Slashback: Quiesence, Jazz, RAND

Welcome to Slashback for 20011018 -- read below for an update on Code Red (is Red Dead?), RAND patents in Web standards (some semi-good news on that front), the sad death of some MIDI software, and an upgrade for Thailand.

Please write your elected W3C representative. haplo21112 writes "The W3C has posted a next-steps comment on the mailing list for the Patent Policy Frame Work proposal.

It announces among other things that two Open Source People have been added to the working group as Invited experts, Eben Moglen (General Counsel, Free Software Foundation) and Bruce Perens (Co-Founder of the Open Source Initiative). They have also announced a home page for the Working Group at: http://www.w3.org/2001/ppwg/

Especially interesting is the Second Objection noted on the page from IBM, where basically they are revealed as one of the drivers of the proposal. They grumble about RF and pretty much say they would vastly prefer RAND."

You'd like to think so, eh? ColaMan writes: "Is CodeRed finally dead? I've had a counter on my webserver (yay apache!) that tracks attempts, but since the start of the month only 1 lone attempt has been logged on our permanent IP dialup connection (and that was just overnight). This compares to 2490 attempts for August and 931 for September. Nimda still seems to be plodding along though - I've had 159 unique ip's so far this month and 466 for September. Knowing that my IP address is in some bandwidth-forsaken backwater of the internet, I was wondering how things were going CodeRed-wise in the Real Internet?"

I forget -- does the M stand for "Microsoft," or "Macintosh"? An Anonymous Coward writes: "Remember this story from last Tuesday asking about audio applications on linux? Today the Jazz++ mailinglist declared jazz++ dead (find the message here). While not the perfect midi sequencer, jazz++ is robust and GPL'd. Since jazz++ only appeared twice in the postings (each moderated at +1 ...) related to the earlier story, it would seem this fine product has low visibility among the /. crowd. The only viable GNU/Linux midi solution died the same week ./ had a call for audio solutions on Linux. Gotta love irony..."

From Bundesrat to Bangkok Germany may be considering it, but Thailand is doing them one better. TheMMaster writes "According to this article on newsbytes, the Thai government will switch to open-source software, linux on the desktop, StarOffice. This is a nice example of OSS, and probably why a lot of people contribute, to help people (OK and for fun)"

As usual, the actual developers float high above the flames on their behalf. Yep, KDE is 5 years old -- and fm6 writes: "A nice contrast to the usual GNOME-versus-KDE flamage: the users of news.gnome.org wish KDE a happy 5th birthday." Remember, the flame wars you see about these two projects have little to do with the fact that both have already created killer desktops, and are continuing to do so faster than human beings should be allowed to travel.

Comments

Code Red

[ogesII]

Over the last 3 days my site has been receiving one Code Red hit per day. The interesting this is that the original 'N' padding is being used again similar to CR1. Prior to this I hadn't had a hit since Sep. 30th.

Nimda is still going like made but at a much reduced pace. 8 unique hosts 423 hits today. I sure wish it would give up after the first GET and it realizes I'm not running IIS. I'm about to start dynamically updating my IPTables

Re:Code Red

[jsveiga]

Code Red II killed (sterilized?) himself on September 30.

I've submitted an "ask Slashdot" by October 4 asking everybody to check their logs, but I was rejected.

Because Code Red I doesn't have the suicide code, it may show up again (CR2 had displaced it, but now it may come back. This is why you get NNNNNN again).

Although it stopped spawning, it does leave the backdoor installed. Unfortunately it does not "announce" it anymore.

Just when I was having fun... I hope CR1 gets back in the top parade.

jazz is not dead, and its not the only or best

[paulbd]

MusE is a more powerful, more appealing, more actively developed MIDI editor and sequencer than Jazz or Jazz++ ever was. And besides, Jazz is not dead. The message is simply one user expressing their concerns, which although they may be realistic, are not definitive.

The 'M'

[sheetsda]

I forget -- does the M stand for "Microsoft," or "Macintosh"?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this question, but the M in MIDI stands for "Musical". Musical Instrument Digital Interface.