Slashdot Mirror

pjbass writes "This story on ZDnet discusses the next I/O subsystem planned for PC's. It will be PCI 3.0 once making it to the consumers, but it is now known as Arapahoe, or 3GIO. Intel Corp. is responsible for making the technology, and boast its performance will be about 6 times that of PCI2.x, getting up to speeds of 6.6 gigabytes per second of bandwidth initially, with promises to scale more once the technology is mainstream."

pjbass writes "This story on ZDnet discusses the next I/O subsystem planned for PC's. It will be PCI 3.0 once making it to the consumers, but it is now known as Arapahoe, or 3GIO. Intel Corp. is responsible for making the technology, and boast its performance will be about 6 times that of PCI2.x, getting up to speeds of 6.6 gigabytes per second of bandwidth initially, with promises to scale more once the technology is mainstream."

BenRussoUSA writes "In this ZDNet story . Brian Behlendorf of Apache, Jeremy Allison of SAMBA, Miguel de Icaza of Ximian and now MONO and Eric Allman of Sendmail are all quoted in a story regarding a nasty rumor. Microsoft may be planning to include a Microsoft patented technology at a crucial interoperability point in .NET and maybe the next version of CIFS. Could this spell the end of SAMBA?"

camusflage writes: "MSNBC has an article that says Representatives Rick Boucher and Chris Cannon are set to introduce legislation that will attempt to control how copyright law treats digital music, and how royalties for it are paid. Among the things the legislation is said to address is what constitutes archival and incidental copying, in-store samples, and 'extending the mechanical compulsory license to Internet file-swapping.' The article goes on to say that the RIAA previously indicated openness to the licensing, while publishers and songwriters oppose it." See also ZDNet or Reuters (this link is the best summary of the bill). And if you've got the stomach to wade through copyright law, read the bill itself. Keep in mind that introducing a bill is a long long way from making any changes in the law, and even this bill doesn't necessarily solve all of the current problems with copyright law.

More reason below on why not to eat the yellow links, as well as the ongoing interesting effects of the Sircam virus, and whatever happened to Linux in Mexican schools. (Answer: it didn't.) And please send some good news for next time.

... and you'll like it! LupusUF writes: "As everyone knows by now...Kazaa is using top text links Kazaa is using top text. But not only are they using them, they are badmouthing people who complain about them. When someone posted a complaint, a Kazaa moderator (Super_Harris) started out his reply by saying "How Dare You!" and then went on trying to explain why they are using top text. Another moderator makes some more poor excuses in the same thread. The same thread also has some very useful information about the spyware that kazaa has installed with the latest version (cydoor, Onflow, New.Net, WebHancer).

My advice would be to get ad-aware.

I hope Kazaa starts treating its users with more respect, and at least gets moderators that can answer questions without treating their users like idiots."

Sircam Sircam A quivering, cowardly reader wrote to point out that sensitive Ukranian government documents were apparently leaked by the Sircam virus. Even juicier than the steady stream of love notes, recipes, tax information, homework, bids and schedules that keeps flowing into my mailbox.

Don't look for much help from Microsoft on this, either, and hardly any from ISPs. Most of the ISPs I've contacted still claim not to have heard of Sircam, and say "it's not our responsibility." Email from Microsoft (after I cc'd them on a few of my virus alerts) equally disclaims responsibility. Funny how Sircam never made it to the front page of their site. Kudos to Charter Communications for calling customers to let them know they were infected -- and a pox on Prodigy for refusing to.

May the path of least resistance rise to meet you. Alec Muzzy writes: "Wired has a story about a failed plan to install Linux on computers for Mexican Schools in an effort to save money. Instead they have decided to run Windows, because Linux wouldn't run on their hardware. As they say, 'It was easier to go with Windows.'

Here's a perfect example of where the free cost of Linux should have been an advantage, yet they decided to go with Windows instead. Does this mean that the costs of running Linux are higher than the cost to purchase Windows?"

Overload128 writes "Over on ZDNet, there's an article detailing Intel's plan to let Rambus memory stand on its own. It seems that it will stop bundling RDRAM with Pentium 4s and stop giving rebates to OEMs that use P4s and RDRAM. They are also releasing a new chipset soon, called 845 that will support SDRAM (SDR) with DDR support for P4s not far down the line."

Overload128 writes "Over on ZDNet, there's an article detailing Intel's plan to let Rambus memory stand on its own. It seems that it will stop bundling RDRAM with Pentium 4s and stop giving rebates to OEMs that use P4s and RDRAM. They are also releasing a new chipset soon, called 845 that will support SDRAM (SDR) with DDR support for P4s not far down the line."

func writes with a rather strange situation: "Hey, my house was robbed, and they stole my computer, vcr, rc heli, and all my beer (!bastards!). But, on the positive side, the thief has been using the computer, and managed to infect himself with the Sircam virus. Now, some of my friends are getting virii sent to them by my stolen computer! Any way to track this guy via email, or even an ip or something stored in the virus code itself? And if I do find him, do I send the cops, or just my 6-foot-4, 260-lb ex-eastern-block buddy Radek?"

Since this virus' spread (cross fingers) seems to be slowing down a bit, this may take fast work. If you can reply with any suggestions for func, please include "Radek" or "Cops" in your subject line. (Just not the FBI.) Perhaps he could send a friendly letter to the thief offering free tech support?

Darkmeat writes: "Saw this on ZDNet. Looks like SQL Server was causing some problems in nuclear databases in Russia." Another similar story at Yahoo. This is a followup to this story detailing the problems.

Darkmeat writes: "Saw this on ZDNet. Looks like SQL Server was causing some problems in nuclear databases in Russia." Another similar story at Yahoo. This is a followup to this story detailing the problems.

Goldberg's Pants writes: "ZDNet and Wired are both reporting on a new virus that spreads via Outlook. Nothing particularly original there, except this virus is pretty unique both in how it operates, and what it does, such as emailing random documents from your harddrive to people in your address book, and hiding itself in the recycle bin which is rarely checked by virus scanners." I talked by phone with a user whose machine seemed determined to send me many megabytes of this virus 206k at a time; he was surprised to find that his machine was infected, as most people probably would be. The anti-virus makers have patches, if you are running an operating system which needs them.

At this moment, there's an office somewhere in Waggener Edstrom with its lights on and a fresh pot of coffee. Microsoft's PR firm is racking its brains working on strategy and tactics for their phone calls tomorrow. As of right now, hundreds of thousands of wormy Microsoft machines are throwing packets at the Bush White House (and missing -- see below). Bill Gates really, really doesn't want Sunday papers editorializing about how shoddy and dangerous his security flaws are. Will billg be the hero or the goat? Slashdot, in its fine tradition of laughing in the face of overworked netadmins, is running a contest. Walk a mile in Waggener Edstrom's shoes, predict the Times's headlines, and win yourself a T-shirt.

Waggener's goal is to minimize the PR damage that the worm will cause. This is potentially a very damaging story for them. Not so much because it underscores the dangers of an insecure, monocultural environment monopolizing our vital networks. Not even because of the embarrassing and ironic nature of the worm. More because it involves a hot button political topic -- Bush and, allegedly, China -- which the average reader will be interested in and might even almost understand.

So what's their battle plan?

Well, first Waggener will try to predict the yield. Our guesstimates as of right now, 11:36 PM EDT Thursday evening, are that it's a dud -- whitehouse.gov is still accessible and my IRC server hasn't gone down. This is probably because whitehouse.gov simply sidestepped its IP address (the stupid worm author hardcoded it instead of using DNS): White House dodges Web worm.

But at least 196,000 machines were infected. You'd think something would happen. Maybe a router will crash and Delaware will fall off the map. Who knows?

Second, Waggener will have an overall strategy. This might range from overhyping the potential danger ("turn off your computers! prepare for Armageddon! oh it didn't happen -- we saved you") to distraction with trivia ("we are pleased with the judges' verdict last week. look over there!"). How will the firm modify our reality?

Third, Waggener will use different approaches on different audiences. Reporters from different tech publications will talk to different handlers, and hear different things. Keep in mind which way these publications lean when you predict what their reactions will be.

Here's the contest. OSDN will be giving away four Slashdot T-shirts (or some other ThinkGeek shirt) to the four readers who most accurately predict newspaper headlines about the "Red Code" worm.

The newspapers of record we're using are the Washington Times and the New York Times. The categories are:

Headline on the Washington Times news story, Saturday morning
(label it: "WT News") Headline on the New York Times news story, Saturday morning
(label it: "NYT News") Title of the Washington Times editorial, Sunday morning
(label it: "WT Ed") Title of the New York Times editorial, Sunday morning
(label it: "NYT Ed")

Type up four guesses and submit them in a comment below. If your guess for any of the four is the closest in its category, you win a T-shirt!

For example, if our contest had been to predict headlines about global warming on July 19, and you'd said:

"WT News: Bush Visits Europe, Says Many Words Correctly
NYT News: Bush Promises Called Into Question
WT Ed: Good News on Global Warming
NYT Ed: Clueless on Global Warming"

...then you'd win, because you guessed the NYT editorial title correctly.

So put on your corporate-PR "spinning" caps, get out there and make us proud!

The Small Print:

1. Top headline only, you don't have to predict subheads or whatever.
2. In case of two stories/headlines, we pick the biggest one, our discretion.
3. Up to four guesses to a post, one for each headline (post early, post often, but slow down cowboy!).
4. One T-shirt to a person.
5. Ties go to the f1rst p0st.
6. No posts after the paper's out, of course (print or electronic, whichever's first) - first edition print is the goal.
7. No OSDN/VA Linux employees or relatives eligible.
8. You must either be logged in when you post or include one email address in your comment; email is how we'll contact you for your snail-mail address. Spamarmor it if you like, as long as we can read it.
9. If for some crazy, absurd reason one of the papers doesn't run a story/editorial about this at all, we'll go looking for a "similar" paper's story/editorial and pick its headline. We're thinking L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, that kind of thing. If the papers actually run stories today (Friday), well, darnit that wasn't much of a contest was it? We'll still look for editorials on Sunday.
10. All judges' judgments are final.

Indicating this ZDnet article, an Anonymous Coward writes: "Something I haven't seen mentioned before; XP will apparently drop Java support, not only for Java apps, but in the browser as well. XP users can still download and install Java seperately, but of course, how many will choose to do so?"

CBNobi writes: "CNet has an article (which is also located at ZDNet) describing this year's MP3.com Summit, held at San Diego, CA. Compared to last year's gathering, things seemed to settle down a lot. "There's no room for small companies to do big things anymore," said Michael Robertson, MP3.com's 34-year-old CEO." I liked the last sentence, which pretty much sums up the state of things - everything innovative in the music world has been crushed by lawsuits.

CBNobi writes: "CNet has an article (which is also located at ZDNet) describing this year's MP3.com Summit, held at San Diego, CA. Compared to last year's gathering, things seemed to settle down a lot. "There's no room for small companies to do big things anymore," said Michael Robertson, MP3.com's 34-year-old CEO." I liked the last sentence, which pretty much sums up the state of things - everything innovative in the music world has been crushed by lawsuits.

jeffy124 writes "ZDnet has an interesting article on how OpenOffice, Sun's Open-Source version of StarOffice, needs some serious help in being ported to the Macintosh OS-X. With Microsoft about to release Office 2001 for OS-X and demo it at next week's MacWorld Expo, support in getting a Mac OS-X port out for OpenOffice is critical to keeping a Microsoft dominance of yet another operating system's office suite to a minimum. The project is need of someone to step up to the plate as a project lead."

jeffy124 writes "ZDnet has an interesting article on how OpenOffice, Sun's Open-Source version of StarOffice, needs some serious help in being ported to the Macintosh OS-X. With Microsoft about to release Office 2001 for OS-X and demo it at next week's MacWorld Expo, support in getting a Mac OS-X port out for OpenOffice is critical to keeping a Microsoft dominance of yet another operating system's office suite to a minimum. The project is need of someone to step up to the plate as a project lead."

imipak writes: "Microsoft have finally commented on the recent seven day outage at their Messenger IM service -- some users have permanently lost data, and there's still no explanation of the cause. Interesting earlier story from CNet News. Key quote: "... an outage that lasts seven days with no valid explanation really starts to make you think about .Net, and about Microsoft's plans for the Internet. What if this were the new Office software verification service that was down?"" Here 's a story on MSNBC as well.

erroneus writes "There's been a lot of talk about pager spamming. I've got to hand it to the spammers. Their combination of low conscience and creativity makes them the continual annoyances they are today. But many people are charged for each page they recieve. " Update: 07/10 06:22 PM by H : I apologize to the people who were mislead about by the summary - I had assumed that it read one way, and did not. Here's a summary from nategasser: "...when in fact they're sending regular email offering an off-brand pager and calling it a Motorola."

jeffy124 writes: "ZDNet is reporting a story in which Ximian will announce on Monday a project dubbed "Mono" that will produce an open-source product to challenge Microsoft's .NET initiative."

jeffy124 writes: "ZDNet is reporting a story in which Ximian will announce on Monday a project dubbed "Mono" that will produce an open-source product to challenge Microsoft's .NET initiative."

The European Union is considering anti-trust action against Microsoft. The Wall Street Journal ran a column today about the Windows XP registration process, which is apparently news to a lot of people who don't read enough Slashdot. IBM says Microsoft is arrogant. Microsoft's XP Beta program is a little more open than they thought. And finally, and most amusingly, one of the threat letters being sent out by the BSA on behalf of Microsoft was sent to (wait for it...) OSDN. Okay, no more Microsoft submissions today, please.

MBCook writes: "This story at ZDNet seems to be an omen of things to come. It describes how Kodak discovered that when their software is installed on XP and someone plugs in a Kodak camera, Microsoft's software is always the one that comes up. The article also mentions that it is also quite a effort to make the Kodak software come up ever time." Yet another software maker finds that the maker of the OS gets first dibs...

MBCook writes: "This story at ZDNet seems to be an omen of things to come. It describes how Kodak discovered that when their software is installed on XP and someone plugs in a Kodak camera, Microsoft's software is always the one that comes up. The article also mentions that it is also quite a effort to make the Kodak software come up ever time." Yet another software maker finds that the maker of the OS gets first dibs...

jeffy124 writes: "As a followup to a previous Slashdot story, the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection has ruled against Acme Rent-A-Car in their practice of fining car renters $150 per speeding infraction. The decision was based on the fact that Acme failed to properly word their contracts when they indicated that fines would be imposed for speeding. Dept. Commisioner Jim Fleming also stated that the practice of renters being fined is illegal. However, the practice of tracking vehicles with GPS is still a legal practice."

afabbro writes "According to this study, people's password choices put them into four groups: "Family", "Fan", "Self-Obsessed", or "Cryptic". I'm sure we're all good Cryptics here...now if only my users would stop being "Family"." And then there's the category "Stupid" for the zillions who use "Trustno1", "Swordfish", and "Password",

Polar Pope writes "The Department of Defense has adopted Sun's Open Source productivity suite StarOffice (up to 25,000 units)." Honestly I don't see this as being that huge of a deal, but it sure is getting submitted a lot. Then again, 25k Linux boxes inside the DoD is cool.

Peterpan writes: "ZDNet reports that Infogrames is going to port their classic Atari games to J2ME-enabled mobile devices. The Japanese still are far beyond the rest of the world regarding such devices. BTW Infogrames also wants to become Atari! I have heard that the company has established ties with Amiga Inc, so we may see Atari games for Amiga powered devices!? I would love to see Turrican on a Zaurus PDA, Rainbow Arts where are you?! :)" There's also a BBC story.

gergi writes: "Running at the kernel level, Redhat's Tux 2.0 blew away Apache and IIS in webserving content according to this benchmark! Given the never-ending security flaws found in other webservers, has a major turning point in web server design come about?"

gergi writes: "Running at the kernel level, Redhat's Tux 2.0 blew away Apache and IIS in webserving content according to this benchmark! Given the never-ending security flaws found in other webservers, has a major turning point in web server design come about?"

A reader writes "There's a retest story on ZD-Net about an upgraded Apache system. Apache 1.3.19 running on a Red Hat Linux 7.1 system upgraded to the 2.4.5 kernel was able to process at peak throughput 4,602 Web requests per second. The last time eWEEK Labs did a big round of Web server benchmarking on Linux was two years ago this month, when we did a retest of Linux and Windows performance numbers as an audit of the Mindcraft Inc. tests. "

joq writes: "Big Brother is seeking to expand their wiretapping limits. 'An unresolved issue is how to handle packet data, a technology that was in its infancy when the law was written, but has since emerged as the leading method for transmitting voice and data. Communications companies carrying packet data have until Sept. 30 to demonstrate that their systems will permit law enforcement officials to conduct wiretaps.' The article concerns CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act), which has been highly criticized by EFF before, and is sure to be scrutinized again. I'm puzzled to know why the Feds are having companies test since it's as simple as getting a list of equipment a company uses then determining from that list whether or not it can be done."

Quite a few readers submitted news about a recent Gartner study which implies a far-lower-than-usually-supposed percentage of servers running GNU/Linux. Reader mfarver, for instance, writes: "Only 8.6 percent of servers shipped in 3rd quarter 2000 were running Linux, claims a recent Gartner Dataquest report. A previous study published by IDC estimated linux held about 24% of the server market share. Unsurprisingly the Gartner study was partially commissioned by Microsoft." Roblimo has penned an interesting piece up at NewsForge about why those numbers might smell a little funny. Hint: how many machines have you bought running any Free operating system from the get-go?

A few more stories about "Smart Tags" (see round 1 if you missed it) -- Liza writes: "According to Newsbytes, a new feature in IE 6.0, "Smart Tags," which inserts hyperlinks into pages so that users can get more information about a concept or company, could violate both copyright law and federal rules prohibiting deceptive and unfair business practices. Microsoft says site operators could insert a metatag disabling Smart Tags, so concerned publishers could avoid them. Interesting questions!" Meanwhile, ZDNet has a nice piece examining smart tags in action.

Oswald writes: "Over at ZDNet, John Dvorak reveals his thoughts on broadband. He makes some good points on his way to concluding that broadband may be a very long time supplanting low-bandwidth connections." DSL service to my house took too many months and five technical visits, and resulted in mangled service and work orders, haphazard billing,and an intermittent connection. Now the initial carrier has gone out of business, and I didn't feel like paying more for the replacement. Dvorak has a point, but for the 10 year picture, I'm optimistic for broad(er) band.

person-0.9a writes: "It seems that the ccTLD organization is very unhappy with how little they get from ICANN. They're so unhappy in fact that the ccTLD's have removed themselves from ICANN. Check out this article on zdnet for the full story."

OberonX writes: "Blockman Trading has released the alpha version of Runix, which is a working verion of Linux 2.4 kernel working with PS2. [ed. note: for the original Playstation, though they plan on porting to the PS2 also.] You can read an article about it at zdnet and you can download the 26MB file here. The final version is expected to be released by October while office software for PS1 is due by the end of the year. Pretty neat stuff..."

SilentChris writes: "A U.S. judge recently ruled that the FBI could obtain hackers' passwords and data, through the use of sniffer programs, despite the hackers being overseas. A couple of notes: the judge ruled the hackers should have had "no expectation of privacy" when they sat down to the (covert) FBI terminals, and the investigators needed a warrant to view the data -- but they didn't need one to copy it."

habit1 writes: "It seems that the big telecoms have gone and run cable across property without paying the rightful owners. These owners, mostly private landowners, are now part of a class action lawsuit which might not only result in a cash settlement, but a jointly owned corporation that owns some of the fiber itself. If you live next to the rails, you may get that fiber optic line quicker than you thought ..."

Several readers who declined identification have pointed out that this "article over at Interactive Week discusses J.S. Wurzler Underwriting Managers, one of the first companies to offer cracker insurance, charging clients 5 to 15 percent more if they use Microsoft Windows NT in their Internet operations. As insurance companies live and die by their statistics, this is a pretty significant move. The article also has interesting information about tech turn-over in Windows vs. open source shops." However, note that Wurzler is not the only company offering anti-cracking insurance, and the Big Names haven't yet followed this lead, even though they're apparently watching intently. Maybe "treating employees nicely" is at least as important a factor to consider.

Shivetya writes: "This is cool, the heck with using a palty 650mb of CDROM storage for playing MP3s in your car. According to this article over on CNET IOMEGA may just have a 20gb solution coming with their new "Peerless" system." As michael exults: "Yay! more portable drives that are totally incompatible with everything else including all other Iomega drives! Yay!"

An anonymous reader submitted an interesting story about the NSA splicing fiber optics under water in order to eavesdrop on digital traffic. This happened years ago, so who knows what they're doing today. Not surprisingly, apparently actually getting the tap is relatively easy. Sifting through the zillions of bits and finding something useful is a little trickier.

Incongruity writes: "ZDNet, in an interactive week article examines the progress towards acceptance of the IP version 6. The Japanese government has set a deadline for its information technology sectors to run on IPv6 by 2005. Other than that deadline set by the Japanese government, acceptance and implementation has, according to the article, been less than full steam ahead. This despite the fact that IPv6 have been available for allocation since mid-1999."

HaiLHaiL writes: "Microsoft's Mundie has a commentary running on ZDNet responding to the responses to his speech. " No real surprises, but it's getting submitted a lot so I figured I'd post it for you. Lots of good points, but I'm sure you can guess the gist of it.

HaiLHaiL writes: "Microsoft's Mundie has a commentary running on ZDNet responding to the responses to his speech. " No real surprises, but it's getting submitted a lot so I figured I'd post it for you. Lots of good points, but I'm sure you can guess the gist of it.

Delrin writes "This article on Zdnet reports on how Linux is slowly becoming an important player in the high-end graphic design industry. The latest upcoming movie "Shrek" a perfect example. Dreamworks and others are turning to linux for a large portion of their work, turning away from the likes of SGI and Microsoft." The movie looks visually astonishing: I'm definitely checking it out asap. Hopefully the story can live up the credits (Mike Meyers, John Lithgow, Eddie Murphy) and the visuals (the trailers blow away much of Toy Story 2).

PowerMacDaddy writes: "Apple's Darwin project is gaining momentum. Aside from finally having a mascot and an approved OSI license, Darwin now has some serious programming resources behind it. According to this article over on ZDnet, Monkey Byte CEO Lane Roathe is now heading the development of networking communications tools for Darwin-compatible games. Apparently, Roathe is currently working on versions of NetSprockets and OpenPlay for Darwin. Is it time for Slashdot to add another topic just for Darwin news?"

edoug writes: "Ransom Love (CEO of Caldera) said he thinks Microsoft was right in its claim that the GPL doesn't make much business sense. And so, Caldera is mulling a non-GPL licensing mechanism -- most likely one based on the BSD license. Love said: "Microsoft is attacking open source at its weakest point: the GPL." Check out the article here ." Update: 05/10 7:30 AM by michael : Newsforge has an interview with Love.

lar3ry writes: "eWeek has a lead story about companies that have been catching the ASP bandwagon, and now are finding themselves high and dryas ASPs are going out of business. I may be old, but I remember when I was writing applications being used by other companies, that the contracts had agreements that provided for the source code to be held in escrow in case the company that I was working for went out of business. Does this mean that common sense is no longer a virtue in the Internet age? Just whispering a few hot terms like "ASP" makes the CIO of a company blind to any financial exposure that an application has to another company's future? Geez!" This is one thing that scares me about various companies' plans to take care of your data and apps. And unlike "Perpetual Care" at ye olde cemetery, you're still around to feel if the perpetual care stops.

Jeremy Allison - Sam (of the Samba team) writes "eWeek reviewed Samba 2.2 - they seem to like it ! It's certainly encouraging to get trade coverage like this, I'm hoping the more people who report Samba use in their organisation to press outlets will encourage them to cover more Open Source/Free Software products ! "