We're seeing this on the Wine mailing list of late. winehq.org set up a forum, gatewayed with the old list, and the number of posts has gone through the roof. Because finally it's getting in all the people who aren't geeks, but are sick of Windows being flaky crap, so they're trying Linux (usually Ubuntu) and have just this one old Windows app they want to run. It's annoying a lot of the geeks, but is also generating lots of useful bug reports. And showing just how important World of Warcraft compatibility actually is for Linux adoption...
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Friday (UNN) -- Russian hackers have accepted EUR800,000 in donations from customers of Nordea, Sweden's largest bank, after a sophisticated "phishing" campaign recruited customers into downloading a Trojan horse program that recorded their account login details.
The Russians had looked up the definition of "hacker" in the Jargon File and been inspired to leverage the creative power of open source Free Software. The first campaign took place in August 2006 and was detected a month later, having affected around 250 Nordea customers.
The emails claimed to be from the Nordea Open Trojan Foundation, telling recipients to install an anti-spam and donation tool. Their computers were then infected by the Trojan HaxDoor.RMS.w32, which installs itself in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 and sends your passwords to its creators, but only after you have read through and accepted the GNU General Public License and checked the README file for known problems. The email also included full source code.
Swedish police traced the attacks to Russia by looking at the contact details, including address and phone number, included in the README. They have filed over 100 bugs on the creators' SourceForge project and joined the mailing lists on the grass-roots marketing and publicity site SpreadHaxDoor.com.
A Nordea spokesman said the attacks have "quietened down" after the initial influx last Autumn. "We are constantly looking at the security of our online banking and many different measures are taken. We are updating our systems behind the scenes. Many already run on enterprise Linux distributions, but we will be moving desktops to Linux as well for more efficient funds transfer with less reverse engineering required, and may recommend that our customers do the same."
The Trojan only affects computers running Windows. "For unsupported platforms, we have an 'honor system' which gives our details so you can send some money in," said a spokesman for the hacker group. "We hope this will help and encourage contributors interested in porting the Trojan to other operating environments."
A 32GB CF card costs around £75. A CF-IDE adapter costs about £1. Combine them for your old laptop (which is slow anyway) and you'll have a slow-but-cheap SSD.
I prefer FreeBSD. I saw/etc/rc.conf and that alone converted me to BSD. As a Unix, FreeBSD is just SO much nicer than the Linux kernel, which I really really hate and which pisses me off lots.
Then my wife came home from visiting a friend and asked if I could put Ubuntu 4.10 on her laptop. Because her friend's machine had... Frozen Bubble. Yes: Frozen Bubble is why I first tried Ubuntu.
Now I have an Ubuntu laptop because Linux supports the hardware less worse than FreeBSD. And the Debian-based packaging system is really pretty smooth, I must admit.
It's not about copyright - it's standing firm against non-free content.
And staying firm about licensing has granted the world a lot more genuinely free-content images than it would have had without them.
See all those annoying placeholder images? I've been adding a ton of 'em of late...
Wikipedia's had a run-in with the ACS just recently. Thankfully, we worked things out okay. It can be very useful to be the only top-ten website run by a nonprofit.
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, St. Petersburg, Florida (UNN) -- The Wikimedia Foundation®, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia®, the Free Cheap Encyclopedia(TM), will be introducing paid editing to all projects through the new Virgin Wikimedia® Corporation joint venture with Richard Branson.
A standard paid account will start at US$25 (EUR20 or £0.05) per month per user, with a discount of US$5 (EUR16 or £0.04) per month for users with over 2000 edits. The paid editing initiative was announced during the Foundation's Winter 2006/Q4 funding drive.
Wikipedia® is the number 9 website in the world, and the only website in the Alexa Top 20 run by a nonprofit. Despite its low overheads, with only six paid staff, the Foundation has had tremendous difficulty in keeping up with the ever-increasing demand for server hardware, not to mention the bandwidth bill for serving an average 150 megabytes per second, doubling every six months. Slow page loading and frequent downtime remain perennial problems.
"Advertising on Wikimedia® has been roundly rejected by the community," said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikimedia®, "even though we're missing out on about *sixty thousand goddamn dollars each and every frickin' day* by not having two Google text ads. But we got away with proving mathematically that the Virgin Unite logo in the fundraising banner was technically sponsorship and not 'advertising' per se, and as a bonus it shook off a couple of the most troublesome whiners from the Dutch and Italian Wikipedias®. And hey, we outlasted Enciclopedia Libre nicely. *We got the brand name, suckas*.
"We were so desperate for cash that we'd initially considered a rental scheme for volunteers, but Rob Church is still under twenty-one so can't legally work any street corner other than Piccadilly Circus, and Greg Maxwell got a little too excitable with his first rough trade customer once the ketamine wore off. Brion had to resort to the cattle prod. Very enthusiastic volunteer, though, Greg. Totally dedicated. But rest assured, we still hold out hope of finding a Wikipedian(TM) who's actually attractive to anyone anywhere. Cary already bought the wide-brimmed purple fedora and the cane."
The new account levels are:
* WikiFree(TM): You can get a free account by completing offers or reffering freinds to do the same. For an initial setup fee of five dollars (EUR4 or £0.01), you get ten article edits a month, six picture userboxes and one vanity article. * Sponsored Plus(TM): The new Sponsored Plus(TM) level gives free users more options, paid for by "PUNCH THE MONKEY!" adverti^Wsponsorship messages on pages, images and the 'Save page' button. After your five dollar setup fee, you get 100 edits a month, twelve picture userboxes and two vanity articles, one for yourself and one for your garage band. * WikiPaid(TM): The WikiPaid(TM) account, at twenty dollars a month, offers unlimited monthly edits, thirty picture userboxes, twenty edits per month in the Wikipedia®: page space, a vanity article each month and sponsorship messages only in the sitenotice banner. * WikiAdministrator(TM): WikiAdministrator(TM) powers are given to the most highly respected editors on Wikipedia®. For one hundred dollars a month (EUR80 or £0.20), you get all the paid user benefits, unlimited edits in the Wikipedia®: page space, smaller sponsorship messages in the sitenotice banner, immunity to CheckUser and droit de banstick in any edit war with a lesser editor.
Sponsored Plus(TM), WikiPaid(TM) and WikiAdministrator(TM) users can also create their own Wikistress meters and move adversaries' articles to Bad Jokes And Other Deleted Nonsense.
The new Virgin Wikimedia® Corporation is a for-profit joint venture between the Wikimedia Foundation® and Richard Branson's Virgin Group. The Foundation owns the trademarks and licenses them to the Corporation, and Virgin engineers run the server network and sell adverti market sponsorship. Wikipedia® remains
I'm living in Minefield (Firefox 3 nightlies) on Windows at present. The interface feels just like Firefox 2 except better. Lots of nice little touches and lots of work improving the plumbing.
We got Firefox as part of our new desktop build in the following manner. We'll be using similar methods to make sure they can't move us to Vista, ever.
1. Get Firefox onto desktops, even as a second option.
2. Make sure small groups of people use in-house web apps are written for Firefox and SeaMonkey, and specifically break in IE. This is easy: just write to standards.
We have one vital app for twenty people that was broken for six months in IE with no-one realising...
I notice that WordPress and Blogger themes are increasingly slightly broken in IE 6. It looks like Web 2.0 developers actually want standards-based rendering, and the IE users can get a non-sucky browser or just fuck off.
Alumina is a limited resource. Aluminium is 8% of the goddamn crust, so "run out" is a question of how hard it is to extract and how worth it that is. Remember that aluminium used to be a precious metal until the electrolytic process was discovered; if there's enough money in it, it'll be extracted.
The problem here is that Vista was heavily marketed as this thing with tons of eye candy, etc. So they can reasonably claim Microsoft's marketing was deceptive here. (I know, who'da thunk.) The pissed-of executive's memo would be a sufficient smoking gun to LART them thoroughly in the UK, dunno about in the US.
In the UK, such signs are actually illegal if they attempt to give the customer less than the law does. (Pointing this out mid-dispute is usually enough to get them to change their tune, particularly if they in fact pointed to it mid-dispute. http://www.tradingstandards.gov.uk/ is the best website ever.)
MORDOR, Washington, Friday (UnGadget) -- Microsoft today announced a set of carefully-phrased promises to appear more open about its business practices and technologies, so as to expand its reach through developers, partners, customers and competitors' wallets.
The interoperability principles and promises are an apparent, lengthy, reluctant, and necessary step for Microsoft's sudden efforts to fulfill the obligations outlined in the September 2007 judgment of the European Court of First Instance (CFI). And the hope of half a chance of getting OOXML through ISO.
"These pronouncements appear to be an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies and a significant expansion in apparent transparency," said Microsoft CEO Heave Stallmore. "While we've promised considerable progress over the past several years, today's announcement takes our virtual commitment to a new level.
"For the past thirty years, we have carefully shared misinformation with thousands of now-bankrupt partners around the world. By promoting greater interoperability, opportunity and choice, we hope to share even more of their information to our benefit."
To enable third-party products to connect to Microsoft products, Microsoft will publish for free!!! voluminous documentation, setting a new low in information per page, to contaminate developers with claimed knowledge for which their employers can later be sued, should they not cough up at what Microsoft considers reasonable and non-discriminatory (or not unreasonably so) terms. Open source developers may use these protocols too!!! precisely so long as they do not do anything that involves people not giving Microsoft money.
"The promises announced today by Microsoft will benefit the broader IT community," said Vomit Togel, head of Microsoft partner Perception Management, "where 'IT community' is defined as 'Microsoft partner.' This provides remarkable opportunity for IT consultants and increased choice of us in the marketplace."
Microsoft will expand industry outreach and dialog through an online Interoperability Forum and Fee Collection Channel. In addition, an initiative will address data exchange between widely deployed bank accounts.
"Sincerity is the key," says Microsoft founder Jill Bates III. "If we can fake that, we've got it made."
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq MNPLY) is the worldwide dominator in software, services and solutions that make people and businesses help it realise its full potential.
Oh, I dunno. Wine is already a better Windows than Vista - your old apps are actually much more likely to run properly under Wine. The sticking point for a lot of businesses to shift off Windows is some obscure piece of crapware that they utterly rely on (or think they do) but which they can't even find the programmer of any more. We have this situation at work - one piece of crapware from a dead company we currently rely on, and we run it under Wine. This is for production use in broadcast, by the way, a situation where it has to work and reliably. Saves us a Windows licence and makes our bosses love Linux just that little bit more.
It Depends. We have systems that are arranged in a long content chain. One machine sends data to the next machine, maybe by pull, maybe by push. Next machine does... something... with it, passes it to next machines. Maybe the developers talk to each other, or remember why their predecessor made the system do that, or maybe they don't. XML is really Just The Thing for the job. And the fact that it can be tweaked by a human (e.g. the sysadmin who has to fix a broken thing) is fantastically useful.
I've been using Minefield nightlies on Winders for a coupla months now. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Minefield/FF3 is just better than FF2 in every way you can think of - size, speed, UI tweaks (not big UI changes, but lots of little UI tweaks that make things just nicer). Some builds are crappy (as one would expect running HEAD), but I haven't had a really dodgy build in a while. I would go so far as to say: forget this beta, just get the Minefield nightly. ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/ is the place to go.
Slashdot Mirror
We're seeing this on the Wine mailing list of late. winehq.org set up a forum, gatewayed with the old list, and the number of posts has gone through the roof. Because finally it's getting in all the people who aren't geeks, but are sick of Windows being flaky crap, so they're trying Linux (usually Ubuntu) and have just this one old Windows app they want to run. It's annoying a lot of the geeks, but is also generating lots of useful bug reports. And showing just how important World of Warcraft compatibility actually is for Linux adoption ...
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Friday (UNN) -- Russian hackers have accepted EUR800,000 in donations from customers of Nordea, Sweden's largest bank, after a sophisticated "phishing" campaign recruited customers into downloading a Trojan horse program that recorded their account login details.
The Russians had looked up the definition of "hacker" in the Jargon File and been inspired to leverage the creative power of open source Free Software. The first campaign took place in August 2006 and was detected a month later, having affected around 250 Nordea customers.
The emails claimed to be from the Nordea Open Trojan Foundation, telling recipients to install an anti-spam and donation tool. Their computers were then infected by the Trojan HaxDoor.RMS.w32, which installs itself in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 and sends your passwords to its creators, but only after you have read through and accepted the GNU General Public License and checked the README file for known problems. The email also included full source code.
Swedish police traced the attacks to Russia by looking at the contact details, including address and phone number, included in the README. They have filed over 100 bugs on the creators' SourceForge project and joined the mailing lists on the grass-roots marketing and publicity site SpreadHaxDoor.com.
A Nordea spokesman said the attacks have "quietened down" after the initial influx last Autumn. "We are constantly looking at the security of our online banking and many different measures are taken. We are updating our systems behind the scenes. Many already run on enterprise Linux distributions, but we will be moving desktops to Linux as well for more efficient funds transfer with less reverse engineering required, and may recommend that our customers do the same."
The Trojan only affects computers running Windows. "For unsupported platforms, we have an 'honor system' which gives our details so you can send some money in," said a spokesman for the hacker group. "We hope this will help and encourage contributors interested in porting the Trojan to other operating environments."
Hackers nab 800,000 from Nordea Bank
The settlements have been for the fees incurred by the SFLC; so yes, the money will precisely go to further defence of free software.
A 32GB CF card costs around £75. A CF-IDE adapter costs about £1. Combine them for your old laptop (which is slow anyway) and you'll have a slow-but-cheap SSD.
I prefer FreeBSD. I saw /etc/rc.conf and that alone converted me to BSD. As a Unix, FreeBSD is just SO much nicer than the Linux kernel, which I really really hate and which pisses me off lots.
Then my wife came home from visiting a friend and asked if I could put Ubuntu 4.10 on her laptop. Because her friend's machine had ... Frozen Bubble. Yes: Frozen Bubble is why I first tried Ubuntu.
Now I have an Ubuntu laptop because Linux supports the hardware less worse than FreeBSD. And the Debian-based packaging system is really pretty smooth, I must admit.
Damn you, Frozen Bubble!
It's not about copyright - it's standing firm against non-free content. And staying firm about licensing has granted the world a lot more genuinely free-content images than it would have had without them. See all those annoying placeholder images? I've been adding a ton of 'em of late ...
Wikipedia's had a run-in with the ACS just recently. Thankfully, we worked things out okay. It can be very useful to be the only top-ten website run by a nonprofit.
One way the Wikimedia sites could really benefit from this is being able to use the original images from the papers.
Placing important papers on Wikisource would also be a good thing.
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, St. Petersburg, Florida (UNN) -- The Wikimedia Foundation®, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia®, the Free Cheap Encyclopedia(TM), will be introducing paid editing to all projects through the new Virgin Wikimedia® Corporation joint venture with Richard Branson.
A standard paid account will start at US$25 (EUR20 or £0.05) per month per user, with a discount of US$5 (EUR16 or £0.04) per month for users with over 2000 edits. The paid editing initiative was announced during the Foundation's Winter 2006/Q4 funding drive.
Wikipedia® is the number 9 website in the world, and the only website in the Alexa Top 20 run by a nonprofit. Despite its low overheads, with only six paid staff, the Foundation has had tremendous difficulty in keeping up with the ever-increasing demand for server hardware, not to mention the bandwidth bill for serving an average 150 megabytes per second, doubling every six months. Slow page loading and frequent downtime remain perennial problems.
"Advertising on Wikimedia® has been roundly rejected by the community," said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikimedia®, "even though we're missing out on about *sixty thousand goddamn dollars each and every frickin' day* by not having two Google text ads. But we got away with proving mathematically that the Virgin Unite logo in the fundraising banner was technically sponsorship and not 'advertising' per se, and as a bonus it shook off a couple of the most troublesome whiners from the Dutch and Italian Wikipedias®. And hey, we outlasted Enciclopedia Libre nicely. *We got the brand name, suckas*.
"We were so desperate for cash that we'd initially considered a rental scheme for volunteers, but Rob Church is still under twenty-one so can't legally work any street corner other than Piccadilly Circus, and Greg Maxwell got a little too excitable with his first rough trade customer once the ketamine wore off. Brion had to resort to the cattle prod. Very enthusiastic volunteer, though, Greg. Totally dedicated. But rest assured, we still hold out hope of finding a Wikipedian(TM) who's actually attractive to anyone anywhere. Cary already bought the wide-brimmed purple fedora and the cane."
The new account levels are:
* WikiFree(TM): You can get a free account by completing offers or reffering freinds to do the same. For an initial setup fee of five dollars (EUR4 or £0.01), you get ten article edits a month, six picture userboxes and one vanity article.
* Sponsored Plus(TM): The new Sponsored Plus(TM) level gives free users more options, paid for by "PUNCH THE MONKEY!" adverti^Wsponsorship messages on pages, images and the 'Save page' button. After your five dollar setup fee, you get 100 edits a month, twelve picture userboxes and two vanity articles, one for yourself and one for your garage band.
* WikiPaid(TM): The WikiPaid(TM) account, at twenty dollars a month, offers unlimited monthly edits, thirty picture userboxes, twenty edits per month in the Wikipedia®: page space, a vanity article each month and sponsorship messages only in the sitenotice banner.
* WikiAdministrator(TM): WikiAdministrator(TM) powers are given to the most highly respected editors on Wikipedia®. For one hundred dollars a month (EUR80 or £0.20), you get all the paid user benefits, unlimited edits in the Wikipedia®: page space, smaller sponsorship messages in the sitenotice banner, immunity to CheckUser and droit de banstick in any edit war with a lesser editor.
Sponsored Plus(TM), WikiPaid(TM) and WikiAdministrator(TM) users can also create their own Wikistress meters and move adversaries' articles to Bad Jokes And Other Deleted Nonsense.
The new Virgin Wikimedia® Corporation is a for-profit joint venture between the Wikimedia Foundation® and Richard Branson's Virgin Group. The Foundation owns the trademarks and licenses them to the Corporation, and Virgin engineers run the server network and sell adverti market sponsorship. Wikipedia® remains
I'm living in Minefield (Firefox 3 nightlies) on Windows at present. The interface feels just like Firefox 2 except better. Lots of nice little touches and lots of work improving the plumbing.
What you've described is an on-chip dongle.
We got Firefox as part of our new desktop build in the following manner. We'll be using similar methods to make sure they can't move us to Vista, ever.
...
1. Get Firefox onto desktops, even as a second option.
2. Make sure small groups of people use in-house web apps are written for Firefox and SeaMonkey, and specifically break in IE. This is easy: just write to standards.
We have one vital app for twenty people that was broken for six months in IE with no-one realising
I notice that WordPress and Blogger themes are increasingly slightly broken in IE 6. It looks like Web 2.0 developers actually want standards-based rendering, and the IE users can get a non-sucky browser or just fuck off.
Alumina is a limited resource. Aluminium is 8% of the goddamn crust, so "run out" is a question of how hard it is to extract and how worth it that is. Remember that aluminium used to be a precious metal until the electrolytic process was discovered; if there's enough money in it, it'll be extracted.
The problem here is that Vista was heavily marketed as this thing with tons of eye candy, etc. So they can reasonably claim Microsoft's marketing was deceptive here. (I know, who'da thunk.) The pissed-of executive's memo would be a sufficient smoking gun to LART them thoroughly in the UK, dunno about in the US.
In the UK, such signs are actually illegal if they attempt to give the customer less than the law does. (Pointing this out mid-dispute is usually enough to get them to change their tune, particularly if they in fact pointed to it mid-dispute. http://www.tradingstandards.gov.uk/ is the best website ever.)
MORDOR, Washington, Friday (UnGadget) -- Microsoft today announced a set of carefully-phrased promises to appear more open about its business practices and technologies, so as to expand its reach through developers, partners, customers and competitors' wallets.
The interoperability principles and promises are an apparent, lengthy, reluctant, and necessary step for Microsoft's sudden efforts to fulfill the obligations outlined in the September 2007 judgment of the European Court of First Instance (CFI). And the hope of half a chance of getting OOXML through ISO.
"These pronouncements appear to be an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies and a significant expansion in apparent transparency," said Microsoft CEO Heave Stallmore. "While we've promised considerable progress over the past several years, today's announcement takes our virtual commitment to a new level.
"For the past thirty years, we have carefully shared misinformation with thousands of now-bankrupt partners around the world. By promoting greater interoperability, opportunity and choice, we hope to share even more of their information to our benefit."
To enable third-party products to connect to Microsoft products, Microsoft will publish for free!!! voluminous documentation, setting a new low in information per page, to contaminate developers with claimed knowledge for which their employers can later be sued, should they not cough up at what Microsoft considers reasonable and non-discriminatory (or not unreasonably so) terms. Open source developers may use these protocols too!!! precisely so long as they do not do anything that involves people not giving Microsoft money.
"The promises announced today by Microsoft will benefit the broader IT community," said Vomit Togel, head of Microsoft partner Perception Management, "where 'IT community' is defined as 'Microsoft partner.' This provides remarkable opportunity for IT consultants and increased choice of us in the marketplace."
Microsoft will expand industry outreach and dialog through an online Interoperability Forum and Fee Collection Channel. In addition, an initiative will address data exchange between widely deployed bank accounts.
"Sincerity is the key," says Microsoft founder Jill Bates III. "If we can fake that, we've got it made."
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq MNPLY) is the worldwide dominator in software, services and solutions that make people and businesses help it realise its full potential.
Actually, they encompass Solaris as well - IBM is Sun's biggest reseller.
Yes, because after you can't play it you'll spend your time doing useful things like failing to understand the words "more likely" on Slashdot. HTH!
Oh, I dunno. Wine is already a better Windows than Vista - your old apps are actually much more likely to run properly under Wine. The sticking point for a lot of businesses to shift off Windows is some obscure piece of crapware that they utterly rely on (or think they do) but which they can't even find the programmer of any more. We have this situation at work - one piece of crapware from a dead company we currently rely on, and we run it under Wine. This is for production use in broadcast, by the way, a situation where it has to work and reliably. Saves us a Windows licence and makes our bosses love Linux just that little bit more.
Mediawiki needs a backing store based on a version control system, e.g. git. Then backups and replication are a simple matter of pulling a given tag.
It Depends. We have systems that are arranged in a long content chain. One machine sends data to the next machine, maybe by pull, maybe by push. Next machine does ... something ... with it, passes it to next machines. Maybe the developers talk to each other, or remember why their predecessor made the system do that, or maybe they don't. XML is really Just The Thing for the job. And the fact that it can be tweaked by a human (e.g. the sysadmin who has to fix a broken thing) is fantastically useful.
You must read this.
I've been using Minefield nightlies on Winders for a coupla months now. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Minefield/FF3 is just better than FF2 in every way you can think of - size, speed, UI tweaks (not big UI changes, but lots of little UI tweaks that make things just nicer). Some builds are crappy (as one would expect running HEAD), but I haven't had a really dodgy build in a while. I would go so far as to say: forget this beta, just get the Minefield nightly. ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/ is the place to go.