Slashback: Activism, VOIP, Ivies

Slashback tonight brings you a response to Declan McCullagh's approach to political activism (and tangentially related, evidence of Bruce Perens' very different way of doing things), a link to a few more VOIP Blasters, tantalizing news from the Blender front, and more -- all below.

Until we know how to get to Stallman's Gulch ... sbrown writes: "Public Knowledge responds to Declan McCullagh's call for less activism, more code. Don't fool yourself geeks, political participation is absolutely necessary to maintain the freedom to write code. Public Knowledge has a plan to make geek political participation easy and effective."

Speaking of activism, Roblimo reported yesterday that Bruce Perens might be leaving HP. Today, IDG reporter Matt Berger confirms the break, writing that "Perens says he is leaving HP to pursue political activism. His protests against the DMCA and other legislation that Perens says threatens the open source community, apparently, were too much for HP to handle. So he is becoming an independent consultant and will work with HP as a consultant. He also plans to follow through with a presentation of a DVD player cracking software that he says is in violation of the DMCA. HP stopped him from doing the demonstration at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention last month."

Might these be the basis of a long-distance relationship? AndersBrownworth writes "After Creative nixed their VoIP Blaster, ($20 USB to "plain old telephone line" converter with free software available) ebay prices eclipsed the $200 mark. Now, it seems Creative has found some VoIP Blasters still hanging around and is selling them as refurbished units for $29.99. Ebay prices have reflected the move in Internet time."

Much more fun than a PBS pledge drive. Kodi writes "In case you haven't been watching, Blender's campaign to become open source by raising 100,000 is almost complete, with about 85,000 raised. If you were holding back, perhaps a little doubtful that they would make it, now's the time to chip in and push it over the top."

If your donation happens to be The Last Straw (and the Blender folks can verify it), I will provide you with your choice of ThinkGeek T-shirt ;)

And such pretty campuses, too. guttentag writes "Several weeks ago, Slashdot ran a story about the Princeton admissions dean who used applicant information to hack into a Yale Web site. Today Princeton announced it will remove the official from his position; however, it will offer him another, undisclosed job. It also revealed that Princeton and other Ivy League schools were aware of the break-ins as early as May 15.

MIT's The Tech adds Princeton officials previously said they were unaware of the incident prior to July 24 when Yale's president informed Princeton's, and that Yale notified the FBI the next day (President Bush's niece was among those students whose privacy was violated). It was not until that point that Princeton placed the official on administrative leave.

Apparently, misusing applicant information to commit identity fraud is not a serious offense at Princeton unless the public learns of it (or a member of the president's family is among the victims), and even then it's not serious enough to warrant dismissal. Princeton's president also said other school officials will be disciplined, but declined to provide details, presumably to protect the privacy of those officials or the university."

Comments

Thanks Bruce

[extrasolar]

I'm glad you're on our side.

In another note, here's an interesting rebuttal to the Declan article.

Also, know the Digital Speech Project. Best not reinventing any wheels.

Re:Creative's HTTPS server is more crushed than Wi

[wowbagger]

Additional data - not only is there HTTPS server bogging bigtime right now, but it will reject any packets with the Explicit Congestion Notify bit set - so if you are running a real OS that actually implements the TCP standard, you may need to

echo 0 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn

before you place your order.

Stop exaggerating this hacking nonsense...

[SMN]

While I do agree that what LeMenger and others does warrant disciplinary action, I think that if you read the full findings of the investigation, you might realize that what took place was not nearly as bad as you make it out to be, and I daresay even understandable. The full story can be found in President Tilghman's statement. Here's a better summary that I posted somewhere else yesterday:

The statement explains each of the accesses, which basically comes down to LeMenager testing Yale's security and getting in, then showing how he did it to others three times, then 8 accesses by "junior" members who then thought it was OK and were interested in whether certain students were accepted, and one more access they're not clear on (actually, they mention a total of 14 accesses from the admissions office, but I only count them explaining 13?). As expected, all of the accesses were _after_ the decisions letters were dropped off at the post office. More interestingly, LeMenager isn't being fired (on account of his 20 years of experience, it seems), but he is being moved out of the admissions office. For now, he's being moved to the Communications Office, and according to a local paper (this isn't in Tilghman's statement) his salary will remain the same as it was before.

According to the full findings, LeMenager first entered the information because he wanted to see what he expected was a step 2 of the sign-in process, which would likely be a PIN number or password - wound up it wasn't there. Three more accesses were LeMenager showing his superior, Dean Hargadon, and others how it worked. The some junior staff members, seeing this, though it was ok to check the site themselves, thus leading to a total of 14 accesses - all of which are justifiable, even if they still deserve punishment.

Furthermore, there was a very interesting take on the fiasco published on Slate yesterday; go ahead and read the full story there. The independent author makes a strong case saying that the only reason Yale bothered to accuse Princeton of wrongdoing was that the Yale Daily Herald had discovered what was happened, and was about to make the report public; Yale wanted to distract attention away from their inadequate security, and did so by blaming Princeton.

Artificial Blender3d Numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Just so you know, I just looked at the blender3d fund page and it had this to say:

Paid: 68985
Pending: 15200
Intent: 3470
Total: 87655

So the real value is, in fact, 68985. My employer had "intent" to pay me "pending" money too. Nothing's yours unless it's in the bank. Isn't there a time limit this 100,000 has to be raised by?