Slashdot Mirror

It appears that the European Parliment is going to attempt to investigae Echelon, the somewhat mystical eavesdropping entity that is supposed to be able to listen to all Continental communications. This article gives a great amount of detail about what it is alleged to be, but apparently it's run by five security agencies, including the NSA, and can intercept almost anything. I'd love to have this rig at home. updated Die Zeit has an article in German about an alleged abuse of Echelon: a german company invented a more efficient method of generating ecologically friendly energy. To their surprise an american company claimed it to be their invention and sued them. German TV (ARD's plusminus) has shown a lot of evidence that the NSA got the information via Echelon and then gave it to the US company. Recall that Germany is not part of Echelon. At the end of the article, they even claim that Intel may be building a back door into its latest processors. (sengan)

mattdm writes "Wired News has a new article on Lego Mindstorms -- specifically on what hackers are doing to improve the thing. Check it out -- geek toys are good!" Mommy? For Christmas, I want Lego Mindstorm with a Linux interface. My favorite comment in the article is that half of the sets were sold for adults.

Much like the Salon article yesterday, Wired News has a brand-spanking-new article about the growth of political oriented hacking. The background-particularly the Zapatistas bow-shows a politically savvy backdrop. I suspect this type of activity is only going to get bigger, particularly given the growth of the multi/trans-nationals and subversion of democracy in many places.

Much like the Salon article yesterday, Wired News has a brand-spanking-new article about the growth of political oriented hacking. The background-particularly the Zapatistas bow-shows a politically savvy backdrop. I suspect this type of activity is only going to get bigger, particularly given the growth of the multi/trans-nationals and subversion of democracy in many places.

Tim Funk writes "Here is an article from Wired about a way to look at planets in other solar systems. In the past, the light from a star was too bright to get a glimpse of the planet. The solution: use two telescopes and interference. "

Lisa wrote in to send us a link to a wired article about some new intel stuff which allows an office to use telephone lines to create a LAN with little hassle. We've seen this stuff before, but now apparently Intel is in the game. No notes on how much bandwidth they can squeeze out of the copper.

We have a batch of strange stuff tonight kids. First Patrik Grip-Jansson wrote in to send us this story where you can read about frozen dog poop being used for DNA testing. Hell. It's friday. bluGill sent us a link to this page full of jpegs of messy equipment. I'm not sure why I'm posting it, except that its much more interesting than the Next story: Ed wrote in to send us a nice quick mirror of the Starr Report. Every site on the net has this as front page news, I guess the least I can do is post it as a quickie :) Finally rise wrote in to send us an entertaing cartoon featuring penguins.

Samwise Gamgee sent us a link to a wired article about a company called TriStrata that claims to have unbreakable encryption. They don't really offer any tech details, but they do talk about the fact that the company has got John Atalla (creator of the security background for ATM machines) out of retirement to join them.

An anonymous reader submits that "Wired has another story on Kevin Mitnick. It's got a couple of laughable notes about the government (U.S. Attorney's office) and how computer-illiterate they are."

Ray Dassen writes "Wired reports, that the US president and the Irish Prime Minister digitally signed a a joint communiqué on e-commerce. Dare we hope politicians start understanding the basics of cryptography, and the right to privacy? "
Hopefully, but probably not. I think this will be a mainly symbolic thing, and that they are trying to reinforce the usage of digital sigs.

davie writes "According to a Wired story, the U.S. Not-for-export version of PGP 6.0 has already shown up on a British server--before the release was even announced. Kind of reminds me of that scene in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum's character says "Life will always find a way." Or something. " Hehe, I agree. Also, Lucky Green wrote in to let us know the new version has new features, such as "n-of-m secret sharing" and said Phil Zimmerman wanted a Linux port. He says you should "talk" with Phil if you're interested. I wonder how GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) is coming along...

Simon Carr writes "We've known about potential ice on the moon for a while now but it's looking like there's a lot more than expected. Cool. How long do you think it'll be before the first Starbucks opens up in the sea of tranquility? "

Kevin sent us a link to an early story about Quake III Arena. As you would expect, it will feature new multiplayer stuff and a new graphics engine to make everything prettier. And if id follows their pattern, we'll have a Linux port as well. To bad 1999 is a long way off.

Roberto Jung Drebes writes "This story from Wired News is pretty nice, not simply because Netscape had any profit, but because it had such profit after "changing the focus of its business to avoid direct competition with rival Microsoft". It's a good example for the open-source cause. "

Electronic Arts, long-time computer game maker will be buying Westwood, home of Dune II, and C&C. The deal splits Westwood from Virgin, their present owners. In other news, a small "e-media" consulting company has sent cease-and-desist letters to Ziff-Davis and IDG, for infringing on their trademarked name, e-media. I love watching big companies mess up.

Electronic Arts, long-time computer game maker will be buying Westwood, home of Dune II, and C&C. The deal splits Westwood from Virgin, their present owners. In other news, a small "e-media" consulting company has sent cease-and-desist letters to Ziff-Davis and IDG, for infringing on their trademarked name, e-media. I love watching big companies mess up.

Christopher Blizzard writes "There's an excellent article by Jon Katz from Wired about how the public is slowly revolting against "mainstream" media. I don't know about all of you but I know that I agree 100% with the contents of this editorial. "

Not really computer related, but just too darn cool to pass up. Stanford, with help from Lockheed Martin and NASA are actually going to test the Theory of Relavitivy, as best we can. The story actually contains a good amount of technical detail, but the gist is this: polished quartz balls, in gyroscopes, launched in a satallite and set spinning. To check their rotation, they have been coated with a superconducter that operates at about the temp. of liquid helium. From there, the box will detect the changes in the fields of the balls. Mmm...science in the morning.

Matt Sherer sent us a link to A Wired Article where you can read their take on the whole Open Source Apple OS thing that has been fluttering around for some time now. Mainly its based on the modest proposal piece that Don Yacktman sent us on Saturday.

Jeffrey Baker writes "HR 3888 has passed out of subcommittee and will be taken up by the full House Commerce Committee. This is the bill that includes the horrible "opt-out" legislation which would require the citizen to notify spammers that they don't want mail from them. Slashdot readers who don't like spam should write a letter to their representative on the House Commerce Committee "

dentinmud writes "The DOJ has forced Microsoft to handover the source code to Windows 95/98." Gosh, Caldera, DOJ--maybe they should just handing it out? Oh, wait...

Kevin sent us a link to this wired article where you can read about Al Gore supposedly planning to announce support for personal privacy in the digital age. Seems to me that he is getting ready for election time with this one, but if it means encryption laws become less stupid, I guess I'm for it.

Simon Janes wrote in to send us a story about John Hamre, US Deputy Secretary of Defense being quoted in wired as saying that no two companies have a "God-given right" to export American Encryption. Update The Wired Article that I was quoting changed to talk about Companies Exporting encryption instead of People Talking Privately. Thanks to the several folks who pointed out the change. It doesn't change much for me though, preventing encryption exporting is just dumb. All it does is make things a pain for us, it doesn't prevent them from having better encryption technology.

Chris Carlin writes "The strangely fascinating saga of OurFirstTime.com continues. This article from ZDNet has the site administrators' sides of the story. They claim it's not a hoax after all and the show (as it is) will go on. Their side is here. "
However, the strange, strange story continues on with later news: pabs writes "A cracker broke into the DNS server for OurFirstTime and redirected requests to Disney, then the page was deleted and replaced with a message explaining the scam and making fun of the page's creator. Last time I checked, OurFirstTime was still down. Read the Wired article here. "

Looks like it's time to clear out the quickies again! First, Erv Walter sent us a note about S.u.S.E releasing more X servers. Hmm. S.u.S.E...aren't they those guys who've been hitting us about 13,000 times/day recently? I wonder what kinda soa they drink over there...Next off, David Kindred wrote in to tell us ISE is releasing the source code to Eiffel under an open source license! Maybe I'll have to take a look at that language again. Finally, Promethus sent us a link to a Bill Joy interview. Bill is one legendary man - one of the cofounders of Sun, I believe. A very interesting interview.

Steven M. writes "Lucent has developed a complete CMOS imaging system-on-a-chip. Just add case and lens. The Science Daily site has a picture of the chip next to a quarter, while the Wired site discusses some of the ethical questions an imaging system this small (Lucent predicts their design could be used to make marble sized cameras) and cheap (they predict prices dropping as low as US$0.50 Fifty Cents!). The design is also very low power (predicted life of three hours from a 9v battery, while a standard CCD chip would get a predicted half hour life on the same battery), and has predicted used ranging from security/survellance cameras, to handheld cameras and built in desktop and laptop monitor cameras for video conferencing. "

sasha e. writes "Wired.com has a nice story on Avalon, making interesting points about Beowulf as the future of supercomputing. Nice bit of pro-Linux in there as well.. "

Chris Halsall writes "Microsoft has acknowledged a security vulnerability in its Office application suite that can potentially reveal sensitive data residing on a user's computer. "The bug reveals information that resides in a user's RAM and memory buffers -- such as user IDs and passwords -- when users save Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. To access the potentially sensitive information contained inside a document, a user simply has to open the file using a text-editing program such as BBEdit or Windows Notepad. Get more info here. " This is apparently true for the Mac as well, but because the Mac doesn't have OLE support, issuing a workaround will be even more difficult. Anyone know anything more on this?

Jeff Gehlbach writes "The Republican Party in Texas became the first state party officially to adopt an anti-spam stance as part of its platform by calling on Congress to extend the ban on junk faxes to include unsolicited commercial e-mail. "

Jouni K Seppänen wrote in to tell everyone that Lars Wirzenius typed in his speech from LinuxExpo. It was pretty cool and I'm sure many of you will enjoy it. Mircea Ciocan wrote in to tell us that the indestructable distribution has risen from ages of silence. We now have Slackware 3.5b2 online for those daring slackers willing to join in. I started with Slackware years ago, and Dave still prefers it. And I know he and the other diehards will be happy that it's still alive. Finally, for a laugh, ewjc wrote in to give us a link to This Wired Article about a nudist who allows access to her site for anyone, unless you have Microsoft affiliations. On one hand, It's a blatant PR stunt designed to cash in on the current tidal wave of anti MS feelings, on the other hand, it's free nudity! (Laugh! I'm kidding! Sheesh. I better go back to the homework before I try to be funny again *grin*.

tjones wrote in to tell us about wired article where you can discover that Lives Will Be Lost courtesy of the spread of strong encryption. It's amazing that these guys are running the show.

Scott Francis sent us a link to an article this Seattle Times Article where you can read about a company called Pixel, who apparently has some clever patent pending (grr) software that allows them to shrink the desktop, and put icon bars and stuff around the edges. I'm curious to see if it really works. Currently it is a win95 only technology, but if this really works, it could certainly be put to good use somewhere. arielb also sent us a similiar article from wired. And the MySpace Homepage claims that Mac and Unix versions are coming.

Alan Cox wrote in to tell us about A Wired Article on ICQ where you can read about the flaws in the system. Alan is quoted talking about his nifty icqsniff proggie, as well as several other comments about ICQ. Personally, I'm kinda surprised that anyone seriously considered ICQ secure to begin with, so I guess I'm not surprised by any of this.

Justin asked me to post a link to The Gnomemaker Page. Perfect for you windowmaker users interested in Gnome. Anand wrote in to tell us that "Tim Johnson has created an alternate, and possibly easier to navigate, interface to the Linux HOWTOs.." DX sent us a link to a Wired column on what it means to be a geek. Is wired the right place for this sort of forum? I suspect reading a weeks worth of comments here will answer questions better than a years worth there *smile* Lastly Jeff Davis wrote in to send us a link to The Gartner Group on Open Source. It's actually not a bad summary, but I question some of those probabilities.

Wired is currently carrying an interview with the Iowa AG, Tom Miller. Miller is part of the large group suing Microsoft for anti-trust violations. Interesting to read a first-hand account of the case.

Wired is currently carrying an interview with the Iowa AG, Tom Miller. Miller is part of the large group suing Microsoft for anti-trust violations. Interesting to read a first-hand account of the case.

Samuel M Bowles writes "The Senate has passed a bill entitled the "Murkowski/Torricelli rider" which much of the Internet community sees as a government endorsement of Spam. In response Mickey Chandler, a Texan paralegal and president of the Forum for Responsible and Ethical Email (FREE), is sponsoring the Pink Pages Project. A project very similar to the Green Ribbon campaign, but instead of a small ribbon web sites are turning a spamish pink to protest the new bill. Chandler says "If this amendment becomes law, it could make electronic mail virtually useless." For more information read Wired's article or check out FREE's pink-out page "

Andy Tai writes "According to this Wired story, InfiniteOS will be GPLed. After this story is leaked out at a site called slashdot.org ( :-) ), the owner of InfiniteOS quickly admitted mistakes and made the Right Choice. The GPL gains another convert. "

tjones wrote in to send us a This Wired Article about InterWeather (BLM's soon-to be open sourced web monitoring tool) and NetStat (which now will also soon be open source). I dig this because I think internet monitoring is one of the best places for Open Source to thrive... oh, and they mention a Slashdot in passing... linking through The Cursed WWW^TM *grin*.

Allright we've got a new mysql running. Hopefully things will be stable. Ooo, and older articles will be 'archived' soon (comments remaining intact). It's the last major code change before the Test Site. OK first off steven sent us a link to a Fortune 500 open source stuff Dr.Claw wrote in to tell us that Debian has gone into deep freeze on 2.0. Oh, and we were mentioned in wired yesterday as part of the whole J*va invaders thing. I didn't intend to make a big deal about it, I just wanted to tell everyone why they can't play Invaders anymore, but 2 hours after I post it I've got a phone call from 'em. Oh well.

The US Senate approved the hiking of the number of visas that can be allowed to foreign technical workers. Although this has been a stormy issue, it was approved with 78-20 margin, amid some controversy over whether this workers are needed or not.

Allright the news is just filled with stuff on TMS, so let's get them out of the way in a lump. Cappella wrote in to tell us that the SPA has denied MS a seat again. Tjl wrote in to send us this story where you can read that apparently Clinton is backing the DOJ on TMS. Static (aka Wade Bowmer) wrote in to send us a bird's eye view of MS's legal situation.

bdu sent us This Link where you can read a Wired article about putting a price on free software. They cover it pretty well, and actually mention Slashdot (linking with the cursed www *grin*)

Wired Ventures, Inc. has decided to sell their magazine Wired, the self-appointed techno-lifestlye magazine, to Advanced Magazine Publishers, Inc. Analysts estimate the deal is valued at about US$75-80 million dollars. I personally never liked Wired, but I think it's interesting to read the opposing view.

Wired Ventures, Inc. has decided to sell their magazine Wired, the self-appointed techno-lifestlye magazine, to Advanced Magazine Publishers, Inc. Analysts estimate the deal is valued at about US$75-80 million dollars. I personally never liked Wired, but I think it's interesting to read the opposing view.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
reviewed by hemos

Acknowledged as one of the best young writers, Douglas Coupland earns his accolades in his fantastic book, Microserfs. Originally published as an except in Wired the original was so well written, and so believable that many people thought the story was a true one. And, in a sense, it is. As Alan Moore once wrote: "All stories are true." That is true for Coupland's works in particular. Part real-life, part creation, the stories are blended together in such a way that you believe it to be true--that it almost has to be true.

The story moves from working at Microsoft in Redmond to the excruciating agonies of making a startup company are all feelings that all resonant true. The beauty of Coupland's writings are that he makes people that we understand, and that we identify with In Microserfs whether it be the oddly obsessive nature of Bug, the human credentials of Daniel (the main character) or the genius of Michael, you can find people that you feel are you. That is rare--but Coupland has shown an amazing ability to understand people. He is the man who popularized the phrase Generation X in one of his earlier novels, although its meaning has shifted. Like the term or not, Coupland displays an unparalleled ability in making things not only clear intellectually, but making it feel like you are part of it.

That is probably what I loved most about Microserfs; the feeling of belonging. When the story is finished you understand, and want more. Reading some of the comments about the book at Amazon, I think the comment "The book IS me" is the most telling of them all. You want to be there, be part of it, and Coupland can make you feel that you are. Check out Microserfs for sale at Amazon.com.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
reviewed by hemos

Acknowledged as one of the best young writers, Douglas Coupland earns his accolades in his fantastic book, Microserfs. Originally published as an except in Wired the original was so well written, and so believable that many people thought the story was a true one. And, in a sense, it is. As Alan Moore once wrote: "All stories are true." That is true for Coupland's works in particular. Part real-life, part creation, the stories are blended together in such a way that you believe it to be true--that it almost has to be true.

The story moves from working at Microsoft in Redmond to the excruciating agonies of making a startup company are all feelings that all resonant true. The beauty of Coupland's writings are that he makes people that we understand, and that we identify with In Microserfs whether it be the oddly obsessive nature of Bug, the human credentials of Daniel (the main character) or the genius of Michael, you can find people that you feel are you. That is rare--but Coupland has shown an amazing ability to understand people. He is the man who popularized the phrase Generation X in one of his earlier novels, although its meaning has shifted. Like the term or not, Coupland displays an unparalleled ability in making things not only clear intellectually, but making it feel like you are part of it.

That is probably what I loved most about Microserfs; the feeling of belonging. When the story is finished you understand, and want more. Reading some of the comments about the book at Amazon, I think the comment "The book IS me" is the most telling of them all. You want to be there, be part of it, and Coupland can make you feel that you are. Check out Microserfs for sale at Amazon.com.

Lars Larsen writes "Novell has released the results of a study that shows that spam costs British and Irish businesses more than US$8 billion annually. They claim their email software will solve the spam problem but the really amusing part is that Novell's mail servers are open relays. You can read more about it here. "

Dewb via Shro0m writes in to tell us about This Wired Story where you can read about the next generation of RealNetworks net streaming products. There are several interesting comments about Real's new stuff, especially compared to the comparable offerings from Microsoft.

Jason Murray writes " Wired has an article that talks about a free Java OS. They say it openly developed and freely distributed." I'm amazed by how much People are still hammering on this JavaOS thing. Anyway the article talks a bit about BeOS and Linux as well. It's worth a skim.