Until I realized how little about high technology the readers of the ABC website (and probably their viewers as well) I was utterly baffled as to why they considered this news. It's complete nonsense.
Hmmm... Someone's web site is recording the IP addresses of the posters. So what? I'm currently engaged in the process of collecting enough AOL CDs to build a parabolic reflector to use the sun's light to write my name on the surface of the moon, and I'm already about halfway there. Almost three-quarters of the way there if I elected to use all the CDs from the other online services as well. With literally geologic epochs-worth of free online time for dozens of providers, it's far far far too easy to come from dozens of places at once. Trying to say that it will keep people from hiding their identities, I'm sad to have to say, demonstrates an incredible naivete. (Bad Rob! No biscuit for you!) For that matter, it will *not* let people track down the "real identities" of posters, since no ISP who wants to stay in buisness will ever give out the personal details of their customers without a court order.
There is only one thing that is accomplished by posting the IP address of the author... It makes it very clear to them that if they decide to troll or post a load of flame bait, that people will have their IP address and time and can send emails of complaint to their ISP. (You would be suprised at both how many web-boards don't log IP address information, as well as how many users don't realize how truly available that information actually is to the moderator of an online forum. Most of the truly awful trolls will play in other pastures once they realize that they could lose their internet account, not to mention get into a lot of trouble with their parents for their actions.
I'd like to inform you all that this will shortly become a moot point.
I have just recently filed for a patent on electro-radiant emissions, also known as "visible light". I hereby request you stop infringing upon my patent immediately by deactivating or disabling devices which emit the patented emissions, including all desk lamps, ceiling lights, flashlights, and especially computer monitors and televisions until such time as you have contacted my office and made suitable arrangements to pay your franchising fee as a new registered producer of visible light emissions.
It certainly seems like this could put some thistles into the shorts of the people over at CDDB. I've never thought it was particularly honest of them to take what was initially a free project put together by people who (it can be assumed) expected that the information they were entering would stay free, and decide they should claim exclusive rights to it all and declare all those insane restrictions and requiring people to practically give them ad space on people's desktops. With any luck the further rulings will sort this out, probably not for the better of CDDB, but I'm sure they'll certainly act like this is the worst thing since Eve's apple, no matter what happens in court.
...in this case is the principal. According to the news article, he has sought the advice of legal counsel, and apparently this just applied more fools to the situation.
The principal claims that this use of the SSN is not in violation of federal law because it is encrypted.
1. A bar code is an encoding mechanism, not an encryption mechanism. There is a huge difference.
2. The federal law in question that created the SSNs in the first place does not have *any* tenet in it that I could see that says it's okay to use the number for things outside of the Social Security system provided that it's encrypted properly. It says rather flatly that it's not supposed to be used for this purpose.
Frankly, I'd be lying to you all if I said that I didn't think that both the principal of this school AND his supposed legal counsel (I think he's just lying) are complete and utter fools.
Let me assure the narrow minded self-righteous twits out there that you *can* get raided without ever breaking into a single system. The FBI has a real "thing" for acting rashly on next to no actual evidence. Usually the less accurate their information, the more irrational their reaction.
Personally, I think ESR has really stepped over the g*****n line this time. I do "real work" and I was at DefCon. He needs to take his ego and stuff it back into his pants for awhile before he completely burns off all his reputation capital and screws over the Open Source Initiative altogether.
Vranesovich isn't blocking links from other sites... AntiOnline is just plain broken. I really doubt that he'll be feeding reporters from ComputerWorld some bullshit story about how he easily weathered the DoS attack they're probably getting right now. (Search ComputerWorld Magazines's website, and you'll see some really OBVIOUS self-aggrandizing stories in there from where JP has clearly fed reporters exactly what he wants them to print.) JP, is IMHO, a charlatan of the worst sort.
I'm seriously considering sending them documentation as well as configuration file for the Toshiba notebooks I've installed Linux on around the office. I'm writing this right now on a 740CDT, and I just bought a 2545XCDT for myself. The only thing I haven't been able to get working on either one is the internal modem, but at least on the 2545XCDT it appears to be a PCI modem. I suppose that means I'll have to read some web pages. *chuckle* The only problem I've had so far with the 2545XCDT is that the floppy drive's controller is apparently just a wee bit deviated from the norm, enough so to cause the occasional FDC reply error when you try to read files from disk. (If anyone knows about this, pipe up). I'm going to set up pages for both the 740CDT and the 2545XCDT shortly and add them to the Linux Laptop Page, but I'm giving Toshiba a crack at them as well (provided I can understand their reply emails. *chuckle*)
First off, about the portscanning... YES, you will quickly get the idea that it's not safe to have a *nix machine running for more than a week without going through the basics of wrapping your login mechanisms and disabling unneccessary services, because on average three and five connections to commonly exploitable services will come in per day as all the lamers blindly scan the 24.0.0.0/8 CIDR block with their super-kool 'sploits. You will also be portscanned if you call tech support with a problem, at least that's the way it is with Intermedia in Nashville, and several other areas as well. Literally any ports responding at all will get your IP reported to the Abuse Team, and they're still working on getting their sh*t together. (I had my connection cut off for running *sshd* by some woman who I can only assume was undergoing severe hormonal distress. You can't be that big of a bitch all the time and keep a job in most places.) Note that they also seem to only scan *nix-used ports, not windows ones. (I find this rather abusive in and of itself.) The message seems to be, "Complain and we'll try to get rid of you because it's faster than fixing the problem."
NFR does *not* scale well enough to be used for something like a cablemodem network. Period. With a just a heavily used 100Base-T segment on a PII-400 with 256Mb of RAM it simply can't keep up with what it needs to analyze. (Although if you need a nearly turnkey IDS, and you're not passing *insane* amounts of traffic, it's definitely worth checking it out, because it's pretty obsessive about details.)
My suggestion to folks is to a) not abuse things by trying to set up 0-day warez sites and etc., b) turn off the services you don't need and wrap the rest on *nix and windows users c) STOP RUNNING WAREZED WINGATE!@#$! and d) everyone block ICMP (screw fragment_needed packets--if you actually find a site that emits them, let me know! I've been looking for *years*.) since a lot of the lamers don't even know that their speed scanners won't probe anything it doesn't think is up (because it pings it first).
...and always remember: A little common sense goes a long way, but an idiot can go further if you drop them from a high-enough precipice.
[To Malda] Don't feel bad dewd. It's not just you. Gnome-session is quite a bit broken. Calling gnome a one-point-oh release was simply a big mistake. It's still at about zero-point-nine-two IMHO. The best thing I can suggest is to rebuild gnome-libs-1.0.9 to the latest (and the rest of the stuff to latest versions actually) from source, and then add a line before it in your ~/.xinitrc to delete the stale ~/.gnome/.gnome-smproxy-* file that screws things up horribly. By doing that I have at least gotten it to reliably start the panel (but I still have to use mini-commander to start E).
I will say this though, if you never logout of X and just use the screen locker, it seems to be less of a problem that gnome-session never seems to be able to start everything right without 'rm -rf ~/.gnome', and a *very* pleasing to the eye desktop.
(Please folks, don't waste your time and mine making guesses as to "non-standard" installation locations. Everything was built with the default prefix of/usr/local, including the compiler and binutils.)
One thing that I did find the most useful on rootshell.com was one of their banner ads. http://www.my-mug.com has a just about everything you might find in a gift shop with a surface flat and smooth enough to draw on for sale, and they let you suppply the graphics through a CGI. Thankfully, they let you know in advance what the idea size of the image should be, and you can order single items just as easily as bulk. The site certainly seems like a good place to start if you're thinking about making some smart-arsed novelty item and don't feel like shelling out $$$ for a minimum lot that would leave you swamped in coffee mugs with the name of your website misspelled.;)
(for example... I have a "Hacker Inside" logo that's just begging to become a front license tag on my car...)
I can't believe that Microsoft has the balls to blatantly try to compare ITSEC to TCSEC, and then relate that to their product.
Problem #1: Just because two grades of security are nearly equivalent, does not mean you can interpret that everything (or anything, actually) that applies towards one has the same meaning towards the other. You either have a C2 rating, or you don't have a C2 rating. I'm pretty sure that if I ran a computer store, and had a bunch of technicians who had graduated from the local community college specializing in desktop PC construction and repair, that I would be in the middle of a lawsuit if I tried to advertise that that was equivalent to an A+ Certification.
Problem #2: On MicroSoft's blurb page, they list the certification level of NT 3.5. Who uses that anymore? What does it have to do with 4.0?
Problem #3: Finally, the big issue is that the level of certification they claim to have reached is not just weakened, but completely invalid if the machine has a network card, modem, or other remote access device in it, or even something as simple as a floppy drive. What do people who would be attracted to this kind of jibber-jabber get NT for? So they can put their super-secret company resources on a network and have it be "safe".
I have seen Microsoft do some lame things to try to make their product look like more than it really is, but this insults my intelligence as a professional.
Maybe I should make myself clearer then. *I* am one of the people who goes to the meetings in Nashville, and I am pretty sure that none of the regulars from either group were particularly traumatized by either of those films, dig?
If you'd like a good, solid definition of "lame" maing unfounded defamatory accusations about a group of people you don't know anything first-hand about definitely qualifies for one.
These things and several more were fixed in Slackware 3.6... Where have you been?
Furthermore, RH 5.2 still attempts to install everything under the sun fully open and accessible by the Internet from it's default installation. People who live in glass houses should not be throwing stones.
Blaming one's incompetence as a system administrator on the distribution you run is lame. If you can't keep your own systems up to date, you have only yourself to blame. In any case, how hard is it for someone to type./configure --help and/or./configure && make && make install?
The "Web of Trust" that keeps getting mentioned is not just some catch phrase we're bandying about. It is the mechanism by which we avoid the problems you're talking about of knowing which is the right key. That's the whole point of people being able to sign each other's keys. Let's say you have to decide on whether or not the key you downloaded was the right one, you'd want to start by looking at the names of the other people who signed the key that the document was signed with. If you don't know for sure that those are their keys, you can trace outwards further until you reach a signature used by someone you *do* know and trust.
It sounds a little far fetched, but if you are a relatively widely recognized figure, you should get out there and try to exchange signatures with as many other widely recognized people that you trust as you can deal with. I know it sounds irrational to try to find an associative link between yourself and various software developers, yet people play "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" (or whatever it's called) all the time. It's not as hard as it looks.
Apparently there's a major problem in the Unix operating system (guffaw) that allows complete and total morons to make public announcements (particularly reporters already known for their utter cluelessness) about new "denial of service attacks" in Unix which are given wide acceptance for reasons which we have not yet been able to discern. Hopefully sniffing the air for the aroma of fertilizer will give us more clues soon.
This in turn causes hundreds of thousands of people around the globe who are just as clueless to announce that they agree this is a problem and are horrified by it and something must be done immediately.
...which in turn causes the several thousands or so who actually *do* know what the hell they're doing to have to spend the next few days answering email and phone calls, attending meetings, and sending out faxes to people setting them straight and telling them to calm down, instead of doing their normally useful job tasks. This denies many companies the services of their properly employed security administrators.
Remember, folks, just because it's on a web site, doesn't mean it's not complete and utter bulls**t.
You know, I would take this whole thing seriously if it weren't for the fact that the entire staff of ABC are so disconnected they might as well be luddites. They really made asses of themselves with that report.
It's not just you. I'm getting it as well. Considering that this is the only thing out of the entire mess of apps that I use which rely on the 1.1.x libraries which malfunctions like this, I'm inclined to blame X11amp.
Hi there. I'm a Slackware user, and I'm here to say that you don't know what you're talking about.
I can actually compile Gnome from CVS, because I know what packages have to be installed, and in what order, and even the proper phase of the moon.
However, none of this changes the fact that the new release of X11amp is *terribly* unstable, and IMHO, quite unuseable. Most of the time it won't even draw a window, but instead chooses to die and give an X error.
On the other hand, GQmpeg said very plainly in the README's that it required the 1.0.x libraries, yet it compiled without a whimper and runs beautifully with gtk+/glib-1.1.4 and imlib 1.9.2. Go figure.
Furthermore, mpg123 (it's backend) 0.59q contains 3dNow! support for people like me who have K6-2 CPUs and binutils 2.9.1.0.19a. That means that mpg123 rolls back and forth between 3% and 8% of my total CPU.
Personally, I'll wait for the X11amp guys to attempt to compile their own code before I go back to trying to use the new version.
I assume you realize that your post very clearly applies to companies who've decided to apply for a patent on something that people had been doing for quite some time.
Give it up, man. You're just making yourself look like yet another dogmatic fool.
Frankly, I'm suprised that the RIAA hasn't already slapped SightNSound with a lawsuit merely for daring to attempt to muscle in on their turf. I would have thought that a protection racket like the RIAA would object strongly to even a small company trying to cut into their profits.
Slashdot Mirror
Until I realized how little about high technology the readers of the ABC website (and probably their viewers as well) I was utterly baffled as to why they considered this news. It's complete nonsense.
Hmmm... Someone's web site is recording the IP addresses of the posters. So what? I'm currently engaged in the process of collecting enough AOL CDs to build a parabolic reflector to use the sun's light to write my name on the surface of the moon, and I'm already about halfway there. Almost three-quarters of the way there if I elected to use all the CDs from the other online services as well. With literally geologic epochs-worth of free online time for dozens of providers, it's far far far too easy to come from dozens of places at once. Trying to say that it will keep people from hiding their identities, I'm sad to have to say, demonstrates an incredible naivete. (Bad Rob! No biscuit for you!) For that matter, it will *not* let people track down the "real identities" of posters, since no ISP who wants to stay in buisness will ever give out the personal details of their customers without a court order.
There is only one thing that is accomplished by posting the IP address of the author... It makes it very clear to them that if they decide to troll or post a load of flame bait, that people will have their IP address and time and can send emails of complaint to their ISP. (You would be suprised at both how many web-boards don't log IP address information, as well as how many users don't realize how truly available that information actually is to the moderator of an online forum. Most of the truly awful trolls will play in other pastures once they realize that they could lose their internet account, not to mention get into a lot of trouble with their parents for their actions.
Get over it folks.
I'd like to inform you all that this will shortly become a moot point.
I have just recently filed for a patent on electro-radiant emissions, also known as "visible light". I hereby request you stop infringing upon my patent immediately by deactivating or disabling devices which emit the patented emissions, including all desk lamps, ceiling lights, flashlights, and especially computer monitors and televisions until such time as you have contacted my office and made suitable arrangements to pay your franchising fee as a new registered producer of visible light emissions.
(No news is good news, right?)
It certainly seems like this could put some thistles into the shorts of the people over at CDDB. I've never thought it was particularly honest of them to take what was initially a free project put together by people who (it can be assumed) expected that the information they were entering would stay free, and decide they should claim exclusive rights to it all and declare all those insane restrictions and requiring people to practically give them ad space on people's desktops. With any luck the further rulings will sort this out, probably not for the better of CDDB, but I'm sure they'll certainly act like this is the worst thing since Eve's apple, no matter what happens in court.
...in this case is the principal. According to the news article, he has sought the advice of legal counsel, and apparently this just applied more fools to the situation.
The principal claims that this use of the SSN is not in violation of federal law because it is encrypted.
1. A bar code is an encoding mechanism, not an encryption mechanism. There is a huge difference.
2. The federal law in question that created the SSNs in the first place does not have *any* tenet in it that I could see that says it's okay to use the number for things outside of the Social Security system provided that it's encrypted properly. It says rather flatly that it's not supposed to be used for this purpose.
Frankly, I'd be lying to you all if I said that I didn't think that both the principal of this school AND his supposed legal counsel (I think he's just lying) are complete and utter fools.
Let me assure the narrow minded self-righteous twits out there that you *can* get raided without ever breaking into a single system. The FBI has a real "thing" for acting rashly on next to no actual evidence. Usually the less accurate their information, the more irrational their reaction.
Personally, I think ESR has really stepped over the g*****n line this time. I do "real work" and I was at DefCon. He needs to take his ego and stuff it back into his pants for awhile before he completely burns off all his reputation capital and screws over the Open Source Initiative altogether.
It was ADM and you're both idiots.
Vranesovich isn't blocking links from other sites... AntiOnline is just plain broken. I really doubt that he'll be feeding reporters from ComputerWorld some bullshit story about how he easily weathered the DoS attack they're probably getting right now. (Search ComputerWorld Magazines's website, and you'll see some really OBVIOUS self-aggrandizing stories in there from where JP has clearly fed reporters exactly what he wants them to print.) JP, is IMHO, a charlatan of the worst sort.
I'm seriously considering sending them documentation as well as configuration file for the Toshiba notebooks I've installed Linux on around the office. I'm writing this right now on a 740CDT, and I just bought a 2545XCDT for myself. The only thing I haven't been able to get working on either one is the internal modem, but at least on the 2545XCDT it appears to be a PCI modem. I suppose that means I'll have to read some web pages. *chuckle* The only problem I've had so far with the 2545XCDT is that the floppy drive's controller is apparently just a wee bit deviated from the norm, enough so to cause the occasional FDC reply error when you try to read files from disk. (If anyone knows about this, pipe up). I'm going to set up pages for both the 740CDT and the 2545XCDT shortly and add them to the Linux Laptop Page, but I'm giving Toshiba a crack at them as well (provided I can understand their reply emails. *chuckle*)
I have to correct a number of things here.
First off, about the portscanning... YES, you will quickly get the idea that it's not safe to have a *nix machine running for more than a week without going through the basics of wrapping your login mechanisms and disabling unneccessary services, because on average three and five connections to commonly exploitable services will come in per day as all the lamers blindly scan the 24.0.0.0/8 CIDR block with their super-kool 'sploits. You will also be portscanned if you call tech support with a problem, at least that's the way it is with Intermedia in Nashville, and several other areas as well. Literally any ports responding at all will get your IP reported to the Abuse Team, and they're still working on getting their sh*t together. (I had my connection cut off for running *sshd* by some woman who I can only assume was undergoing severe hormonal distress. You can't be that big of a bitch all the time and keep a job in most places.) Note that they also seem to only scan *nix-used ports, not windows ones. (I find this rather abusive in and of itself.) The message seems to be, "Complain and we'll try to get rid of you because it's faster than fixing the problem."
NFR does *not* scale well enough to be used for something like a cablemodem network. Period. With a just a heavily used 100Base-T segment on a PII-400 with 256Mb of RAM it simply can't keep up with what it needs to analyze. (Although if you need a nearly turnkey IDS, and you're not passing *insane* amounts of traffic, it's definitely worth checking it out, because it's pretty obsessive about details.)
My suggestion to folks is to a) not abuse things by trying to set up 0-day warez sites and etc., b) turn off the services you don't need and wrap the rest on *nix and windows users c) STOP RUNNING WAREZED WINGATE!@#$! and d) everyone block ICMP (screw fragment_needed packets--if you actually find a site that emits them, let me know! I've been looking for *years*.) since a lot of the lamers don't even know that their speed scanners won't probe anything it doesn't think is up (because it pings it first).
...and always remember: A little common sense goes a long way, but an idiot can go further if you drop them from a high-enough precipice.
Some of us arent't running stale RPMS.
/usr/local, including the compiler and binutils.)
[To Malda]
Don't feel bad dewd. It's not just you. Gnome-session is quite a bit broken. Calling gnome a one-point-oh release was simply a big mistake. It's still at about zero-point-nine-two IMHO. The best thing I can suggest is to rebuild gnome-libs-1.0.9 to the latest (and the rest of the stuff to latest versions actually) from source, and then add a line before it in your ~/.xinitrc to delete the stale ~/.gnome/.gnome-smproxy-* file that screws things up horribly. By doing that I have at least gotten it to reliably start the panel (but I still have to use mini-commander to start E).
I will say this though, if you never logout of X and just use the screen locker, it seems to be less of a problem that gnome-session never seems to be able to start everything right without 'rm -rf ~/.gnome', and a *very* pleasing to the eye desktop.
(Please folks, don't waste your time and mine making guesses as to "non-standard" installation locations. Everything was built with the default prefix of
One thing that I did find the most useful on rootshell.com was one of their banner ads. http://www.my-mug.com has a just about everything you might find in a gift shop with a surface flat and smooth enough to draw on for sale, and they let you suppply the graphics through a CGI. Thankfully, they let you know in advance what the idea size of the image should be, and you can order single items just as easily as bulk. The site certainly seems like a good place to start if you're thinking about making some smart-arsed novelty item and don't feel like shelling out $$$ for a minimum lot that would leave you swamped in coffee mugs with the name of your website misspelled. ;)
(for example... I have a "Hacker Inside" logo that's just begging to become a front license tag on my car...)
I can't believe that Microsoft has the balls to blatantly try to compare ITSEC to TCSEC, and then relate that to their product.
Problem #1: Just because two grades of security are nearly equivalent, does not mean you can interpret that everything (or anything, actually) that applies towards one has the same meaning towards the other. You either have a C2 rating, or you don't have a C2 rating. I'm pretty sure that if I ran a computer store, and had a bunch of technicians who had graduated from the local community college specializing in desktop PC construction and repair, that I would be in the middle of a lawsuit if I tried to advertise that that was equivalent to an A+ Certification.
Problem #2: On MicroSoft's blurb page, they list the certification level of NT 3.5. Who uses that anymore? What does it have to do with 4.0?
Problem #3: Finally, the big issue is that the level of certification they claim to have reached is not just weakened, but completely invalid if the machine has a network card, modem, or other remote access device in it, or even something as simple as a floppy drive. What do people who would be attracted to this kind of jibber-jabber get NT for? So they can put their super-secret company resources on a network and have it be "safe".
I have seen Microsoft do some lame things to try to make their product look like more than it really is, but this insults my intelligence as a professional.
Maybe I should make myself clearer then. *I* am one of the people who goes to the meetings in Nashville, and I am pretty sure that none of the regulars from either group were particularly traumatized by either of those films, dig?
If you'd like a good, solid definition of "lame" maing unfounded defamatory accusations about a group of people you don't know anything first-hand about definitely qualifies for one.
I hate to burst your self-righteous little bubble, but the Atlanta and Nashville groups were both meeting long before "Hackers" hit the theaters.
Why did you have these services turned on in the first place if you were not using them?
These things and several more were fixed in Slackware 3.6... Where have you been?
Furthermore, RH 5.2 still attempts to install everything under the sun fully open and accessible by the Internet from it's default installation. People who live in glass houses should not be throwing stones.
I will say this again.
Blaming one's incompetence as a system administrator on the distribution you run is lame. If you can't keep your own systems up to date, you have only yourself to blame. In any case, how hard is it for someone to type ./configure --help and/or ./configure && make && make install?
You *CLEARLY* have not read the documentation.
The "Web of Trust" that keeps getting mentioned is not just some catch phrase we're bandying about. It is the mechanism by which we avoid the problems you're talking about of knowing which is the right key. That's the whole point of people being able to sign each other's keys. Let's say you have to decide on whether or not the key you downloaded was the right one, you'd want to start by looking at the names of the other people who signed the key that the document was signed with. If you don't know for sure that those are their keys, you can trace outwards further until you reach a signature used by someone you *do* know and trust.
It sounds a little far fetched, but if you are a relatively widely recognized figure, you should get out there and try to exchange signatures with as many other widely recognized people that you trust as you can deal with. I know it sounds irrational to try to find an associative link between yourself and various software developers, yet people play "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" (or whatever it's called) all the time. It's not as hard as it looks.
Apparently there's a major problem in the Unix operating system (guffaw) that allows complete and total morons to make public announcements (particularly reporters already known for their utter cluelessness) about new "denial of service attacks" in Unix which are given wide acceptance for reasons which we have not yet been able to discern. Hopefully sniffing the air for the aroma of fertilizer will give us more clues soon.
This in turn causes hundreds of thousands of people around the globe who are just as clueless to announce that they agree this is a problem and are horrified by it and something must be done immediately.
...which in turn causes the several thousands or so who actually *do* know what the hell they're doing to have to spend the next few days answering email and phone calls, attending meetings, and sending out faxes to people setting them straight and telling them to calm down, instead of doing their normally useful job tasks. This denies many companies the services of their properly employed security administrators.
Remember, folks, just because it's on a web site, doesn't mean it's not complete and utter bulls**t.
You know, I would take this whole thing seriously if it weren't for the fact that the entire staff of ABC are so disconnected they might as well be luddites. They really made asses of themselves with that report.
It's not just you. I'm getting it as well. Considering that this is the only thing out of the entire mess of apps that I use which rely on the 1.1.x libraries which malfunctions like this, I'm inclined to blame X11amp.
Hi there. I'm a Slackware user, and I'm here to say that you don't know what you're talking about.
I can actually compile Gnome from CVS, because I know what packages have to be installed, and in what order, and even the proper phase of the moon.
However, none of this changes the fact that the new release of X11amp is *terribly* unstable, and IMHO, quite unuseable. Most of the time it won't even draw a window, but instead chooses to die and give an X error.
On the other hand, GQmpeg said very plainly in the README's that it required the 1.0.x libraries, yet it compiled without a whimper and runs beautifully with gtk+/glib-1.1.4 and imlib 1.9.2. Go figure.
Furthermore, mpg123 (it's backend) 0.59q contains 3dNow! support for people like me who have K6-2 CPUs and binutils 2.9.1.0.19a. That means that mpg123 rolls back and forth between 3% and 8% of my total CPU.
Personally, I'll wait for the X11amp guys to attempt to compile their own code before I go back to trying to use the new version.
I assume you realize that your post very clearly applies to companies who've decided to apply for a patent on something that people had been doing for quite some time.
Give it up, man. You're just making yourself look like yet another dogmatic fool.
Frankly, I'm suprised that the RIAA hasn't already
slapped SightNSound with a lawsuit merely for daring to attempt to muscle in on their turf. I would have thought that a protection racket like the RIAA would object strongly to even a small company trying to cut into their profits.