Complaining about slashdot, especially the 'groupthink,' is an excellent example of slashdot groupthink. And you thought you had this place figured out, didn't you?
We wrote a large body of building automation software subsystems in OS/2. There was no easy way to provide the same functionality in Windows, so it was never cost effective to port it.
To this day, we keep the central routing server and all the subsystems in OS/2 boxes that are treated like embedded control systems, and have written Windows 2K-based interface code that proxies everything as BACnet devices.
OS/2 was a good combination of modern OS services (named pipes, threads, etc.) and easy development. Given how simple it was to access serial ports, we could easily interface via DigiBoard multiplexers and such, and could write a new system driver (including reverse engineering time) in less than six months.
I'm the primary contact for IBM in our office, so they've been flooding me with information about porting these apps to Linux, which sadly, may never be cost effective.
I am *very* sorry to see this event, even though I fully understand and appreciate all the factors that led to OS/2's demise. It's like watching a very dependable ship being sent to the bottom of the ocean because it's too expensive to keep it afloat.
The article is only about the dawn of.mp3, but within less than three years, the RIAA & co. had configured themselves to set the Evil Bit whenever they saw the.mp3 extension. Or at least, that was my experience.
In 1998, I started a little fan site detailing the history of a country group -- I won't name them, but they became famous and then infamous within the span of 5 years. As part of the site, I included some low-quality.mp3's of the group's orignal sound, from some out-of-print indie albums. But before you could say "infringement", I got a Cease And Desist letter from the group's lawyers. I capitulated, but the affair proved the perfect grist for a story in the local alternative newsweekly [dallasobserver.com] -- they saw the group as having sold out to Nashville, with the C&D just further proof.
But check out what the group's manager said about the nascent format: Senior Management's Simon Renshaw, the band's manager, insists the only reason the band went after Brooks was that the sound bites were in MP3 form. "I will just say one thing: His site with MP3 files...is a huge red flag," Renshaw says. "And that's all I really want to say about that, quite honestly."
And the lawyer, on the broader issue of copyrights: "The bottom line to me is very simple," says Beiter, whose firm was hired by Senior Management, the band's Nashville-based management company. "To me, it's just not fair. It's not fair for him to take their copyright and decide that he's unilaterally going to give it away out on the Internet. It's not fair for him to do that. He may try to cast it as David versus Goliath or Robin Hood or whatever, but it's just not fair for him to do that. He never even asked."
In the end, I got more free publicity for my little fan site than if I'd scattered flyers all over Dallas. I'll avoid whoring for hits in this post, though... I think you can figure out where to click if you're really interested.
I figured I'd post them here, so we can keep everything in once place, I found from the MozillaZine thread [mozillazine.org] dug up:
1.0.5 is mainly a security fix, but I have seen a bunch of non-security fixes creep in also, such as removing the default checkbox "yes" for "make firefox my home page." This looks like a big cleanup for the 1.0.x branch, before 1.1 takes over.
I don't know about the security fixes, besides the medium-risk frame/window spoofing thing (with 1.0.4, you should not open untrusted sites at the same time as sensitive sites...). Here are the non-security fixes (non-security as it seems to me) checked in since 1.0.4:
If you compose a song, it's protected under copyright. People can't go and repreform that song without giving you royalties. Now in the US, reperformances, called covers, have statutory royalties, so the copyright holder doesn't have much say in it, but you still have to pay them.
However the performance is seperate, and copyrighted. While osmeone can do a cover of your song, they can't just copy your performance without permissions.
This also means that though a given song may be public domain, a particular performance isn't. So all Motzart's works are public domain, you can post the sheet music on the net freely, without fear. However a specific performance of that music may be copyrighted. You can, of course do your own performance, or comission to be done, but you can't just (legally) copy their performance.
Both are seen as creative works. It is a creative work to create a song, but it is also a creative work to play that song. The musicians have a lot to do with the rendition of it, espically with classical music and I can say as a former classical musician, it's not easy.
Now in this case, you are allowed to trade the specific performance freely as well. The orignal songs are of course long out of copyright, and the BBC has chosen to give their work in to the public domain, which is their right.
The challenge is from greedy labels, not over copyright, but over unfair competition. They claim it's unfair that the BBC, which is taxpayer funded, is giving away works that compete with ones they sell. However the status of the copyright isn't being challenged. The BBC Orchestra performed it, and the BBC chose to relinquish the performance to public domain, that's a done deal.
I appreciate the Make post on how it works, but this product is taking throw away culture to an extreme. The convenience can't possibly be worth all the manufacturing and materials going into a single hot cup of cofee. And given the way it's packaged, there's no way you're going to reasonably recycle any of this. This is so wasteful it honestly offends me.
I have one question: Why computerjobs.com? I'm not real familiar with their site, but are they one of the sites that claims to consolidate complete listings of I.T. jobs from a number of other large job search sites (Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, BrainBuzz, etc. etc.)?
If they really do get a pretty good number of I.T. related listings all collected up in one place, then yes - I think this is a pretty useful little graph/tool.
I've been out of work since the beginning of May, and living in the St. Louis area, it seems to me that there are currently very slim pickings. I keep hearing talk of the economic recovery, but at least around here - I'm not really seeing it.
According to the chart, that would be an accurate accessment too - since it clearly shows a sharp decline in I.T. jobs available in St. Louis since April of 2005. (And worse yet, I'm really mainly interested in the hardware side of things, but if you look at that specifically - you see that in my city, there were only a grand total of about 2 jobs fitting that category, at any given time!) In the whole U.S., it looked like I.T. hardware jobs only averaged around 1,200 *total*, for that matter. Not good... not good at all!
Iris Scans' Leader Looks Secure Dominant player Iridian's patent on the technology is expiring. Rivals plan to jump in, but overtaking the pioneer is unlikely anytime soon
In the mid-1980s, ophthalmologists Leonard Flom and Aran Safir realized that no two patients' irises were alike, and the idea of identifying people by their irises -- the colored part of the eye surrounding the pupil -- was born. In 1987, the pair were issued the so-called Flom patent, which has given the company they founded, Iridian Technologies, dominance in the iris-recognition market. Advertisement
But Iridian's market leadership is about to be challenged. The Flom patent expired in the U.S. in February, and it will expire in Europe and much of Asia in 2006. This means a struggle over the rollout of new iris-recognition products, with smaller startups already beginning to challenge Iridian's lock on a business expected to grow more than sixfold by 2009.
ACQUISITION TARGET? Competitiors, however, will have a hard time catching up to Iridian, which is flush with cash and likely to become more so. In April, the privately held company closed yet another $5 million round of funding. Now that iris scans are showing such promise, many venture-capital firms view Iridian as an attractive investment or acquisition prospect.
Take Robert LaPenta, co-founder of defense contractor L-3 Communications Holdings (LLL), who formed a $250 million biometrics fund on June 7. He says the money will be used to cobble together a biometrics powerhouse. LaPenta plans to purchase several outfits in fingerprinting and facial and iris recognition to develop a single, superreliable system integrating several biometric methods.
And Iridian is on the short list, says LaPenta. "We're looking at market leaders to acquire," LaPenta says. Iridian says only that it might seek more funding in the future.
CROWDING FIELD. Since its founding in 1990, Mooretown (N.J.)-based Iridian has controlled about 99% of the market, licensing its software and knowhow to a few iris camera makers such as Panasonic (MC ) and LG Electronics. It has successfully sued for patent infringement every company that has tried to slip into the market without its blessing.
While Iridian still holds some two dozen active patents on everything from ways to digitize an iris scan to camera design, expiration of the Flom patent will finally allow a stream of competitors to enter the iris-recognition market. Within a year, at least five well-established players will be in the market, believes Maxine Most, principal for Boulder (Colo.) biometrics consultancy Acuity Market Intelligence. Other analysts peg the number at a dozen companies.
This influx should boost the iris-scanning market, which has long lagged behind that of fingerprinting (the leading biometric today) and facial identification. Iris recognition -- widely considered to be the most accurate method of quick biometric identification -- hasn't taken off due to governments and large corporations hesitating to rely on a single vendor, says Prianka Chopra, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan. A year ago, Iridian had to start offering no-cost licenses to developers for use in passport and visa verification so the International Civil Aviation Organization, which sets standards for international travel documents, wouldn't axe the possibility of the technology's future use over concern about having a single supplier.
AIRPORT SECURITY. Now that the Flom patent is becoming history, the iris-recognition market is projected to skyrocket. It's set to rise from $81 million last year to $518 million by 2009, Chopra estimates. That would make it one of biometrics' fastest-growing areas.
Iridian is still expected to be a big beneficiary in the next few years. But other iris-scanner startups will get a piece of the action, as various governments and agencies are expected to adopt the technology within a couple of years.
Several U.S. government and international agencies are close t
Fujitsu to offer Suse Linux and server support services
PrimeQuest and Primergy servers gain Suse Linux support
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service
July 08, 2005
Fujitsu (Profile, Products, Articles) will begin offering Novell's (Profile, Products, Articles) Suse Linux Enterprise Server software and support services for Fujitsu PrimeQuest and Primergy servers worldwide later this year, it said Friday.
SPONSOR
White Paper: Simplicity and Enterprise Search
The company will offer the software with the Intel (Profile, Products, Articles) architecture servers from the end of September this year, said Nancy Ikehara, a spokeswoman for Fujitsu in Tokyo.
Fujitsu currently offers Windows and Red Hat (Profile, Products, Articles) Linux software development and support services for its PrimeQuest and Primergy servers.
The new agreement extends a deal that's been in place since 2000, under which Fujitsu supported Suse software on its Primergy servers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Wired magazine, the bible of the tech set, may have its finger on the pulse of all that's cool. But the San Francisco publication has been using decidedly uncool tactics when it comes to getting some people to renew their subscriptions.
San Francisco resident Bob McMillan discovered this after choosing to allow his longtime subscription to lapse late last year. "I like the magazine, " he told me. "I just didn't have time to read it anymore."
First came the usual letters warning McMillan, 36, that his subscription was up and that he wouldn't get any more copies of Wired unless he ponied up some cash.
Then Wired's correspondence took a different turn.
In May, McMillan received a letter from North Shore Agency, a leading debt-collection firm. The letter, headed "Please Respond," said he owed $12 for his Wired subscription.
"Our objective is to clear your bill quickly and fairly," it said. "Your payment will reinstate your subscription."
A more assertive letter from North Shore, headed "Request for Payment," arrived last month. "You must realize that we want you to resolve your account in the amount of $12," it said.
Then, the other day, a third North Shore letter arrived, headed "Account Status: Delinquent."
"Your account appears as delinquent on our client's files," it warned. "This professional collection agency continues collection activity on your debtor account."
The letter added, ominously: "Respond to this letter or continued collection efforts may follow."
McMillan had ignored the first two letters. Now, however, he's worried that Wired/North Shore will take some legal action that will decimate his credit rating.
"I'm very angry," he said. "This isn't a real debt. It seems like they're just trying to trick me into renewing my subscription."
Other subscribers
Turns out McMillan isn't alone in feeling strong-armed by Wired. A Google search turns up others who say that they, too, allowed their subscriptions to expire and then received scary letters from North Shore.
In each case, the erstwhile Wired readers were told that they had an "open balance" of $12 and that "this is an attempt to collect a debt."
In each case as well, the recipients were told that paying the $12 would result in a renewed subscription.
"Since when is letting a magazine subscription expire a debt?" one person asked online. "This guerrilla marketing technique is unethical in my book."
Said another: "Talk about a low way to get subscribers. This is bottom- feeding. Magazines used to offer you incentives. Now they threaten to louse up your credit rating if you don't re-up, and NOW."
So what does have Wired have to say?
When I first contacted Joe Timko, the magazine's consumer marketing director, he acknowledged having received complaints from readers about being hassled by North Shore. "It's something we're investigating," he said.
Timko insisted that it isn't Wired's policy to use a collection agency to muscle people into renewing their subscriptions.
"We don't do that," he said. "Or at least that's not our intention."
I asked a North Shore spokeswoman to comment on the matter. She never called back.
Longstanding relationship
In any case, Wired has been using North Shore for a number of years. I found some online gripes about the North Shore letters dating back to 2002 (and you can see one of the firm's letters for yourself at http://urbanideas.com/images/nsa.jpg).
I spoke with Timko again on Thursday. This time, he offered an explanation for what was happening: From time to time, Wired sends direct-mail solicitations to people offering discounte
Internet Chatroom Helps Keep City of London Open
By Jane Merriman, Reuters and Alistair MacDonald, Reuters
July 8, 2005
Be the first to comment on this article
LONDON, July 8 (Reuters)--A secret Internet chatroom run by Britain's financial regulators helped keep London's financial markets open after Thursday's bomb blasts, while financial firms activated security measures in case of further attacks. ADVERTISEMENT
The Bank of England, the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority switched on a secure section of their Financial Sector Continuity Web site to talk to major banks in the City of London's financial hub about how they were coping.
A Bank of England spokeswoman said this was the first time the secure site had been used in an actual crisis situation since its creation in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
"In the light of yesterday's events, the tripartite authorities (Treasury, Bank of England and FSA) have activated the contingency part of the Web site," they said on Friday.
The Web site has a secure section in which the authorities can communicate directly with big banks that are key to the stability of the international financial system.
The City of London's financial markets, where currencies, stocks, bonds and commodities worth trillions of dollars are traded daily, kept going despite disruption from Thursday's bombings on a London bus and underground trains, which killed more than 50 people and injured hundreds.
"Contingency planning by banks has increased considerably in last three years, post Sept. 11, and what yesterday shows is that the planning has worked," said David Key, crises management practice leader at Control Risks Group, which advises many banks on crisis and security management.
PLANS IN PLACE
Swiss financial services group UBS, for example, briefly evacuated its building on Liverpool Street, which houses bond and currency desks, but contingency plans ensured trading was not affected.
Japanese bank Nomura did not have to evacuate staff to any of its three disaster recovery sites in London, but a well-rehearsed plan was put into effect, coordinated by an emergency response team, which held meetings every hour.
Nomura security staff were alerted to the bombs by text, pager and e-mail messages sent by London's police service. A complete roll call of staff was taken, and a helpline for family and friends set up. On Friday, the bank was operating with about half its usual staff, with people being told they need not come in if they did not feel comfortable doing so.
The Corporation of London, the body that runs the City, and City of London police also have an Internet communication system that was used on Thursday to pass on advice to banks and other firms in the "Square Mile", the European hub for some of the world's biggest financial services firms.
Banks have long had plans for such attacks and routinely monitor code levels put out by intelligence services and the police. Chairmen of several big banks, for example, plus their security chiefs, had a briefing with intelligence services about four months ago, one bank source familiar with the matter said.
"Banks' internal security teams have got better and more sophisticated as they have invested in best practise," Key said.
"There has also been a move away from the traditional focus on security towards risk management, or understanding the threat and developing resilience," he said.
CONTINGENCY
The City of London is no stranger to bomb attacks.
In 1992 many firms suffered devastation from a huge car bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army outside the Baltic Exchange in the heart of the area. A year later, an
Extract:
All versions of Apache previous to 2.1.6 are vulnerable to a HTTP request smuggling attack which can allow malicious piggybacking of false HTTP requests hidden within valid content. This method of HTTP Request Smuggling was first discussed by Watchfire some time ago. The issue has been addressed by an update to version 2.1.6.
Editorial Comment:
The vulnerability involves a crafted request with a 'Transfer-Encoding: chunked' header and a 'Content-Length' can cause Apache to forward a modified request with the original 'Content-Length' header. The malicious request may then piggyback with the valid HTTP request possibly resulting in cache poisoning, cross-site scripting, session hijacking and other various kinds of attack. This vulnerability has resurfaced due to vendor confirmation, the original Watchfire Whitepaper on HTTP Request Smuggling is here.
addict3d reports that mostly all Apache 2.0.x versions, on the major platforms, are vulnerable to this attack. Apache has promptly released a 2.1.6 version of their HTTP software to address this issue.
They should specify the type of destroyer, because there are many types; a Star Destroyer is any of a broad type of fictional starship from the Star Wars universe. These ships are ubiquituous warships following a dagger aesthetic and usually serving in the Imperial Starfleet of the Galactic Empire.
BTW In the original treatments of the scripts that would become Star Wars, the term "Stardestroyer" (as a compound word) was used for the two-man fighters flown by what would become the Galactic Empire in the final movie, if my memory is correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know what group you belong to?
Hint: I'm saying that people from Kansas are stupid
Who cares? It's not as if the GPL is legally binding.
Complaining about slashdot, especially the 'groupthink,' is an excellent example of slashdot groupthink. And you thought you had this place figured out, didn't you?
To this day, we keep the central routing server and all the subsystems in OS/2 boxes that are treated like embedded control systems, and have written Windows 2K-based interface code that proxies everything as BACnet devices.
OS/2 was a good combination of modern OS services (named pipes, threads, etc.) and easy development. Given how simple it was to access serial ports, we could easily interface via DigiBoard multiplexers and such, and could write a new system driver (including reverse engineering time) in less than six months.
I'm the primary contact for IBM in our office, so they've been flooding me with information about porting these apps to Linux, which sadly, may never be cost effective.
I am *very* sorry to see this event, even though I fully understand and appreciate all the factors that led to OS/2's demise. It's like watching a very dependable ship being sent to the bottom of the ocean because it's too expensive to keep it afloat.
Oh well...
Tim
In 1998, I started a little fan site detailing the history of a country group -- I won't name them, but they became famous and then infamous within the span of 5 years. As part of the site, I included some low-quality
But check out what the group's manager said about the nascent format:
Senior Management's Simon Renshaw, the band's manager, insists the only reason the band went after Brooks was that the sound bites were in MP3 form. "I will just say one thing: His site with MP3 files...is a huge red flag," Renshaw says. "And that's all I really want to say about that, quite honestly."
And the lawyer, on the broader issue of copyrights:
"The bottom line to me is very simple," says Beiter, whose firm was hired by Senior Management, the band's Nashville-based management company. "To me, it's just not fair. It's not fair for him to take their copyright and decide that he's unilaterally going to give it away out on the Internet. It's not fair for him to do that. He may try to cast it as David versus Goliath or Robin Hood or whatever, but it's just not fair for him to do that. He never even asked."
In the end, I got more free publicity for my little fan site than if I'd scattered flyers all over Dallas. I'll avoid whoring for hits in this post, though... I think you can figure out where to click if you're really interested.
I figured I'd post them here, so we can keep everything in once place, I found from the MozillaZine thread [mozillazine.org] dug up:
3 0 [mozilla.org]
1 0 [mozilla.org]
7 7 [mozilla.org]
3 2 [mozilla.org]
6 4 [mozilla.org]
3 6 [mozilla.org]
3 1 [mozilla.org] .ico file
1 8 [mozilla.org]
0 6 [mozilla.org]
5 2 [mozilla.org]
7 0 [mozilla.org]
1 3 [mozilla.org]
7 8 [mozilla.org]
1.0.5 is mainly a security fix, but I have seen a bunch of non-security fixes creep in also, such as removing the default checkbox "yes" for "make firefox my home page." This looks like a big cleanup for the 1.0.x branch, before 1.1 takes over.
I don't know about the security fixes, besides the medium-risk frame/window spoofing thing (with 1.0.4, you should not open untrusted sites at the same time as sensitive sites...). Here are the non-security fixes (non-security as it seems to me) checked in since 1.0.4:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2837
"Save As" dialog tries to overwrite link/shortcut (.lnk) file instead of opening the directory/folder
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2952
Tab title different from window title on initial load at gmail
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2837
Right arrow key after selecting autocomplete result no longer uses selected item
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2912
update installer packages should offer unchecked check box for setting start page
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2910
Helper app dialog incomplete for non-nsStandardURL types
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2655
(64-bit only issue)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2456
Crash loading (particular)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418
Table with large rowspans and colspans hangs the browser
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2880
Drag image across browser windows --> crash
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2950
Obscure Javascript crash
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2962
Default user agent problem (AIX platform only)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2808
Crash on OS/2 platform
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2937
bookmarks toolbar missing in 2nd opened window, links in second window possibly cause crash
If you compose a song, it's protected under copyright. People can't go and repreform that song without giving you royalties. Now in the US, reperformances, called covers, have statutory royalties, so the copyright holder doesn't have much say in it, but you still have to pay them.
However the performance is seperate, and copyrighted. While osmeone can do a cover of your song, they can't just copy your performance without permissions.
This also means that though a given song may be public domain, a particular performance isn't. So all Motzart's works are public domain, you can post the sheet music on the net freely, without fear. However a specific performance of that music may be copyrighted. You can, of course do your own performance, or comission to be done, but you can't just (legally) copy their performance.
Both are seen as creative works. It is a creative work to create a song, but it is also a creative work to play that song. The musicians have a lot to do with the rendition of it, espically with classical music and I can say as a former classical musician, it's not easy.
Now in this case, you are allowed to trade the specific performance freely as well. The orignal songs are of course long out of copyright, and the BBC has chosen to give their work in to the public domain, which is their right.
The challenge is from greedy labels, not over copyright, but over unfair competition. They claim it's unfair that the BBC, which is taxpayer funded, is giving away works that compete with ones they sell. However the status of the copyright isn't being challenged. The BBC Orchestra performed it, and the BBC chose to relinquish the performance to public domain, that's a done deal.
I appreciate the Make post on how it works, but this product is taking throw away culture to an extreme. The convenience can't possibly be worth all the manufacturing and materials going into a single hot cup of cofee. And given the way it's packaged, there's no way you're going to reasonably recycle any of this. This is so wasteful it honestly offends me.
I have one question: Why computerjobs.com? I'm not real familiar with their site, but are they one of the sites that claims to consolidate complete listings of I.T. jobs from a number of other large job search sites (Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, BrainBuzz, etc. etc.)? If they really do get a pretty good number of I.T. related listings all collected up in one place, then yes - I think this is a pretty useful little graph/tool. I've been out of work since the beginning of May, and living in the St. Louis area, it seems to me that there are currently very slim pickings. I keep hearing talk of the economic recovery, but at least around here - I'm not really seeing it. According to the chart, that would be an accurate accessment too - since it clearly shows a sharp decline in I.T. jobs available in St. Louis since April of 2005. (And worse yet, I'm really mainly interested in the hardware side of things, but if you look at that specifically - you see that in my city, there were only a grand total of about 2 jobs fitting that category, at any given time!) In the whole U.S., it looked like I.T. hardware jobs only averaged around 1,200 *total*, for that matter. Not good... not good at all!
Iris Scans' Leader Looks Secure
Dominant player Iridian's patent on the technology is expiring. Rivals plan to jump in, but overtaking the pioneer is unlikely anytime soon
In the mid-1980s, ophthalmologists Leonard Flom and Aran Safir realized that no two patients' irises were alike, and the idea of identifying people by their irises -- the colored part of the eye surrounding the pupil -- was born. In 1987, the pair were issued the so-called Flom patent, which has given the company they founded, Iridian Technologies, dominance in the iris-recognition market.
Advertisement
But Iridian's market leadership is about to be challenged. The Flom patent expired in the U.S. in February, and it will expire in Europe and much of Asia in 2006. This means a struggle over the rollout of new iris-recognition products, with smaller startups already beginning to challenge Iridian's lock on a business expected to grow more than sixfold by 2009.
ACQUISITION TARGET? Competitiors, however, will have a hard time catching up to Iridian, which is flush with cash and likely to become more so. In April, the privately held company closed yet another $5 million round of funding. Now that iris scans are showing such promise, many venture-capital firms view Iridian as an attractive investment or acquisition prospect.
Take Robert LaPenta, co-founder of defense contractor L-3 Communications Holdings (LLL), who formed a $250 million biometrics fund on June 7. He says the money will be used to cobble together a biometrics powerhouse. LaPenta plans to purchase several outfits in fingerprinting and facial and iris recognition to develop a single, superreliable system integrating several biometric methods.
And Iridian is on the short list, says LaPenta. "We're looking at market leaders to acquire," LaPenta says. Iridian says only that it might seek more funding in the future.
CROWDING FIELD. Since its founding in 1990, Mooretown (N.J.)-based Iridian has controlled about 99% of the market, licensing its software and knowhow to a few iris camera makers such as Panasonic (MC ) and LG Electronics. It has successfully sued for patent infringement every company that has tried to slip into the market without its blessing.
While Iridian still holds some two dozen active patents on everything from ways to digitize an iris scan to camera design, expiration of the Flom patent will finally allow a stream of competitors to enter the iris-recognition market. Within a year, at least five well-established players will be in the market, believes Maxine Most, principal for Boulder (Colo.) biometrics consultancy Acuity Market Intelligence. Other analysts peg the number at a dozen companies.
This influx should boost the iris-scanning market, which has long lagged behind that of fingerprinting (the leading biometric today) and facial identification. Iris recognition -- widely considered to be the most accurate method of quick biometric identification -- hasn't taken off due to governments and large corporations hesitating to rely on a single vendor, says Prianka Chopra, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan. A year ago, Iridian had to start offering no-cost licenses to developers for use in passport and visa verification so the International Civil Aviation Organization, which sets standards for international travel documents, wouldn't axe the possibility of the technology's future use over concern about having a single supplier.
AIRPORT SECURITY. Now that the Flom patent is becoming history, the iris-recognition market is projected to skyrocket. It's set to rise from $81 million last year to $518 million by 2009, Chopra estimates. That would make it one of biometrics' fastest-growing areas.
Iridian is still expected to be a big beneficiary in the next few years. But other iris-scanner startups will get a piece of the action, as various governments and agencies are expected to adopt the technology within a couple of years.
Several U.S. government and international agencies are close t
PrimeQuest and Primergy servers gain Suse Linux support
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service
July 08, 2005
Fujitsu (Profile, Products, Articles) will begin offering Novell's (Profile, Products, Articles) Suse Linux Enterprise Server software and support services for Fujitsu PrimeQuest and Primergy servers worldwide later this year, it said Friday. SPONSOR
White Paper: Simplicity and Enterprise Search
The company will offer the software with the Intel (Profile, Products, Articles) architecture servers from the end of September this year, said Nancy Ikehara, a spokeswoman for Fujitsu in Tokyo.
Fujitsu currently offers Windows and Red Hat (Profile, Products, Articles) Linux software development and support services for its PrimeQuest and Primergy servers.
The new agreement extends a deal that's been in place since 2000, under which Fujitsu supported Suse software on its Primergy servers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
* Anything from or related to the country of India, including:
* The people of India, sometimes called Asian Indians to differentiate from American Indians
* The many languages of India
* The Indian subcontinent or the adjoining Indian Ocean
* The Asian American subgroup, Indian Americans
* Native Americans, the aboriginal people of the Americas and their descendants, also known as American Indians
* People from the West Indies, mainly descended from African slaves and indentured servants from India, are called West Indians.
* The people of the East Indies are called East Indians
* (archaic) aboriginal people in general
* A classic American motorcycle: see Indian (motorcycle).
* The Cleveland Indians baseball team in the United States
* Indians, a Chicago monument created by Ivan Mestrovi.
* The constellation called Indus.
* Indian ink is a carbon based ink.
* Indians is the title of a play by Arthur Kopit
* Indian is a 1996 Tamil movie by Shankar starring Kamal Haasan and music composed by A.R. Rahman.
David Lazarus
Friday, July 8, 2005
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Wired subscriber gets a jolt 07/08/2005
Wired magazine, the bible of the tech set, may have its finger on the pulse of all that's cool. But the San Francisco publication has been using decidedly uncool tactics when it comes to getting some people to renew their subscriptions.
San Francisco resident Bob McMillan discovered this after choosing to allow his longtime subscription to lapse late last year. "I like the magazine, " he told me. "I just didn't have time to read it anymore."
First came the usual letters warning McMillan, 36, that his subscription was up and that he wouldn't get any more copies of Wired unless he ponied up some cash.
Then Wired's correspondence took a different turn.
In May, McMillan received a letter from North Shore Agency, a leading debt-collection firm. The letter, headed "Please Respond," said he owed $12 for his Wired subscription.
"Our objective is to clear your bill quickly and fairly," it said. "Your payment will reinstate your subscription." A more assertive letter from North Shore, headed "Request for Payment," arrived last month. "You must realize that we want you to resolve your account in the amount of $12," it said.
Then, the other day, a third North Shore letter arrived, headed "Account Status: Delinquent."
"Your account appears as delinquent on our client's files," it warned. "This professional collection agency continues collection activity on your debtor account."
The letter added, ominously: "Respond to this letter or continued collection efforts may follow."
McMillan had ignored the first two letters. Now, however, he's worried that Wired/North Shore will take some legal action that will decimate his credit rating.
"I'm very angry," he said. "This isn't a real debt. It seems like they're just trying to trick me into renewing my subscription."
Other subscribers
Turns out McMillan isn't alone in feeling strong-armed by Wired. A Google search turns up others who say that they, too, allowed their subscriptions to expire and then received scary letters from North Shore.
In each case, the erstwhile Wired readers were told that they had an "open balance" of $12 and that "this is an attempt to collect a debt."
In each case as well, the recipients were told that paying the $12 would result in a renewed subscription.
"Since when is letting a magazine subscription expire a debt?" one person asked online. "This guerrilla marketing technique is unethical in my book."
Said another: "Talk about a low way to get subscribers. This is bottom- feeding. Magazines used to offer you incentives. Now they threaten to louse up your credit rating if you don't re-up, and NOW."
So what does have Wired have to say?
When I first contacted Joe Timko, the magazine's consumer marketing director, he acknowledged having received complaints from readers about being hassled by North Shore. "It's something we're investigating," he said.
Timko insisted that it isn't Wired's policy to use a collection agency to muscle people into renewing their subscriptions.
"We don't do that," he said. "Or at least that's not our intention."
I asked a North Shore spokeswoman to comment on the matter. She never called back.
Longstanding relationship
In any case, Wired has been using North Shore for a number of years. I found some online gripes about the North Shore letters dating back to 2002 (and you can see one of the firm's letters for yourself at http://urbanideas.com/images/nsa.jpg).
I spoke with Timko again on Thursday. This time, he offered an explanation for what was happening: From time to time, Wired sends direct-mail solicitations to people offering discounte
When was the last time you felt a woman's breasts? It doesn't count if your girlfriend is overweight.
from http://eweek.com/
header: Infrastructure
Internet Chatroom Helps Keep City of London Open By Jane Merriman, Reuters and Alistair MacDonald, Reuters
July 8, 2005
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LONDON, July 8 (Reuters)--A secret Internet chatroom run by Britain's financial regulators helped keep London's financial markets open after Thursday's bomb blasts, while financial firms activated security measures in case of further attacks. ADVERTISEMENT
The Bank of England, the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority switched on a secure section of their Financial Sector Continuity Web site to talk to major banks in the City of London's financial hub about how they were coping.
A Bank of England spokeswoman said this was the first time the secure site had been used in an actual crisis situation since its creation in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
"In the light of yesterday's events, the tripartite authorities (Treasury, Bank of England and FSA) have activated the contingency part of the Web site," they said on Friday.
The Web site has a secure section in which the authorities can communicate directly with big banks that are key to the stability of the international financial system.
The City of London's financial markets, where currencies, stocks, bonds and commodities worth trillions of dollars are traded daily, kept going despite disruption from Thursday's bombings on a London bus and underground trains, which killed more than 50 people and injured hundreds.
"Contingency planning by banks has increased considerably in last three years, post Sept. 11, and what yesterday shows is that the planning has worked," said David Key, crises management practice leader at Control Risks Group, which advises many banks on crisis and security management.
PLANS IN PLACE
Swiss financial services group UBS, for example, briefly evacuated its building on Liverpool Street, which houses bond and currency desks, but contingency plans ensured trading was not affected.
Japanese bank Nomura did not have to evacuate staff to any of its three disaster recovery sites in London, but a well-rehearsed plan was put into effect, coordinated by an emergency response team, which held meetings every hour.
Nomura security staff were alerted to the bombs by text, pager and e-mail messages sent by London's police service. A complete roll call of staff was taken, and a helpline for family and friends set up. On Friday, the bank was operating with about half its usual staff, with people being told they need not come in if they did not feel comfortable doing so.
The Corporation of London, the body that runs the City, and City of London police also have an Internet communication system that was used on Thursday to pass on advice to banks and other firms in the "Square Mile", the European hub for some of the world's biggest financial services firms.
Banks have long had plans for such attacks and routinely monitor code levels put out by intelligence services and the police. Chairmen of several big banks, for example, plus their security chiefs, had a briefing with intelligence services about four months ago, one bank source familiar with the matter said.
"Banks' internal security teams have got better and more sophisticated as they have invested in best practise," Key said.
"There has also been a move away from the traditional focus on security towards risk management, or understanding the threat and developing resilience," he said.
CONTINGENCY
The City of London is no stranger to bomb attacks.
In 1992 many firms suffered devastation from a huge car bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army outside the Baltic Exchange in the heart of the area. A year later, an
A discussion about a terrorist bombing, and you're crying in your pillow over slashdot's moderation system? Do shut the fuck up, will you?
Guess who got the mod points, bitch ass.
Extract: All versions of Apache previous to 2.1.6 are vulnerable to a HTTP request smuggling attack which can allow malicious piggybacking of false HTTP requests hidden within valid content. This method of HTTP Request Smuggling was first discussed by Watchfire some time ago. The issue has been addressed by an update to version 2.1.6. Editorial Comment: The vulnerability involves a crafted request with a 'Transfer-Encoding: chunked' header and a 'Content-Length' can cause Apache to forward a modified request with the original 'Content-Length' header. The malicious request may then piggyback with the valid HTTP request possibly resulting in cache poisoning, cross-site scripting, session hijacking and other various kinds of attack. This vulnerability has resurfaced due to vendor confirmation, the original Watchfire Whitepaper on HTTP Request Smuggling is here. addict3d reports that mostly all Apache 2.0.x versions, on the major platforms, are vulnerable to this attack. Apache has promptly released a 2.1.6 version of their HTTP software to address this issue.
Another whitey curmudgeon that won't make it past middle manager. Thank you for fitting the profile so cleanly.
I appreciate all input, and come back to check regularly.
RMS is still a faggot, as are his acolytes.
They should specify the type of destroyer, because there are many types; a Star Destroyer is any of a broad type of fictional starship from the Star Wars universe. These ships are ubiquituous warships following a dagger aesthetic and usually serving in the Imperial Starfleet of the Galactic Empire. BTW In the original treatments of the scripts that would become Star Wars, the term "Stardestroyer" (as a compound word) was used for the two-man fighters flown by what would become the Galactic Empire in the final movie, if my memory is correct.
Back into your hole.
"Gun fag," please.