Slashback: Retail, Preparedness, Games

Tonight in Slashback: More on TransGaming's approach to the world (and licenses), another sweet box of French Linux goodness, another piece of the stolen-Enigma puzzle is pressed firmly into place, and a small piece of travel advice.

"Getting off easy" defined. dgroskind writes: "This AP story might be interesting as a slashback followup to an item about the theft of the Enigma machine from Bletchly Park. The accused got 10 months with the charge of blackmail left open for possible later prosecution. Also, this story today says a U.S. spy tipped off the Germans that the Enigma code had been broken but they didn't believe it."

Of course, you could tell your boss it got blown up. You may have already written your congressional representatives (especially if you live in South Carolina) about Fritz Holling's proposed SSSCA, but for air-traveling technical types, there's another post-bomb consideration. cloudscout writes: "In the past, I've always been nervous before travelling... am I remembering my toothpaste? Razor? Shoes? Now I've learned there is something else to remember. Charge my batteries. The current state of air travel security means more random searches and since I tend to travel with lots of electronic gadgets, these searches take a while and they test every device. I was chosen for a random search. Notebook, PDA, Digital Camera, Camcorder, Cellphone... the MiniDisc player had a dead battery. I was stuck. I didn't know what to do. They demanded that I prove the devices functionality. I dug around in my bag and, luckily, was able to take a battery from another device in order to power up the MD but it could have been a much worse situation if I didn't have a spare battery. The lesson here? If you're going to fly, be prepared."

Last week, flying between several supposedly very security-conscious airports (Dulles, Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt), I never had to turn my laptop on, probably because I had carefully charged the battery beforehand.

I'll believe it when I record my 2nd sample FMD disk. Perhaps unimpressed with the perpetually promised quarter-sized CDs mentioned the other day, an Anonymous Coward writes: "What optical medium has 8 layers, stores 24 GBs, and plays at 22Mbits/sec? And it's just the first age, with plans to reach 140 GB soon afterwards. Constellation 3D are developing FMD-ROM format that will change the capacity of data storage we use today, furtheir information can be obtained from FMD insider which is a news site that reports the progress and general information about this product. Constellation 3D seem to have lowered their expectations of their first line of products, to something more realistic and affordable, and they expect to make the technology available to some markets by the end of 2002.
Are you ready?"

Street performances need to beware Sturgeon's Law. joestar writes "As said on Slashdot this week-end, Transgaming is about to release - with Electronic Arts and MandrakeSoft - a special Linux distro aimed at games called Mandrake Linux Gaming Edition. Their technology - WineX - is actually a DirectX to Mesa translator that allows to port most recent Windows games to Linux apparently very efficiently compared to a simple Wine port. A great article with lots of details about that project GameSpyDaily has just been released. By the way, WineX is released under the Alladin License."

Picking your poison gets more complicated. Red Hat 7.2 is out, but as you might expect, MandrakeSoft isn't sitting still: The newest Mandrake, 8.1, is also available in stores. (But when will 8.1 PPC be ready? ;))

Comments

Enigma...

[jeffy124]

...hmmm ....

You'd think the Germans would have figured out that someone cracked Enigma when the Allied forces knew about their secret plans on a consistent basis.

OTOH, kudos to the Brits for knowing how to handle decrypted info. In Zimmermann's Note, for example, they intercepted and cracked the original message, but made it look like lax security in Mexico compromised the Note to the US.

Re:Enigma...

[kzinti]

You'd think the Germans would have figured out that someone cracked Enigma when the Allied forces knew about their secret plans on a consistent basis.

The Allies were very careful to disguise the source of their knowledge. A target was never struck without first sending out a reconnaissance mission and letting the Germans spot it. Or so the pop-history sources say. You can also read about this sort of thing in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

--Jim

Re:Am I the only one who doesn't get this?

[jeffy124]

that's a good point. you can tuck something inside a second battery slot or empty drive slot. But then again, laptops are required to still go through the xray machine, where something would (hopefully) be found.

But honestly, I dont know what turning something on would provide. A terrorist can always key a fake electronic device to act like a real device when placed under inspection. A cell phone is perfect for that, as they dont go through xray nor metal detectors (at least that was the case last time I was at an airport last August), and all one has to do is turn on the backlight or display panel.

Maybe it's just a false sense of security that some policy maker thought up.

Er, not quite.

[MichaelKVance]

WineX - is actually a DirectX to Mesa translator

Uh... not quite. Mesa is an implementation of the OpenGL API, and is only relevant to DirectX insofar as OpenGL is a competing API to Direct3D, a component of DirectX. What you probably meant was:

WineX - which includes a reimplimentation of the DirectX API using *nix interfaces such as X11, OpenGL, and OSS.

Get it right, then get it right again.

m.