Slashback: SmoothWall, Gopher, Be

Slashback tonight on the slipping of Be through the fingers of Palm, further squashing of ZeoSync, the age of gophers, the invention of everyone's favorite electric-powered pronoun, and more -- just read on.

But can you backtrack through a google cache? pointym5 writes "Checked out the ZeoSync web site lately? Remember all those PhDs on the scientific staff? Well, like I'm sure others did, I sent e-mail to a few of them expressing interest in more technical details. All that I contacted responded with absolute disclaimers of any relationship whatsoever with ZeoSync. This morning I note that most names are gone from the 'org chart' and the scientific team list. There are only five left, including Dr. Piotr Blass, 'developer of one of the world's first web sites.' Wow!"

How smooth is smooth? juct writes: "I appreciate it, that Slashdot gave the SmoothWall Team an opportunity to answer to the concerns in my review of their firewall. But it is full of errors and might leave a wrong feeling of security. So I invite everybody to my Tour on SmoothWall where you can judge for yourself."

Whispered words of wisdom, 'Let it be.' Sander van Dragt writes: "Many BeOS news lately. Not all so good for the BeOS community though. BeUnited, the organization which tried to license BeOS from Palm, has received today a final answer from Palm: '...we have made a firm decision NOT to license any part of this technology other than that which we incorporate into the Palm OS.' It is already known that the new 32-bit PalmOS will feature some elements of the Be technology, but that OS is built for PDAs, not for the desktop."

You can read that letter and the rest of the article on OS news.

And take this as you will -- An Anonymous Coward writes: "osnews.com is reporting that there is a new version of BeOS on the way... A German company called 'yellowTab' is said to be ready to ship a new version of BeOS (Just when everyone thought it was dead, and the final shovel full of dirt laid on top), get the full article here ... Hrm, I sure liked BeOS, I hope this one works out."

Dig, my brethren -- the Gopher Palace is almost complete! SuperguyA1 writes "Lwn is reporting that the gopher team has done it again with a 3.0 release marking Gopher's 10th anniversary. Happy birthday gopher. Thanks for helping me find all the muds I wasted so much time in college on:)"

"Bad connection, say again, you invented WHAT?" mi writes: "Yahoo! reports a potential problem, the Segway Scooter may have in Japan -- a Japanese robotics professor seems to have a patent on something very very similar since 1996. On the other hand, the USPTO knew about, when granting the patent to Segway's Dean Kamen, but still found Mr. Kamen's invention worthy of a patent in 1999. My favorite is the Kazuo Yamafuji's words: 'I would hand over my patent for one dollar if Mr. Kamen admitted that we were first.' Indeed, he just sat on the invention for 15 years."

Comments

Why Kamen deserved the Segway patent

[Mr. Uptime]

As the final project for my Engineering Law class last semester, we studied this issue at length and even read the documents the PTO released under FOIA justifying their acceptance of the Kamen patent. Some of the major points we found were:

• Kamen has been working on the Segway for a lot longer than 15 years. Most people don't realize how old Dean Kamen is; Yamafuji probably was just a young tot when Kamen introduced his "cripple cart."
• The Segway employs a sophisticated transmission system that adjusts gear ratios depending on how difficult the terrain is (uphill, flat, or downhill) and the desired speed. This improves battery life and performance. Kazou's project had no such feature.
• As was clearly stated in the patent, Kamen used a gyroscope while Yamafiji used a clumsy set of concentric rings and Hall effect sensors. It's like the difference between using GNOME 1.0 and KDE 2.0 - there's just no comparison.
• Kamen's software was considerably more streamlined because it was written as a true embedded system, in pure ASM. Yamafiji's model used C++ because, well, it was just a model and it would have been useless if it were not hooked up to the portable computer he used to build it.

Kamen deserves every penny he can make frmo Segway, both here and in Japan. For once, the USPTO did the right thing - and the media owes it to DK to stop complaining.

Mr. Uptime

Wow, IE fetches gopher links

[imrdkl]

I had never pointed IE at a gopher server. Dare I say I am just ever so slightly impressed? Perhaps not. When UMinn decided to charge, I wrote them a perl script which implements a gopher client in about 50 lines.

I dont guess they ever made any money of gopher at UMinn, but perhaps we shouldn't have been so hard on them for trying. Bygones.

Don't forget

[eclectro]

the Be auction the day after tomorrow for those who are lucky enough to be near menlo park.

Who knows, maybe some of that stuff will become collectible.

Yet another smoothwall security hole

[swuser]

Just downloaded smoothwall 0.9.9se and had a search on google.

bash$ id
uid=99(nobody) gid=99(nobody) groups=99(nobody),14(smoothwa)
bash$ ls -l /usr/sbin/pppoe
-rwsr-x--- 1 root nobody 23888 Aug 6 12:36 /usr/sbin/pppoe
bash$ /usr/sbin/pppoe -D /etc/test
bash$ ls -l /etc/test
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root nobody 367 Jan 10 03:11 /etc/test

Though it's not surprising it's full of holes with code that the smoothwall people write:

...
if (setgid(0)) { fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't set GID to 0\n"); return 0; }
if (setuid(0)) { fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't set UID to 0\n"); return 0; }
...
snprintf(command, STRING_SIZE - 1, "/var/patches/%s/setup", argv[1]);
if (!(p = popen(command, "r")))
return -1;

etc. etc.
It's full of setgid(0);setuid(0);system(command);
absolutely unbelievable.

Re:Compression

[the_quark]

This IT World Article notes that Steve Smale (the Berkley Prof that's one of the five yet remaining) says he's spent "one hour" working for ZeoSync and that he is "in no position to say anything about these claims."

St. George (the ZeoSync founder) also basically says (in classic snake-oil-salesman style) that the reason everyone says it's bunk is because they have a vested interest in the status quo. That tends to be one of the classic hallmarks of a "false" visionary.

I also love it when the article quotes him:

"For every person who says it might not work, there are 10 saying it does," he said, adding that he's received many congratulatory e-mails since the announcement.

Uh, yeah. I bet if we put up a /. poll, we'd get 10-1 the other way, and it's be just as scientific. Even better, he's holding up as evidence in favor of his claim the opinion of a bunch of people who no nothing about compression, and haven't even seen the technology. Wow, that's convincing.

Beos: Amiga, TNG

[Anonymous Coward]

Every few years a new, closed-source alternative OS appears to gain a rabid following and when it inevitably dies they are left with nothing but press releases and desperate attempts at revival.

It's time for the BeOS crowd to learn from the Amiga, OS/2, OS9 (no, not MacOS9), and every other alternative PC OS. Give it up. It's dead and it will never come back. Don't make bets on closed source alternative PC OS's. It doesn't pay off.

Re:Gopher how without Slip or PPP

[Syre]

mosaic required a direct TCP/IP connection (SLIP, if you were on dialup). Gopher would work as text mode on a terminal.

lynx would do www on text mode terminals too, but was harder to use in text mode than gopher was.

Even on SLIP, mosaic was slow because it would load the entire page, including all images, before you could see anything. On a slow dialup line (14.4) that could take a while.

of course then Netscape came out and the rest is history... the main feature of Netscape that made everyone use it was that partial pages were displayed while the images downloaded.

Re:ZeoSync's Claims

[Fat Cow]

Stephen Smale is a _very_ eminent mathematician. A fields medal winner. He proved the poincare conjecture for dimensions greater than 4.