Slashback: Zip, Language, Opportunism

Slashback tonight brings you updates and corrections from recent and ongoing stories, including (this time around) non-silver silver paste, the return of the Orkut, Mike Rowe and his not-so-epic battle with Microsoft (one last time, I hope), the future of Zip for Microsoft Windows, and more. Read on below for the details.

Funny name, well-executed idea. YourMother writes "After almost 4 days of being offline, the social network Orkut is back online. The Orkut development team has been working nonstop since bringing it down on Sunday afternoon and quite a few new security features have been implemented to protect users information. Within the first 48 hours it was up, it gained almost 100,000 users, growing many times faster than other social networks like Friendster or Tribe. Did Google hit the social network bulls-eye?"

glinden points to a story with some more information about those security holes. "From the article, 'Sources close to Google suggest widespread XSS (cross-site scripting) hacks forced the closure of the service. It isn't clear how much personal data or communication was disclosed.'"

Playmate. Playmate, playmate playmate. An anonymous reader writes "A week after an appeals court ruling revived a Playboy Enterprises Inc. trademark infringement lawsuit against Netscape Communications Inc., the companies have reached a settlement in the case (See a ZDNet report) The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed. This puts an end to a closely watched case in the search engine advertising field. Several other lawsuits over misuse of trademarks in search engine ads are still in place. Google e.g. is embroiled in a lawsuit with Luis Vuitton regarding keyword-based ads in France and asked for a California court's ruling to back its trademark policy for AdWords after facing the threat of a lawsuit from American Blind & Wallpaper Factory Inc."

You have to admire such brave nomenclature. Michiel Frackers writes "Thanks for the link to my site, I got 3 gigabyte of traffic in a few hours! If I would have known, I would have written something in English. I have added an update about the Strangeberry product and its relation to Tivo at the URL you linked to.

I also included a link to my private blog (as www.frackers.com is more about my work in media & technology). Hopefully this clarifies some things for your readers, I did not intend to make this some kind of quest or game at all: it's just that I promised Arthur and his colleagues not to disclose what they are exactly doing, as you will understand."

And Anonymous joe writes with this link to an intriguing bit of Strangeberry speculation at the Register.

Nokia to port Python to Mobiles, not Perl An anonymous reader writes "Nokia was mistaken. In fact, El Reg reports that Python, not Perl, is the preferred language for scripting on its smartphone platforms. The availability of a Python implementation for mobile phones is part of a broader plan, including a JVM-based BASIC interpreter."

However, the Register article linked says that Perl is being considered, it's just that Python is being looked at as the primary language.

I wouldn't trust their pearls, either. Blade Leader writes "OCZ has issued a recall of OCZ Ultra 2 thermal paste after the Overclockers.com article on their lack of silver content. They blame the lack on their supplier, and claim they will be pursuing legal action."

A piece of history (or at least a piece of somethin' ...) Artemis writes "Searching along E-Bay and MikeRoweSoft.com I noticed that Mike Rowe has decided to sell the Microsoft Cease-and-Desist Letters and WIPO book he received on E-Bay. He is selling the WIPO book with the 25-page letter received from Microsoft's lawyers on January 14/2004.This inch-thick book contains copies of web pages, registrations, trade marks, other WIPO cases, emails between me and Microsoft's lawyers and much more. There are 27 annexes filled with information. This package also comes with the 25-page complaint transmittal coversheet that was sent with the inch-thick book."

What's wrong with gunzip, tar? whitefox writes "CNet News is reporting that PKWare & WinZip have settled their differences and will maintain Zip file compatibility for the foreseeable future with each supporting the other's security extensions. In addition, PKWare will include its SecureZip in the code it licenses to other software makers. This is good news in deed for users and developers alike!"

Comments

What about infozip?

[phr1]

Will the new "secure" zip format be published so other implementations can use it? There's the old pkzip "password" feature that infozip implments, that's deliberately weak because of the old export controls, but that doesn't count.

Re:What about infozip?

[DeadMeat (TM)]

There's actually 2 encrypted .ZIP formats: the announcement is just that PKZIP will read WinZip's format, and vice-versa.

WinZip's AES encryption is documented here. PKWare's format is apparently proprietary.

So who seeds Orkut

[Space cowboy]

There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation about a meeting-place where membership is by invitation (can't you tell I'm not one of the exalted :-)

It would be interesting to see what the demographic of the initial seed population was - and to see whether that influenced the community over time... As any fule know, the initial conditions can have a profound impact on any time-dependent phenomena :-)

Simon

Re:So who seeds Orkut

[kfg]

... As any fule know, the initial conditions can have a profound impact on any time-dependent phenomena :-)

I was once solicited, directly from the salesfloor of my then employer ( my customer was a sales manager who I impressed), to work in sales for a major international insurance agency.

Upon the formal application I was turned down for employment (thank God).

Why? Because I'm not a joiner. I didn't belong to fraternity, Elks Lodge, Country Club, The Rotary, what have you.

Thus I didn't have, in their eyes, a ready pool of people the "invite' to purchase insurance. My abilites and professionalism as a salesman were completely irellevant to them.

Does that shed any light on your curiosity?

KFG

Is a "copy" the same as a "duplicate original"?

[Nakito]

I read the description of Mike Rowe's auction on Ebay. He says that he is auctioning "the WIPO book with the 25-page letter I received from Microsoft's lawyers on January 14/2004," but then says, "I have two copies of these and I will be keeping one for my own personal memoirs." So -- is the subject of the auction a true original? Did Microsoft serve a duplicate set of originals on the same guy? Or is he just selling a copy that he made? If I bought that letter, I would want to see blue ink on the signature line.

thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with gunzip, tar?

Have you ever tried to extract a single file from a gzip'ed tar archive? It's not possible without unpacking everything and throwing away the bits that you don't want.

Nokia to port Python to Mobiles, not Perl

Yay! This makes *much* more sense. Python rocks and is perfectly suited for portable devices on small devices, hence the successful PalmOS port.

Orkut - Funny name, well-executed idea.

Urm.. it's been a very badly executed idea if they've had to shut it down already because of hacking. Then there are the disgruntled reports from users that think it's completely pointless. It's only popular because Google is - they could have sneezed and everybody would have noticed.

Re:thoughts

[DunbarTheInept]

that does unpack everything only to throw away all but the file you wanted,

Well, actually it only unpacks the stuff that comes before the file in the archive. If the file in question is near the top, most of the archive is not unpacked.

two copies

[SHEENmaster]

He received them in duplicate, and he's only auctioning one copy. That said, I'd auction 'em both; the price is at $3,751.00 with more than seven days remaining!

Did Google hit the social network bulls-eye?

[Anonymous Coward]

They haven't let me in, so I suspect the answer is yes.

Re:Zip

[DumbWhiteGuy777]

XP's zipping isn't good. Download 7-zip instead. Totally free, no fancy crap, and works great for all kinds of archives. You'll thank me later.

Re:Hum...

[momerath2003]

You don't even have to read the article to pick this up:

"Slashback tonight brings you updates and corrections from recent and ongoing stories..."

That's all it is.

Re:Orkut

[Anonymous Coward]

So are any of you guys members yet?

No, I have real friends.

Google and cross-site scripting

[Anonymous Coward]

As amazing as it sounds, Google don't really pay that much attention to web technologies. They may have some pretty impressive clustering, database and analysis technologies, but the way they apply web technologies such as HTML and HTTP is lacking.

For a start-off, their website isn't even valid HTML. If they moved some of the presentation details to CSS, they could lop a massive chunk of bandwidth off their bill and take some of the load off their servers and speed up access to their site. I don't know what they are paying at the moment, but it's bound to be significant.

Their spidering technologies only half implement HTTP. For instance, they ignore the content-type header, favouring the file extension instead. The only other software that I have heard of being that broken in terms of HTTP is Internet Explorer.

Their ranking algorithms pay a little attention to the HTML structure (e.g. they rank keywords in <h1> elements highly), but then they comlpetely ignore other significant markup, or screw it up, like definition lists.

So they didn't understand the rules for escaping special characters in HTML. It doesn't come as a surprise, cross-site scripting attacks bite many people who haven't paid attention to the HTML specifications.

It's a shame, because so many people bend over backwards to get ranked highly in Google, that if Google actually tried to use HTML and HTTP properly, it would cause loads of people to write higher-quality HTML overnight.

Re:Google and cross-site scripting

[angio]

I think you're pretty off-base with respect to Google's awareness of the byte costs of various approaches. First of all, Google is trying to optimize the user's perception of speed - and downloading a separate CSS doc would require a second TCP connection, etc., etc., which could negatively impact both the user experience and the load on Google's servers. I wager that their common case is one search per user.

Second, have you actually _looked_ at the returned HTML from a Google search? It does use CSS within the returned page (see the style section), and it's very compact CSS and HTML.

The rest of their site has some "potential inefficiences" that could be corrected, but keep in mind that probably more than 99% of Google's traffic is search traffic. Amdahl's law - optimize the part that slows you down the most, not the little corner cases. Google's search results pages are very efficient.

Oh, and re the orkut thread, it was seeded with Orkut's friends and coworkers at Google, pretty much. The social network is pretty obvious in the way it grows out from there - stanford, google, bay area, computer science, geek schools, other schools, general population.

Re:Orkut

[rjelks]

The first rule of Orkut: You do not talk about Orkut.

-

The text of my Orkut invite

[PCM2]

So are any of you guys members yet?

No-one I know has joined yet and I've not heard much on the net so are there really any members or is it just another conspiracy theory - ie you think it's good therefore you want to join?!?

Who knows? It's not like they've given anybody any impression of what to expect when they sign up. The Web site says next to nothing, and neither does the actual invite when you get one. Here's the text of the one I received:

[person] <name@address> invites you to join her network of personal friends at orkut.com.

orkut is a community of friends and trusted acquaintances that connects individuals through a social network that grows person by person.

With orkut, you can catch up with old friends, make new acquaintances through people you trust, and maybe even find that certain someone you've been looking for everywhere.

orkut helps you organize and attend events, join communities that share your interests, and find partners to participate in the activities you most enjoy.

To find out why [person] thought you'd enjoy orkut and to discover who else you know is already a member, click on the link below:

[link]

* * *

If you're already an orkut member, make sure that the email address at which you received this note is entered into your orkut profile. That way, you'll automatically be connected to all of your friends.

This invitation was sent to [me] <my@address> on behalf of [person] <name@address>. If you do not wish to receive invitations from orkut, click on the link below:

[link]

And that's about it! Now you tell me -- do I really want to join this thing? What does it get me? Since it's Google, I guess we're all assuming it won't land us on anybody's spam lists, but how can we be sure? Is there any way to back our information out of the system if we decide it's all a pointless waste of time (or worse -- a scam)?

And, to get philosophical -- is it really possible to meet people online? Can you really have "met" somebody ... whom you've never met before???! I just don't get the point of these "friend networks," at all.

A Fair Deal...

[Fnkmaster]

Alright, you invite to join Orkut, and I will invite women. Lots of women. Some of them even like geeky guys (assuming you know how to shower and brush your teeth). I will bring these women into _your_ social network and introduce you to them. That's right, you could actually meet real women. Invite me and you MIGHT even get laid.

Think about it - can you afford not to invite the Fnkmaster into your Orkut family? I didn't think so... don't be afraid... push that invite button...

Re:Orkut

[generic-man]

Orkut is actually just a scam designed to fleece unsuspecting Internet users out of money. The record so far is $11.00.

Solid vs. segmented archives

[L. J. Beauregard]

I suppose by gzip and bzip2 you mean these two programs combined with tar. By themselves they compress only single files. In fact, on a single file, gzip achieves only slightly better compression than zip -- it uses the same compression method, and any improvement is solely due to its simpler structure. Bzip2 still gets somewhat better compression.

The .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 formats are "solid" archives: they enchain the files into a single archive, the .tar file, and then compress that as a whole. This allows them to achieve better compression because they can compress redundancies between files as well as within them. Zip, OTOH, is what I call a "segmented" archive: the files are individually compressed and the compressed images are enchained.

Solid archives can be smaller than segmented, but are more difficult to manipulate after the fact:

• To extract a single file from a solid archive, you have to read everything in the archive, at least up to the file you're extracting. A zip file has a directory at the end that quickly locates the desired file.
• To add, delete, or replace files in a preexisting archive, you have to decompress the whole thing, manipulate the files, and then compress the whole thing again. It can be done, but it's slow and can take up lots of disk space. Zip can do these things directly, leaving unaffected files unchanged.
• Finally, solid archives are more fragile than segmented ones. If a solid archive is damaged, everything from the point of the damage onward is lost. With zip, however, only the files at the damaged portion are lost, and subsequent files are still recoverable.

IIRC RAR can generate either a solid or a segmented archive.

Zip, furthermore, has a feature that can preserve arbitrary file metadata such as NTFS file permissions. Tar, OTOH, is meant for Unix, and can only preserve metadata relating to Unix.

There's no technical reason that you couldn't create a .zip.gz or .zip.bz2 file, getting a solid archive that preserves all the metadata, but alas, you'd probably confuse most people doing that :-(

Re:Zip

[cscx]

I still don't know how to copy a zip file created by WinXP to a floppy disk. Any ideas? Trust Microsoft to screw it up

Yes, take your computer, unplug it, place it back into the box it was delivered in, and ship it back to the factory.

I'll PayPal You $1 If You Invite Me...

[MS_leases_my_soul]

Dude, if you join and invite me, I will paypal you $1. Then, when I go to work tomorrow, I will be all like, "Yeah, I'm on Orkut" and all the geeks at work will be like, "Dude, you are the alpha geek. Let us in!" and I will be all like "No way! You guys are lame!" and they will be all like, "Dude, you totally suck, now let us in" and I will be like ... well, you, like, get the point. 'Cause cliques are like, totally.

It will make my Friday. I'd buy that for a dollar! ;=)