Slashback: OpenDocuments, RFID Passports, Firefox Celebration

Slashback tonight brings updates and continuations of recent Slashdot stories including a continuation of the Massachusetts document format debate, a response from the US State Department on RFID passports, a unique celebration of Firefox's 100 millionth download, and more.

Politics still muddying the water of the MA OpenDocument debate. The Commonwealth's Secretary of State William Galvin says he has "grave concerns" about the switch and told secretary of administration and finance Thomas Trimarco that "we will not be participating." Galvin is considered one of the strong candidates to run as a rival candidate for next year's gubernatorial race against incumbent Mitt Romney who supports the switch.

RFID passports still the best option. The US State Department released a final ruling on the issue of RFID technology to be included in all US passports after October 2006 which also contained some of the reasoning behind their move. Other technologies were apparently looked at and discarded due to the difficulty of implementation and several security measures have apparently been taken to try and placate the opposition.

Firefox fans at Oregon State celebrate 100 million downloads. CNet has a pictorial about a local OSU LUG that had a few interesting ways to celebrate the recent big numbers on the Firefox downloads page. Happy to show their support students both painted a giant Firefox logo and launched a weather balloon, I can't think of any better way to say congratulations.

DrDOS didn't really break, it just reverted. The FreeDOS folks have an update on their webpage stating that DrDOS 8.1 no longer exists and all links on the DrDOS webpage apparently point to DrDOS 7.03. There were some negative reactions to the release or 8.1 stating that it included software that it shouldn't have so for now the "band-aid" fix appears to be in place.

Flexbeta takes a look at Flock. Noting the roots of Flock in Mozilla's Firefox browser, the folks over at Flexbeta take a quick look at the additional functionality offered by this newcomer. This comes with the recent news that Flock has also decided to open source their browser. Looks like this Firefox offspring is fighting hard for some recognition of its own.

iTunes continues to take over the world. With the recent release of iTunes Australia and Apple's continued growth in the industry a recent announcement brings us "Standford on iTunes". This new service will give alumni and the general public access to a wide range of Stanford-specific digital audio content.

Comments

Re:Too much controversy.

[CyricZ]

Then you generate RTF, PS or HTML files from the LaTeX source. It works like a charm.

Indeed, it'd be great if they could come up with something better. But it seems that they can't. That's why they're running into so many problems. Indeed, being able to read the various formats is a problem, especially when they're some proprietary binary format. That's why using plaintext, LaTeX and PDF files works so well: they're well documented, non-obfuscated, and are easily transmittable.

Re:Too much controversy.

[Noksagt]

This is the minimum of what's needed in an office suite

Right--you are arguing different philosophies. LaTeX could certainly be part of some monolithic Office Suite, but it is already very good at what it does. It may even be better than you give it credit for.

Spreadsheets

See the EMACS file as a proof of concept. Something similar could be written in TeX.

graphs

PSTricks & other packages let you add graphs which are generated on the fly.

presentations

I actually like LaTeX Beamer quite a bit--the PDF presentations are fantastic.

Does LaTeX excel at any of these? Probably not. But why not do, as others do, and choose tools which DO excel at them.

a single-file container format so exchange is easy. OpenDocument has it. HTML and LaTeX fails it;

Just zip the needed files together, as OpenDoc does....

* a user interface that regular users can migrate to. OpenDocument has it. HTML has it. LaTeX fails it;

These are file formats. Not interfaces. There are friendly HTML and LaTeX authoring tools.

* macro language (admitedly not standardised in OpenDocument). OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails it;

This is laughable. LaTeX is VERY scriptable.

* integration with other office formats such as OleDB datasources. OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails.

No, again--the programs that grok OpenDoc have it. Not the format itself. There are LaTeX tools which can pull data from a database.

Re:For people living in Massachussets

[Jaywalk]

Greeting fellow, err, Massachusan? Whatever.

If you really want to get involved, according to Groklaw the meeting Monday, October 31, in Boston, at the State House, room A1, from 1 to 5 that's open to the public. If you can't make that kind of commitment, Mass.gov. One useful page is this one which lets you type in your city and find out which state congress critters are yours. They're the ones who want your vote next time around. We also already know that Romney is in favor of ODF and Galvin (who wants to run for Romney's job) is against it, so writing them won't hurt either.

As for what to write I'd suggest you be nice, be brief and use your own words. That's more effective than just cranking out form letters. Let them know what you think and that you're paying attention.

Firefox, Flock and Flexbeta

[hackwrench]

I always use the latest nightly build so I don't know how they count that.

I notice that the Flexbeta review is not comparing Flock to the latest nightly builds of Firefox because some features the latest nightly builds have that are similar to Flock's are missing from the screenshots. They are giving Flock credit for features Flock may have inherited from the Firefox codebase.

Re:Too much controversy.

[StressedEd]

...giving arbitrary file access,...

This was a concern of mine for a project that I started researching, which would have accepted source files from the web and compiled them (I still want to take it further but havn't got the time).

The most obvious problems are commands like \input, allowing files to be read, which could be disasterous (e.g. \input{/etc/passwd}).

Potentially worse is \write18, which allows you to write a file..

All is not lost however, after asking a suitably enlightened TeXnician, Thomas Esser (the te in teTeX), one just has to specify the appropriate options in texmf.cnf to restrict file access, both read and write.

For example

shell_escape = f
openout_any = p
openin_any = p

In this manner one can put restrictions on what TeX can do in the manner of sandboxing. It's fairly rudimentary but certainly effective!

..it is a programming language with no security model..

I'm not convinced this is the responsibility of the language, should this not be an issue with the platform, for example languages such as C++, FORTRAN 90 etc say nothing about "security", whereas the Java platform does.

...or even code signing...

I'm not sure code-signing is helpful (this is a general statement) as it doesn't prevent something bad being done, just who you trust to do it!

With other constraints such as memory usage and cpu time (from the shell), you can make TeX suprisingly bullet proof. One of it's advantages in this respect is that it is a straightforward, linear and deterministic system.