders in this market.

We will do a lot of work on ARM and Intel platforms this year that will see Ubuntu popping up all over the the computing landscape. Ubuntu is a platform: it is not a desktop product or a server product or a mobile product. So where there is a requirement for an OS you will find Ubuntu. You'd be surprised by the kinds of devices you already own that run Ubuntu today.

A couple of weeks ago you posed some questions for Matt Asay, who recently moved into the COO role at Canonical. Click below to read his answers.
Adoption stories and influences
by eldavojohn (898314)"Every so often I see an adoption story about so-and-so taking up some open source solution and sometimes I think 'Wow, French government? Now it's really going to take off. This is it. It's time.' And then I wait. And wait. Are these stories at all positive for the project? I mean, you would think with states and governments using Ubuntu or Red Hat that it would catch on like wildfire if the savings are there so why isn't that happening? I know Microsoft sends out a lot of Wormtongues to stick in the ears of important people. Do you plan on targeting governments in a similar manner? Does/will Canonical work on making a presence in things like the EU Commissions where we've seen corporations collecting members in their pockets?"
Matt: No, we have no plans to turn Wormtongue. We do, however, have aspirations to play Frodo. :-)

Ultimately, governments (good ones, anyway) are established to reflect the voice of their citizens. At Canonical, we believe that real, lasting change happens from the bottom up, as citizens within government and IT and those served by it clamor for change. We try to help this along by working with government organizations, including open source-friendly lobbying groups, to promote free markets and expanded choice through free and open-source software, but I personally believe that individuals will make the difference.

Change can be expensive, whether in terms of cost or bother, and so as individuals or organizations we generally try to avoid it. But people are now starting to feel enough pain - be it software costs, inefficient use of hardware, viruses and other malware, etc. - that Linux and open-source software, generally, are getting plenty of attention. The cure, in other words, now outweighs the effort of applying it. Yes, Microsoft will do its part to thwart this progress,but even so I've seen broad and ever-increasing government adoption of open source. It's just that most of it doesn't get reported.

Don't lose heart and, in particular, don't lose "voice." We're being heard. The worst thing we could do is to slacken our pace now.

Revenue
by Enderandrew (866215)"Shuttleworth is still funding Canonical. At some point however, this needs to turn into a profitable venture to endure. How does Canonical create lasting revenue streams, and will those decisions come at the cost of usability and freedom in the distro, such as the recent decision to use Yahoo search (powered by Bing) as the default)?"
Matt: First off, it's critical to understand that Canonical doesn't make decisions at the cost of usability. Ever. Usability is our cardinal virtue.

The Yahoo! deal is not at the cost of usability. Yahoo! is an excellent and wildly popular search engine with many many millions of users. We are very pleased to have reached an agreement that will pump additional revenue into the community compared to the existing default. For those worried about Microsoft's involvement with Yahoo!, it is trivially easy to switch to Google or other alternatives.

We will make more commercial for-pay services available to our users, but we will never make then a requirement to have a full experience of the Ubuntu desktop. If you don't like them don't buy them and nothing will make you need to.

We have very healthy revenue coming from our various businesses, the most visible of which is providing support for our OEM partners like Dell as they roll Ubuntu-based devices globally. Less visible, but also fast growing, include our enterprise business (providing support and other services for Ubuntu in cloud and traditional server deployments) and our Ubuntu One services for Ubuntu client users.

I like to think of our guiding principle as "make money because of the Ubuntu community, not from it." At the scale where we operate, all sorts of financial opportunities become possible, opportunities that don't require us to hold back Ubuntu bits to goad people into purchasing. As we roll new services out, I hope you'll let us know how we're doing, and ensure we never sacrifice usability for financial gain.

Freedom, second?
by TheModelEskimo (968202) "Matt, you were intensely criticized by members of the Free Software community for your critical stance facing 'vague concepts' like software freedom and 'no vendor lock-in.' Reading your blog, it seems to me like you are still a fan of focusing on 'high quality software at a compelling price' rather than these other concepts. How will this position affect your work with Canonical and more specifically, its relationship with freedom-first software advocates?"
Matt: I've never considered myself at odds with the goals of freedom-first software advocates, though I sometimes disagree with the means and the timing. Some, for example, have criticized Canonical in the past for including non-free bits (codecs and such).

I'm not among that number, because I believe that if we ever want to see mainstream adoption of Linux, we need to provide solutions, preferably short-term, that map to users' requirements. How likely is it that the mainstream could adopt a Linux desktop, for example, that doesn't offer support for Flash so that people can watch YouTube videos, as just one example?

It's easy to demand that everyone be like us, right now. But that, to me, is the antithesis of freedom. I'm not interesting in forcing people to make a choice. That's no choice at all. I believe the best way is to consistently offer a better experience, and invite prospective users to try it.

Here's a personal example. In my new role, I have switched from using Mac OS X to Ubuntu Linux. I've been using a Mac since 2002 when I switched off Windows. This switch would have been painful but for the fact that Firefox runs so well on Linux, and gives me access to a range of online services (like Google Calendar) that I was using before on the Mac. It would have been doubly so if I couldn't keep using Tweetdeck and other software to which I'd grown accustomed on my Mac.

Over time, I'm sure I'll migrate to open-source alternatives, for the same reason I used Adium, not iChat, on my Mac: the open-source alternatives are often the best available.

But to force-feed "freedom" on me or anyone else is a foolish, losing proposition. Especially in the short term.

I believe that Canonical and the Ubuntu community are creating software that people will want to use, not that they have to use. In the three weeks I've been with Canonical, I've used my Mac exactly once (still moving music out of old, DRM-encrusted iTunes songs). I haven't missed it.

Your version of their vision
by eldavojohn (898314) "Late last year, you heralded some moves by Shuttleworth and you said:

This, I believe, is an opportunity for Canonical to tighten its focus. While Shuttleworth suggests that Silber's appointment 'doesn't mark a change of direction,' perhaps it should. With over 300 employees and products that span mobile, Netbooks and other personal computers, cloud computing, enterprise servers, and more, Canonical has its fingers in a lot of pots.

As COO, what are you going to do to improve the products you highlighted above? I'm not looking for a soft answer like 'I'm going to promote Ubuntu on netbooks' but more so an itemized list of measurable goals, with milestones, dates and areas of focus (for instance, power minded ARM distributions). Is there anything about their vision you intend to change or influence the most?"
Matt: I don't want to offend you with a "soft-ball" answer, but it would be inappropriate for me to provide the level of detail you request, in part because much of this information is confidential to Canonical and our partners, but also because a big part of our strategy is to undergird and rely upon the community to take Ubuntu into devices that we as a company cannot or choose not to cover.

That said, two things have impressed me in my three weeks with the company. First, there are, as you point out, a lot of things going on with the very real potential for inefficiency and lack of focus.

But two, the company is remarkably consistent in what it does choose to go after. In particular, we are relentlessly focused on improving the Linux user experience. Canonical, in conjunction with the Ubuntu community, builds the industry's best Linux distribution, one that even a (former) Mac user like myself can easily digest.

We intend to take this emphasis and expertise in user design into a wide array of devices, but importantly will continue to focus on those that require a general purpose operating system. The good news is that even despite the increasing diversity of devices, the world is actually converging on fewer platforms, not more.

For areas that require expertise or focus beyond ours, we encourage our community to take Ubuntu into such opportunities, and they have. You might be surprised to learn just how many of the devices out there are powered by Ubuntu, often without Canonical involved. I see this as very healthy. It's the only way to compete with much bigger competitors like Microsoft: beat them with a bigger community like Ubuntu.

This isn't to say that we couldn't focus more. But that was already underway through Mark's and Jane's guidance. My job is to accentuate it and ensure that we stay on track.

Gaming and drivers
by HungryHobo (1314109) "I like Linux, I like programming on a Linux machine, I like learning on a Linux machine but I can't really game on a Linux machine and that's a big thing in the home PC market. What are the plans to induce game makers to port their games to Linux? What moves are being made to try to encourage graphics chip companies to create good drivers for Linux?"
Matt: You're asking the wrong man! My favorite game is Rogue, originally developed for Unix and still going strong in the guise of Qt NetHack and other variants. I'm easy to please, I guess.

As for the general gaming market, yes, gaming is a weakness on Linux, but addressing that is not a priority for Canonical. Games developers will make their decisions based on their market dynamics and those dynamics are pointing more and more towards dedicated consoles rather than the general PC market.

We work very hard with the Linux Foundation and others in the Linux community to encourage component manufacturers to either open source their drivers or make them available for Linux and with considerable success. This is not to enable gaming per so but to make Linux a peer experience on all machines.

Proprietary products
Enderandrew (866215) "You often praise proprietary, closed-source products on your blog (especially products from Apple and IBM). What is your stance on mixing proprietary and open products?"
Matt: Ubuntu is about choice. While we believe that an operating system is best developed with the source code openly available, that does not mean that the applications running on it need to be restricted to only those using the same development method. Our own users tell us, in large numbers, that they would like to see apps become available from the likes of Adobe and the games developers. On server the case is even more apparent where there are excellent proprietary applications that we would love to make available to Ubuntu users and we work to do that.

We can't boil the ocean. We want people to adopt Ubuntu Linux, and part of that requires us to support the applications that the mass market requires. Our focus is to continue to provide the industry's best Linux experience, and to make that Linux experience superior to any other platform. This process is well underway, and will encourage more and more application developers to port their software to Ubuntu.

Along the way, we hope that others will follow our lead and open source their software, but we intend to lead by example, not force-feed the industry. Google, for example, is arguably putting more pressure on Microsoft's closed-source approach than any amount of lobbying ever has or will. You can argue that Google is only doing this out of self-interest, to which I reply, "Exactly." Once the industry recognizes its self-interest in open sourcing software, we'll have even more from which to choose.

I love great software, whatever its license. But I joined Canonical because I believe the open-source development model can create better software than closed alternatives, and I'm determined to prove that.

Enterprise versus desktop emphasis
by eldavojohn (898314) "You used to write a lot about desktop Linux distributions but now that you're COO of Canonical, the revenue comes most from enterprise support. Do you plan on trying to change that or maintain any value in pleasing the at home Ubuntu user? Your blog post talks about your kids achieving basic tasks with Ubuntu, will you still keep them in mind despite the fact your new employer doesn't see a dime from them? Any plans to make it more user friendly or make it more mainstream and less server room?"
Matt: Actually, the majority of Canonical's revenue does not derive from providing support to enterprises, though I of course hope and expect us to continue to grow that area of our business. Our revenue will be a mix of making Ubuntu available to everyone on a wide range of hardware, from selling services direct to users (e.g., Ubuntu One), enabling hardware manufacturers to deliver a solid, supported Ubuntu experience on a wide range of devices, and from selling support and other services to enterprise IT.

Our market opportunity derives from Ubuntu's global user community, but it's a matter of making money with or around that community, not from it. All sorts of business opportunities are possible once a platform becomes ubiquitous, which business opportunities don't depend on charging users for the right to use that platform. That's a 20th-century model that we eschew.

So, yes, you'll see Canonical putting a great deal of effort into making the Linux experience even more user friendly: the more users, the better our revenue opportunities from ancillary services. It's in our interest to have millions upon millions of people happily running Ubuntu, and our unwavering focus is on improving the usability and design of Ubuntu to ensure that they do just that.

Ubuntu and KDE and GNOME
by Enderandrew (866215) "I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrudge people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?"
Matt: I'm new to the Ubuntu party, but I believe we already do this with Kubuntu. No?

Ubuntu and KDE and GNOME (cont.)
by Anonymous Coward "More importantly, we see GNOME falling further and further behind KDE. We need to know exactly when Matt will be pushing for GNOME to be deprecated in favor of KDE (or even XFCE). He really doesn't have a choice; GNOME needs to go, and it needs to go very soon. We're seeing the GNOME community fragmenting, and quite badly. Some people still advocate using C, others are saying that Mono is the way to go. And yet others are pushing for Vala. Frankly, the internal strife will tear the GNOME project apart, much like happened to XFree86. I, for one, sure hope that Ubuntu has moved away from GNOME far before then."
by Enderandrew (866215) "I think Ubuntu is actively hurting the KDE community by giving it a bad name. When Canonical works on new features for each Ubuntu release, they work independently of the Kubuntu team. Kubuntu is constantly trying to play catch-up on base issues. Even worse, they [Ubuntu] put out unstable, buggy, and sometimes flat-out broken KDE packages. Almost every I've talked to that has had really bad experiences with KDE complain about bugs and constant crashes they had when testing KDE packages from Ubuntu. Read KDE forums, mailing lists, etc. You'll see some serious hate and vitriol from users who blame KDE devs... They don't realize it is their distro that is causing their problems. I've seen several KDE devs walk away and stop contributing because of all the hate they're getting. If Ubuntu wasn't putting out broken packages, it would remove a lot of this backlash. That is not to say that 100% of KDE backlash is Ubuntu-created. ... But Ubuntu certainly hasn't done KDE any favors the past two years with the packages they've put out."
Matt: I remember my first taste of the KDE/Gnome divide when I was involved in the Linux Business Office at Novell. It was fractious then and, judging from your "question," it remains so. I don't want to add to this rancorous debate, but do hope you'll continue to talk actively and openly with Canonical and the Ubuntu community to ensure your views are heard and the Ubuntu distribution remains one that you will enjoy using.

Quality control
by davidm2005 (1453017) "I have been using Ubuntu as a software developer for the past several years. I have been extremely disappointed with the most recent release of Ubuntu, 9.10, as it has been extremely buggy and seems like a step backwards. The conclusion of this review also expresses a lot of my thoughts about Ubuntu 9.10. I had so many problems in using 9.10, that did NOT exist in 9.04, that I switched one of the two computers I use at work to Windows 7, for stability (yes, these are crazy days). Do you have any plans to increase quality control in Ubuntu, even if it comes at the cost of delaying the every-six-month release schedule?"
Matt: We are not complacent about bugs or quality. Far from it. In fact, I've been surprised by the level of attention it gets within the company.

You can criticize Canonical and Ubuntu for many things, but the work of the engineers and community in making an incredible operating system for servers and desktops on a huge array of hardware available for free to all is not one of them.

Every release of Ubuntu gets more users and is used on a wider choice of hardware. This creates complexity. Making an operating system entirely independent of the hardware that it is run on is hard and it's harder again when you are trying to push the performance of that product with each release.

As for Ubuntu 9.10, I've heard people call it a buggy release but that has not been my personal experience, and it's an accusation that the data do not support. Yes, we're constantly trying to improve, as Canonical CTO Matt Zimmerman calls out. But I look at this as a very good problem to have.

Why?

Because it's a symptom of a very positive thing: growth. There are more users using Ubuntu on more hardware than any previous release. Millions upon millions of users. Importantly, with our hardware partners we are providing certified, pre-installed, and supported Ubuntu on an ever-widening array of hardware. Dell's XPS 13 is just one awesome example.

For those who prefer to go off the beaten track and install Ubuntu on alternative hardware, as I did recently with a ThinkPad X200s, there may be some manual labor involved, just as there would be if you were running Windows or Mac OS X on unsupported hardware. In my personal experience, however, everything "just works." I've yet to have a single problem. Coming from a former Mac user (motto: two buttons are too hard - just give me one button on my mouse! :-), that's high praise.

Quality control (cont.)
by bcrowell (177657) I've been using ubuntu since edgy eft, and I'm really dismayed by the quality of jaunty and (especially) karmic. The biggest issue is that sound, which worked for me in edgy through intrepid, started working poorly in jaunty, and is now essentially completely broken for me in karmic. I've spent a lot of time surfing ubuntuforms.org, collecting information, trying to write useful and well documented bug reports, etc. But the upshot is that there have been major, major regressions in sound for me.
Matt: I'm sorry to hear that (no pun intended). But see my response above.

Is there a time to fork?
by nine-times (778537) "I've been thinking about the relative lack of success of Linux on the desktop lately. By 'relative lack of success' I don't mean to bash the quality of Linux, but only that it doesn't seem to be very widely used in spite of being pretty good for a lot of purposes. So first, to what do you attribute the relative lack of success, and what plans do you have, if any, to do something about it. It seems to me that a fair amount of the problem isn't the OS itself, but the associate applications. For example, lots of people have complained about GIMP for reasons ranging from lack of specific functionality to an unconventional UI, and even to the awkward connotations of the name 'GIMP.' Even having personally gotten some graphic designers to try the GIMP, I have yet to know any professional designers who find it adequate. I'd like to use Linux, but don't find I can come close replicating an equivalent workflow to what I have available using tools like Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, and Sound Forge. (those are the applications I'm personally stuck with, though I'm sure other people have other applications on their personal lists.)"
Matt: As to the relative lack of market share, it comes down to inertia. I didn't give the Linux desktop much attention until I joined Canonical. I had used it off and on over the years, but there was never a compelling reason to change.

Now that I've switched, I'm surprised by how much my ignorance of desktop Linux was coloring my opinion of it. I've been using it as my dedicated OS for three weeks, and have had only one (minor) reason to revisit my old Mac machine. I simply haven't missed it, and I thought that I would struggle.

Until someone has a compelling reason to shift, however, they're unlikely to discover this. For those picking up new machines, for example, a low-cost netbook, they won't have to overcome this inertia. Email, Internet, IM, etc. all work just as well on Linux as they do on Windows or the Mac. These are the applications we spend 99.9999% of our days in (most of us, anyway). As a result, I think we'll start to see barriers come down.

The irony in this is that these application incompatibility concerns are the exact same ones I had when I started using a Mac in 2002. Years later, application support on the Mac is much better, though still not at the same level as Windows. And yet 99 percent of the time it doesn't matter, just as it doesn't on Linux. As more applications move to the Web and as application developers improve their support for Linux (a trend I've noticed happening), it will matter even less.

In the interim, if you are happy to pay for and need these specific Windows-only applications then Windows is probably the right OS for you. Microsoft Office, however, is not a compelling reason to keep paying the Windows tax for many people. It's one of those applications that we think we use more than we actually do, and which OpenOffice (or Google Docs, if you wish) more than adequately handles.

We would love Creative Suite to be available for Linux but the open source or web-based alternatives are satisfactory for many users.

Mobile platform plans
by abhikhurana (325468) "What are Canonical's plans for mobile platforms? With Maemo, another Debian based distro, now available for smartphones, would Canonical also get involved with either that or maybe develop a completely new Distro? With the desktop Linux market being extremely small and server markets being dominated by Red Hat and Novell, mobiles probably are the sweet spot for Canonical, with its strong focus on usability. Additionally, the lack of standardization means that users are more willing to experiment with interfaces. So what is the relative priority of Mobile, Netbook, Desktop and Server platform in Canonical's roadmap?"
Matt: Mobile is a top priority for Canonical, especially as it looks less and less like the traditional embedded market and more and more like a general-purpose OS market. That's our sweet spot, and given our concern for and expertise in user interface design, we will be leaders in this market.

We will do a lot of work on ARM and Intel platforms this year that will see Ubuntu popping up all over the the computing landscape. Ubuntu is a platform: it is not a desktop product or a server product or a mobile product. So where there is a requirement for an OS you will find Ubuntu. You'd be surprised by the kinds of devices you already own that run Ubuntu today.

An anonymous reader writes "A quick update on the widespread PlayStation 3 glitch we discussed recently: as of last night (Monday, March 1st) the problem has resolved itself. I powered up my PS3 to find the clock was set to April 29th, 2020, but once I went into the system menu and set the date and time via the internet I got an accurate date. That seems to be the test of whether your PS3 is 'fixed' or not; Sony says you should be all set."

eldavojohn writes "Taiwanese HTC is being sued by Apple for 20 patents regarding the many phones HTC manufactures. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying, 'We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.' Apple has similar patent litigation with Nokia and may be trying to scare the rest of the industry into licensing patents similar to the Microsoft-Novell and Microsoft-Amazon deals regarding patents covering Linux functionality."

eldavojohn writes "Taiwanese HTC is being sued by Apple for 20 patents regarding the many phones HTC manufactures. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying, 'We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.' Apple has similar patent litigation with Nokia and may be trying to scare the rest of the industry into licensing patents similar to the Microsoft-Novell and Microsoft-Amazon deals regarding patents covering Linux functionality."

An anonymous reader writes "On the heels of the earlier leak of various country positions on ACTA transparency, today an even bigger leak has hit the Internet. A new European Union document [PDF] prepared several weeks ago canvasses the Internet and Civil Enforcement chapters, disclosing in complete detail the proposals from the US, and the counter-proposals from the EU, Japan, and other ACTA participants. The 44-page document also highlights specific concerns of individual countries on a wide range of issues including ISP liability, anti-circumvention rules, and the scope of the treaty. This is probably the most significant leak to date since it goes beyond the transparency debate to include specific country positions and proposals."

brothke writes "In aviation today, technically advanced airplanes present a unique paradox. Technically advanced airplanes, in theory, have more available safety, and the outcome should be that there are fewer accidents. But without proper training for their pilots, they could be less safe than airplanes with less available safety. The FAA found that without proper training for the pilots who fly them, technically advanced airplanes don't advance safety at all. The reason is that technically advanced airplanes present challenges that under-prepared pilots might not be equipped to handle." Read on for the rest of the review. Human Factors in the Design and Evaluation of Central Control Room Operations author Neville Stanton, Paul Salmon, Daniel Jenkins, Guy Walker pages 446 publisher CRC Press rating 10/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-1439809914 summary Invaluable reference that can be used for the design, assessment, evaluation an operations of NOCs and SOCs In the IT world, staff members are often expected to install, configure, maintain and support technically advanced software. Companies often buy huge infrastructure software, such as CRM, ERP, PKI, identify management, intrusion detection and more, without first understanding how to make them work in their complex environment. Management often is oblivious to the fact that just because they can buy and install the software that it will not work on its own. The reason why so many large software deployments fail miserably is that the IT staff often doesn't have the proper training, support and assistance that they need.

Human Factors in the Design and Evaluation of Central Control Room Operations is a fantastic book that shows what it takes to ensure support staff work and operate together, in a formal and efficient manner. The book integrates the topics of human factors and ergonomics to create an incredibly valuable tome. The book details the interactions between people and their working environment, and shows in depth how the work environment can and must be designed to reduce errors, improve performance, improve the quality of work, and increase the work satisfaction of the workers themselves.

While the book was written primarily for control room settings, it is relevant for those in IT if they have any involvement in remote support, security operation centers (SOC) and network operation centers (NOC).

While the book is of value to anyone involved in operation, those who will find the most value are those charged with the management and operations or large groups or operations. If they have management support to deploy the formal methods detailed in the book, they will find that they can create significantly higher levels of customer and end-user satisfaction.

The authors note that all SOC and NOC's have a common feature in that the people operating them are often remote from the processes that they are monitoring and controlling, and the operations function on a 24/7 basis. The many demands of remote and continuous operation place special considerations on the design of the SOC and NOC. The output of the book is that it can be used to effectively to design these operating centers.

The books presents a comprehensive and all-inclusive on the topic of human factors on the following 14 topics: competencies, training, procedures, communications, workload, automation, supervision, shift patterns, control room layout, SCADA interfaces, alarms, control room environment, human error, and safety culture. Each chapter includes extensive diagrams and flowcharts to show how the processes develop.

The book also provides a highly analytical approach to each topic. It details the required processes and procedures necessary to make each subject area work. The book is not only based on the four author's expertise; they quote heavily from other experts and their research.

Chapter 2 opens with the observation that the safe and efficient operation of operating centers and control rooms is dependent upon the competence of the operators working within them. It details how to create competence assessments to ensure that staff is capable of carrying out their tasks safely and efficiently by assessing their skills and knowledge. The authors stress that it is not acceptable for organizations to assume that their staff are competent based on only their exposure to training and experience. They suggest that organizations create a program to determine those competence levels.

Chapter 3 goes into detail about how to create effective training programs to ensure worker competence. The benefit of a trained worked is that they can yield higher productivity and provide better service. Well-trained workers often have better morale and produce less errors. The chapter details the importance of a training needs analysis to properly determine what needs to be in the curriculum.

Chapter 4 is on procedures and is particularly important to those working in a SOC or NOC. If consistent and repeatable procedures are created, staff can provide much a more effective and dependable levels of service. Even with the benefits of well crafted procedures, its development process is a complex one involving the identification of all of the tasks that require procedures, a judgment on the level of assistance required, identification of the type or format of procedure required, writing and reviewing the procedures, and obtaining approval for them.

The importance of procedures is underscored when the book notes research that 70% of accidents and incidents within the nuclear power companies occurred when workers failed to properly follow procedures. In the petrochemical industry, 27% of incidents were caused by situations for which there were inadequate or no procedures available.

The percentage of failed IT projects and large software rollout catastrophes is both staggering and appalling. No other sector but IT would tolerate such failures. A book like as Human Factors in the Design and Evaluation of Central Control Room Operations goes a long way to stop that. The book is a rare one in that it both provides all of the factors involved in the problem at hand, and then provides all of the details needed to obviate those problems.

Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.

You can purchase Human Factors in the Design and Evaluation of Central Control Room Operations from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

brothke writes "In aviation today, technically advanced airplanes present a unique paradox. Technically advanced airplanes, in theory, have more available safety, and the outcome should be that there are fewer accidents. But without proper training for their pilots, they could be less safe than airplanes with less available safety. The FAA found that without proper training for the pilots who fly them, technically advanced airplanes don't advance safety at all. The reason is that technically advanced airplanes present challenges that under-prepared pilots might not be equipped to handle." Read on for the rest of the review. Human Factors in the Design and Evaluation of Central Control Room Operations author Neville Stanton, Paul Salmon, Daniel Jenkins, Guy Walker pages 446 publisher CRC Press rating 10/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-1439809914 summary Invaluable reference that can be used for the design, assessment, evaluation an operations of NOCs and SOCs In the IT world, staff members are often expected to install, configure, maintain and support technically advanced software. Companies often buy huge infrastructure software, such as CRM, ERP, PKI, identify management, intrusion detection and more, without first understanding how to make them work in their complex environment. Management often is oblivious to the fact that just because they can buy and install the software that it will not work on its own. The reason why so many large software deployments fail miserably is that the IT staff often doesn't have the proper training, support and assistance that they need.

Human Factors in the Design and Evaluation of Central Control Room Operations is a fantastic book that shows what it takes to ensure support staff work and operate together, in a formal and efficient manner. The book integrates the topics of human factors and ergonomics to create an incredibly valuable tome. The book details the interactions between people and their working environment, and shows in depth how the work environment can and must be designed to reduce errors, improve performance, improve the quality of work, and increase the work satisfaction of the workers themselves.

While the book was written primarily for control room settings, it is relevant for those in IT if they have any involvement in remote support, security operation centers (SOC) and network operation centers (NOC).

While the book is of value to anyone involved in operation, those who will find the most value are those charged with the management and operations or large groups or operations. If they have management support to deploy the formal methods detailed in the book, they will find that they can create significantly higher levels of customer and end-user satisfaction.

The authors note that all SOC and NOC's have a common feature in that the people operating them are often remote from the processes that they are monitoring and controlling, and the operations function on a 24/7 basis. The many demands of remote and continuous operation place special considerations on the design of the SOC and NOC. The output of the book is that it can be used to effectively to design these operating centers.

The books presents a comprehensive and all-inclusive on the topic of human factors on the following 14 topics: competencies, training, procedures, communications, workload, automation, supervision, shift patterns, control room layout, SCADA interfaces, alarms, control room environment, human error, and safety culture. Each chapter includes extensive diagrams and flowcharts to show how the processes develop.

The book also provides a highly analytical approach to each topic. It details the required processes and procedures necessary to make each subject area work. The book is not only based on the four author's expertise; they quote heavily from other experts and their research.

Chapter 2 opens with the observation that the safe and efficient operation of operating centers and control rooms is dependent upon the competence of the operators working within them. It details how to create competence assessments to ensure that staff is capable of carrying out their tasks safely and efficiently by assessing their skills and knowledge. The authors stress that it is not acceptable for organizations to assume that their staff are competent based on only their exposure to training and experience. They suggest that organizations create a program to determine those competence levels.

Chapter 3 goes into detail about how to create effective training programs to ensure worker competence. The benefit of a trained worked is that they can yield higher productivity and provide better service. Well-trained workers often have better morale and produce less errors. The chapter details the importance of a training needs analysis to properly determine what needs to be in the curriculum.

Chapter 4 is on procedures and is particularly important to those working in a SOC or NOC. If consistent and repeatable procedures are created, staff can provide much a more effective and dependable levels of service. Even with the benefits of well crafted procedures, its development process is a complex one involving the identification of all of the tasks that require procedures, a judgment on the level of assistance required, identification of the type or format of procedure required, writing and reviewing the procedures, and obtaining approval for them.

The importance of procedures is underscored when the book notes research that 70% of accidents and incidents within the nuclear power companies occurred when workers failed to properly follow procedures. In the petrochemical industry, 27% of incidents were caused by situations for which there were inadequate or no procedures available.

The percentage of failed IT projects and large software rollout catastrophes is both staggering and appalling. No other sector but IT would tolerate such failures. A book like as Human Factors in the Design and Evaluation of Central Control Room Operations goes a long way to stop that. The book is a rare one in that it both provides all of the factors involved in the problem at hand, and then provides all of the details needed to obviate those problems.

Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.

You can purchase Human Factors in the Design and Evaluation of Central Control Room Operations from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Hugh Pickens writes in with an update on the warnings we discussed a year back about the dangers of a "solar Katrina." Now NPR is reporting on a tabletop exercise mounted in Boulder, Colorado by government workers attempting to model the effects of a worst-case solar electromagnetic storm. "...an exercise held in Boulder, Colorado, has investigated what might happen if the Earth were struck by a solar storm as intense as the huge storms that occurred in 1921 and 1859 — a sort of solar Katrina — and researchers found that the impact is likely to be far worse than in previous solar storms because of our growing dependence on satellites and other electronic devices that are vulnerable to electromagnetic radiation. 'In many ways, the impact of a major solar storm resembles that of a hurricane or an earthquake,' says FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, except that a solar Katrina would cause damage in a much larger area — power could be knocked out almost simultaneously in countries from Sweden to Canada and the US. In the exercise, the first sign of trouble came when radiation began disrupting radio signals and GPS devices, says Tom Bogdan, who directs the Space Weather Prediction Center. Ten or 20 minutes later electrically charged particles 'basically took out' most of the commercial satellites that transmit telephone conversations, TV shows, and huge amounts of data we depend on in our daily lives. But the worst damage came nearly a day later, when the solar storm began to induce electrical currents in high voltage power lines strong enough to destroy transformers around the globe, leaving millions of people in northern latitudes without power."

strredwolf writes "Caltech has released a flexible solar array that converts 95% of single-wavelength incandescent light and 86% of all sunlight into electricity. Instead of being flat-panel, they stand thin silicon wires in a plastic substrate that scatters the light onto them. The total composition is 98% plastic, 2% wire — the amount of silicon used is 1/50th that of ordinary panels. So as soon as they can get these to market, solar could be very viable and cheap to produce." Update: 03/01 21:02 GMT by KD : Reader axelrosen points out evidence that the 80%+ efficiency figure is wrong. MIT's Tech Review, in covering the Caltech announcement, says that the new panel's efficiency is in the 15%-20% range — which is competitive with the current state of the art. And the Caltech panel should be far cheaper to manufacture.