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Yes, this is the University of Washington Dave Dittrich behind the software the FBI is trying to get you to use to help find the people doing the massive DoS attacks that have made headlines all over the place. Learn more about Dave and check out the info about the current brou-hah-hah on his home page, then ask away. We'll send the 10 - 15 highest-moderated questions to Dave Friday evening, and post his answers as soon as he can get them to us in between answering questions from mainstream media types who, as you can imagine, are all over him right now.

Alex Prestin writes, "In an effort to control the recent distributed Denial of Service attacks which everyone's heard about, the FBI has released Linux and Solaris tools to detect the presence (or absence) of the various DDoS daemons. They're available in binary form only (for now). You can get them here." Quote from the page: "Recipients are asked to report significant or suspected criminal activity to their local FBI office." Update: 02/10 07:37 by H :Here's some more information:The author of the DDoS analyses (at staff.washington.edu/dittrich) has released a network scanner to scan for active agents on your network. It includes source, and is available here. PLEASE use it responsibly.

neal writes "Fortune has an article that selects Linus as one of the'people' to watch in 2000! " Just another sign of the recognition that Linux and Open Source as a whole has garnered over the last eighteen months or so. Here's to 2000 being even better than 1999.

coaxial writes: "At SuperComputing '99, the fastest network in the world, 2.4 gigabits, was built between the University of Washington and Microsoft's Redmond campus thanks to the DARPA-sponsored National Transparent Optical Network (NTON), the university's Pacific/Northwest Gigapop, and Nortel. You can read all about it from the NCSA now apart of The Alliance . " Cool, MP3's and DECSS'd DVD movies at the speed of the light.

thrig writes "I was wondering the feasibility of setting up an "Orwellian Clock," similar to the "Armageddon Clock" which arrived shortly after Nuclear Devices showed up on the scene. That way, eroded rights could be tracked, as we (possibly) march towards the vision set forth in 1984... " I like it. Considering that none - none - of the U.S. Presidential candidates are running on any sort of liberty-enhancing platform, it's only going to get worse. The 12 o'clock position would, of course, be occupied by "1984". Anyone up to the challenge?

Dylan Greene writes "Tom's Hardware has a quick blurb on a color head-mounted display from Daeyang E&C HMD which says the company will start shipping their SVGA HMD in Q1 2000. Details on the HMD are here." Darnit. I really need one of these, need, of course, being a relative thing.

Dylan Greene wrote to us with a story talking about the possible suppresion of cold fusion research from those whom you would expect to. It might be inflamatory, but it's also interesting.

denmon writes "Seen on memepool: The HIT Lab has produced a virtual retinal display that paints a color VGA image directly on the retina using a low-power laser. They intend to miniaturize the components into a head-mounted display that will 'generate an inclusive, high resolution 3-D visual environment in a device the size of conventional eyeglasses'. Seems like Snow Crash gets closer every day... " Screw big flat screens, I want my interface right on my eyeball. Excellent.

denmon writes "Seen on memepool: The HIT Lab has produced a virtual retinal display that paints a color VGA image directly on the retina using a low-power laser. They intend to miniaturize the components into a head-mounted display that will 'generate an inclusive, high resolution 3-D visual environment in a device the size of conventional eyeglasses'. Seems like Snow Crash gets closer every day... " Screw big flat screens, I want my interface right on my eyeball. Excellent.

Jason C. Wells writes "FreeBSD, Inc. has released FreeBSD 3.1. Please read the release notes. You can install FreeBSD 3.1 by following the instructions. Have fun with it! "

Just after I went to bed, another 15 of you wrote in to say like Trey Harrison that Dave Tayor of Crack.com has accepted a job at Transmeta. It's in his plan today "I've just accepted a job with Transmeta. Thanks to all of those who sent me the great job leads."

George Greer writes "While idling doing a search for Transmeta on AltaVista, I came across the title "Recent Ph.D graduates". Naturally I was curious. On the page link they list the following people now working at Transmeta and their focus. Craig Anderson, ``Improving Performance of Bus Based Multiprocessors'', Autumn 1995. Advisor: Jean-Loup Baer. Current Employment: Transmeta, Inc., Santa Clara, CA. David Keppel, ``Runtime Code Generation'', Spring 1996. Advisor: Susan Eggers. Current Employment: Transmeta, Inc., Santa Clara, CA. Jack Lo, ``Exploiting Thread-Level Parallelism on Simultaneous Multithreaded Processors: Hardware and Software Techniques for Effectively Managing Shared Resources'', Spring 1998. Advisors: Susan Eggers and Hank Levy. Current Employment: Transmeta Corporation, Santa Clara, CA. As if there's any doubt left they're making a (really cool) processor. " Mmm...and based on what Linus said at Linux Expo, I think it's clear that they are headed toward SMP fun.

dirt writes "Uhh, it's about a penguin, therefore somehow related to the linux community. Something to peruse on dull weekends, funnier than hell if you've got "the Pokey gene". " I've read these. Dave read these. And frankly, we're very afraid. Anyway, I've had a stressful day and need something strange to offset it. This'll work. The Pokey Archives will bring a smile to most of ya.

It's finally here. The JVM for the PalmPilot. But this isn't just any virtual machine - it's a distributed virtual machine. This smells of geek. A bit big at over 180k, but I'm sure that won't stop us hardcore geeks from ripping it apart.
In related news, Tim Wilkinson wrote in to tell us his company, Transvirtual, has released the first beta of Kaffe, an open source JVM for a load of platforms, including Linux. It is a full Java system, and it even does threads! Check out Transvirtual's site for more.

Rogers Cadenhead writes "On Wednesday, the University of Washington released Pine 4.0 for Unix, the first integer release of the e-mail and news software since 3.0 appeared in 1992. The new version adds the ability to launch a Web browser from an e-mailed URL, some HTML rendering capabilities, improved MIME, and the strangely poetic feature "quell-partial-fetching." Upgrade now and tell your boss it's an Y2K fix that may quell food riots, electrical disasters, and perhaps even partial fetching. Pine's authors say that versions 3.96 and prior have a Y2K bug in their date-sorting routines that will cause sorting problems with the letters you receive come the middle of the 21st century. "

Rogers Cadenhead writes "On Wednesday, the University of Washington released Pine 4.0 for Unix, the first integer release of the e-mail and news software since 3.0 appeared in 1992. The new version adds the ability to launch a Web browser from an e-mailed URL, some HTML rendering capabilities, improved MIME, and the strangely poetic feature "quell-partial-fetching." Upgrade now and tell your boss it's an Y2K fix that may quell food riots, electrical disasters, and perhaps even partial fetching. Pine's authors say that versions 3.96 and prior have a Y2K bug in their date-sorting routines that will cause sorting problems with the letters you receive come the middle of the 21st century. "

Zach Fine writes "Looks like AT&T is not happy simply running "the world's largest, most powerful long-distance network in North America" and wants to delve further into the cable television and local phone service markets. So they're merging with media giant Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI)"

Jay Pederson sent me a link to Itsy over at the University of Washington. It's a link to a presentation about Itsy, a StrongARM based handheld. LCD Touchscreen, runs on AAA battaries @200MHz. And did I mention it supports Linux? Its only a prototype, but here's hopin'

Jay Pederson sent me a link to Itsy over at the University of Washington. It's a link to a presentation about Itsy, a StrongARM based handheld. LCD Touchscreen, runs on AAA battaries @200MHz. And did I mention it supports Linux? Its only a prototype, but here's hopin'

Jay Pederson sent me a link to Itsy over at the University of Washington. It's a link to a presentation about Itsy, a StrongARM based handheld. LCD Touchscreen, runs on AAA battaries @200MHz. And did I mention it supports Linux? Its only a prototype, but here's hopin'

Wow did I ever call it. Netscape announced this morning that they are going to GPL communicator 5. Check out this link and this one for more information on one of the biggest events in recent software history. Now let's hope the Free Software folks can prove that this is the future of software! Thanks to Phaedrus and James Baker for sending in the first of many links on the subject.