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Slashback: OpenDocuments, RFID Passports, Firefox Celebration
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.
The new OpenDocument Fellowship is working with a petition to get Microsoft to implement the format. SIGN IT! http://www.opendocumentfellowship.org/petition/
Jay | http://oldos.org
For example, I've downloaded 10 myself - I'm sure many others have too.
There's no way to compare these numbers to the main competition (IE), so I'm not celebrating much myself.
ps First Post!?!
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
Indeed, if there's one thing that we can learn from this whole OpenDocument debacle, it's that we should instead use LaTeX and plaintext.
Plaintext emails and memos work just fine. LaTeX is fantastic for more complex documents. And you can even output PDFs of documents, if you really want to make viewing easy and exact.
These new technologies seem to bring nothing but problems, especially when the existing formats work so well.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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
I hardly think this will be a big issue in the election for Massachusetts voters, but if it becomes one, this will be a huge way to get non-techies to identify problems with the Microsoft monopoly. If this issue somehow becomes a big (if not the biggest) factor in this election, we can expect ODF to come up in elections all over the place.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
I read the text of the passport release earlier, and they claim to have addressed the privacy concerns but really haven't. The biggest problem is that a criminal could very easily grab all of your identity information without your knowledge. They assert that (I'm paraphrasing) "since the chip has no internal power source, it can't broadcast your identity". But that is a canard -- anyone who wants to read out your identity can simply use the same high-gain antenna to beam power your way as to pick up your passport's readout. Of course the protocols will be discovered -- at least by the people you don't want reading your passport.
All the more reason to stick your passport in the microwave with your new shirts from Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, bop on over to www.house.gov and send a quick note of outrage to your representative!
This may sound dumb but....
If you assume that this happens with all software, then you just have to assume total downloads is an arbitary figure and use it to compare with other downloads?
Standford engineers have discovered...
"Standford on iTunes"
It appears ScuttleMonkey didn't just make a typo, but just has no clue that it is actually Stanford not Standford...
Read the link.
1 05739574
Quote: Microsoft has stated that they will support the OpenDocument format in MS Office if there is customer demand:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051016
The purpose of this petition is to quantify the customer demand for OpenDocument support. EndQuote
Jay | http://oldos.org
This comes up every time such stats are mentioned.
First of all, they don't track downloads via the update feature of Firefox.
Second, while you've downloaded it ten times, there are many businesses and schools who have installed it on hundreds of workstations from a single download. So it may be one of those things that balances out in the end.
And finally, it's not so much about the exact number. It's about the general magnitude of the number. Even if they're 10 million downloads off either way, that's still an impressive number of people to reach.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It means somewhere between 1 and 99,999,991 users.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
For Flock to not open source their browser? By basing it on Firefox, doesn't the Mozilla Public License require that the changes to the source be distributed?
This comes with the recent news that Flock has also decided to open source their browser.
They had a choice?
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Hold on....The Democrats are opposed to ODF.....supporting a big business....thought....only.....Republicans....did that....
Damn. This must be Bush's fault somehow....
-john
Slashdot: you'll not find a more wretched collection of villainy and disreputable types...
100 million downloads is a good thing, but what exactly does it mean?
Well I didnt download it the other 999,999,990 times, so I gues it means that firefox kick ass!
serenity now!
Pacheco expressed his concern that OpenDocument would not be usable by people with disabilities, and his committee is holding a hearing at the State House to discuss the format. However, it's not clear whether Pacheco's moves will have any effect.
If he thinks that the closed format of MSOffice is usable by people with disabilities he has another thought coming.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Even their website says "Copyright 2004" and their latest news item is dated 2003. Or has their site always been like that?
From the RFID passport link in the main article:
Based on that testing, the Department, in cooperation with the GPO,
will include an anti-skimming material in the front cover and spine of
the electronic passport that will mitigate the threat of skimming from
distances beyond the ten centimeters prescribed by the ISO 14443
technology, as long as the passport book is closed or nearly closed.
The Department will also implement Basic Access Control (BAC) to
mitigate further any potential threat of skimming or eavesdropping. BAC
recently has been adopted as a best practice by the ICAO New
Technologies Working Group and will soon be formally added to the ICAO
specifications. BAC utilizes a form of Personal Identification Number
(PIN) that must be physically read in order to unlock the data on the
chip. In this case, the PIN will be derived from the printed characters
from the second line of data on the Machine-Readable Zone that is
visibly printed on the passport data page. The BAC also results in the
communication between the chip and the reader being encrypted,
providing further protection.
There you have it - with an off-the-shelf reader you have to be within inches OR trick the user into opening the book, AND you have to type or scan in the encryption code.
This won't stop dishonest border guards from hiding a 2nd reader under their jacket and memorizing the secret codes, but it will stop the guy sitting in the row behind you on the airplane.
Now who was the wise guy who said only North Koreans needed RFID-enabled passports?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
The built-in RFID leak-protection mechanism is a good start but it's not nearly enough for the Truly Paranoid [TM].
Who will be the first to try to patent a passport wallet made out of aluminum foil?
Who will trademark the name Passport Protector [TM]?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
By displays pages correctly you mean "Is broken in the same ways IE is."
No. If you have x unknown amount of additional downloads that shouldn't be counted, and y number of installations that weren't counted, then the odds of x - y = 0 (the hypothesis that it "balances out in the end") seems extremely unlikely.
Why is there this fascination with using all kinds of contorted non-logic to try and derive statistics from data that just can't support it? If you don't have the facts, the right thing to do is hold your hands up and say "I don't know", and the wrong thing to do is say "well because we don't know how many we undercount by and how many we overcount by, we'll just sweep logic under the rug and pretend that it "balances out".
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Hah! As if Microsoft would even THINK ABOUT LaTeX. Look, Microsoft is struggling against (or is it US who are struggling against Microsoft for?) OpenDocument. LaTeX isn't even in their radar screen.
Besides, you forgot the reason for OpenDocument to exist: Inter-operability. And you also forgot its power: XML.
Anyone with an XML parser can read opendocument. But to read LaTeX, you need a complicated parser.
OpenDocument can be transformed into HTML with an XSLT template automatically. Heck, you could render OpenDocument with Internet Explorer! (With the appropriate XSL stylesheet, of course)
Also, any XML can be transformed into PDF via XSL:FO.
You could put a bunch of OpenDocument files and index them from with a simple program that supports XML.
The point of OpenDocument is that it's EASY to handle. The EZPublish content management system ALREADY supports importing and exporting of OpenDocument files. Heck, there's even a C++ IDE that can export the sourcefiles (syntax-highlighted) to OpenDocument.
I don't care how much you're fond of LaTeX. Is it powerful? Yes. But is it popular? Is it easy to implement?
Sorry, but I think you're stuck a few years behind.
I'm betting that it also doesn't count all of the installs from verious Linux venders. Auto-updated Redhat, gentoo, ...
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
I think a good idea would be for them to truly find out how many people are using it. Make it so that when you download it, you have to state how many people it's for. And to make that accurate, you should have to give your SSN or whatever your country's national ID number is, and the ID number of everyone who you claim will use it. Then they can strike any duplicates. To make sure people don't give it away and distort the number, they could make the file encrypted such that it will only run if you register it. To confirm you're not using someone else's number, they could set up centers at DMV's (Department of Motor Vehicles) where you can verify that it's you before you can register it (and they'd have computers you'd use to register your copy).
To prevent people from compiling it on their own, they could close the source so that you can only run it through the official installer and only that would be counted in the tallies. To verify transparency, they should put all the names and ID numbers in a central database that everyone can access so that independent agencies can verify the names and contact people to be sure they're actually using it. This could all be funded by selling the contact information in the database to direct marketing organizations (the legitimate ones, not the ones who harass you).
This is the only way to get an accurate, scientific count of the true number of users.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
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.
RFID's in passports are one of the dumbest anti-terrorism ideas to make it past the drawing board. It has already been demonstrated that so-called "short-range" RFID tags can be read up to 70 feet away with easily attainable current technology, the tools will only get more sensitive as time passes.
The "anti-skimming material" that the Dept of State references will make it harder to get exact bits off the RFID, but it sure won't stop someone from being able to at least tell if you have one of these RFID passports in your pocket.
Carrying your passport around with you (as you are required to do in most foreign countries) will be the equivalent of wearing a big sign on your back that says, "Get Your Grudge On! Kidnap Me! I'm an American!"
Short of sending hundreds of legit blank passports directly to Osama, I can't think of a passport plan likely to enable more terrorism than this cockamamie scheme.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Good point.
Of course this counter should only display INDETERMINATE.
In fact all counters can produce errors of this sort, so they should all display INDETERMINATE.
As a matter of fact, every counter in the entire world could have the same sort of errors, even clocks are not 100% correct, so every counter of any sort should simply display INDETERMINATE.
I mean if you can't guarantee 100% accuracy, then there is not point in even attempting to measure anything.
You should feel happy, you have made the world a better place.
(accidently posted this to someone who wasn't a moron)
This probably isn't very relevant -- I presume what you mean is that he sent it as a Microsoft Word document. Back in 1994 I remember that the .DOC format was more well known for being plain ASCII text --- it was a common extension for electronic software user manuals everywhere.
Somewhere along the line, Microsoft decided to make it the default extension for Microsoft Word. I'm not sure if it was used in Word for DOS, but Word for Windows certainly became much more popular than the DOS one had ever been for all sorts of reasons. One of them was perhaps that shortly after Word for Windows was released, wherever it was installed, people who double-clicked on a .doc file in Windows would then be opening it on Word... never mind that it was plain ASCII text.