Slashback: Sidekick Justice, Free WebTV, Office Patent

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including, justice for a stolen sidekick victim, free WebTV test a hit, SUSE 10.1 release postponed, Microsoft loses Office patent appeal, and PayPal fixes their phishing hole -- Read on for details.

Justice for stolen Sidekick victim. chroma writes "Remember the stolen Sidekick from a few days back? When the girl uploaded photos of herself to T-Mobile's service and bragged on IM about having the stolen PDA? Well, after creating a webpage that gathered 400,000 links in less than two weeks, and much runaround from the NYPD, justice has finally been served: the perpetrator has been arrested and the PDA returned. Further information is also available from The New York Times."

Free WebTV test a hit. An anonymous reader writes "Disney has said that their recent ABC free WebTV was a real hit with viewers and advertisers alike. Shows posted on the site received more than 11 million hits in the first month alone. From the article: 'An online exit survey posted the first week of the two-month trial showed that 87 percent of respondents could recall the advertisers that sponsored the episodes they watched. That compares with typical ad recall of about 40 percent for commercials viewed on television, industry sources said.'"

SUSE 10.1 release postponed. An anonymous reader writes "According to a confidential memo, the next release of both the server and desktop versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 will be delayed. The delay is apparently to allow Novell 'to address final issues with our new package management, registration, and update system and also fix the remaining blocker defects.' From the article: 'SUSE has a new update and package management system, which has not worked well in its initial release in the free, community OpenSUSE 10.1 release. Unfortunately, even after a recent set of fixes was released, SUSE's update and new program installation system is still giving many users trouble.'"

Microsoft loses Office patent appeal. xwipeoutx writes to tell us ITNews.com is reporting that Microsoft has lost their appeal in US Federal court over a judgement handed down saying they violated a patent by Guatemalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado. The original judgement stipulated that Micosoft was to pay Amado $6.1 million for violating a patent covering a means to link spreadsheets and databases.

Paypal fixes their phishing hole. Juha-Matti Laurio writes "News.com is providing new information to the previous PayPal XSS hole and reporting that the hole is now fixed." From the article: "By exploiting the flaw, attackers were able to redirect people from a PayPal Web page to an online trap located in South Korea, a representative for the service said. The page actually has a real PayPal URL, but hosts malicious code that presents a message warning members that their account had been compromised. It then redirects them to a 'phishing' Web site."

Free WebTV advertiser potential

[ThinkingInBinary]

Shows posted on the site received more than 11 million hits in the first month alone. From the article: 'An online exit survey posted the first week of the two-month trial showed that 87 percent of respondents could recall the advertisers that sponsored the episodes they watched. That compares with typical ad recall of about 40 percent for commercials viewed on television, industry sources said.

This doesn't surprise me one bit. I find that when I have a computer with me while I'm watching TV, I'm much more likely to visit an advertiser's page. I find myself poking at the product pages for products that I'd never buy, like the Toyota Yaris or internet services that compete with my own. This leads me to believe that, if TiVo really wants to fill the gap caused by ad-skipping, they should create interactive ads that viewers can poke and prod.

Honest Question

[Frogbert]

This is an honest question, I'm not trying to be a troll here but seriously... Is SUSE really relevant anymore? I mean this may be a case of I don't use it so no one must but I don't know anyone who is using it, or has even tried it. What is its "killer app"?

Re:Honest Answer

[BootNinja]

Suse's Killer App is YaST. In my experience, Yast is by far the simplest, most intuitive system configuration tool of any linux distro. I myself use gentoo these days, but SuSe was my first linux distro, and will always hold a soft spot in my heart. If you want a simple linux, then SuSe is probably the closest you'll get. They also ship with a large assortment of wireless drivers, making it very simple to configure your wireless card.

ABC's shows online done well...

[posterlogo]

ABC's use of the web to stream their most popular shows online worked out well because it was done well. It offers what it promises -- the latest shows, soon after they air, with minimally intrusive advertising. I found myself watching shows that I had missed and forgotten to tape, shows while I was staying late at work waiting for stuff to finish up, or shows that I wanted to rewatch parts of (remember the accidental boob-grope of evangeline lilly in the last episode of lost...that was wierd). I would not go there exclusively because 1) The quality is better on TV, or even better, on HDTV and 2) The website design is still a bit sluggish. I think there is plenty of room for improvement, but it appears atleast one network is on the right track.

Re:Honest Question

[a_greer2005]

Open Enterprise integration: A buddy was showing me what could be done with suse desktops and a Novel Open Enterprise server; really easy managment, webmail, PIM and colaboration, so the answer to your question is: Suse is worthless unless you are going to spend $$$ on Novell open enterprise...it is just a loss leader now.

what's wrong with this picture?

[jaymzter]

Concerning the Sidekick saga, how is it Digg got a shout out in the New York Slimes and ./ didn't?

Re:Honest Question

[MO!]

SuSE's used extensively where I work because the closest business-oriented distro - RedHat - was rejected after RedHat support personnel royally ticked off our admins/management. Right now, only SuSE and Redhat are supported by some of the IBM software we use in the data center. So once RedHat lost the contract due to poor support, Novell was only alternative.

Re:Free WebTV advertiser potential

[stunt_penguin]

I agree, if you had a selection of things that could be done - for example an event such as an exhibition or a festivel could be automatically added to your calendar, a new car commercial could have an email sent to you giving product information and maybe details of a test drive in your area.. a short movie trailer could let you book tickets or see a longer trailer. There are loads of possibilities, none of which the advertisers seem to be aspiring towards...... especially when they start talking about the illegality of not watching ads, and about locking hardware into forcing you to watch advertising. One teeny step towards this kind of interactivity in the UK and Ireland is how Sky (a digital satellite provider) now allow you to press the green button to set a reminder to watch a particular programme, and occasionally you see a 'press the red button' advert for a big-budget campaign that will give you extended information on a product or service.

Re:Honest Question

[imemyself]

SUSE's probably one of the most relevant distros out there. Novell's Open Enterprise server has a lot of really nice and sometimes easy to use features that make it a lot more of an alternative to Windows Server/AD than Debian, Gentoo, or even RedHat are. I'm talking about eDirectory/Novell Client, iFolder, iPrint, Zenworks, etc. And all of that is in addition to SuSE/NLD being a damn fine desktop/laptop system. I love SuSE 10.0 on my laptop (and 10.1 looks pretty nice in VMware apart from some rough edges surrounding the new Zenworks updater). Some of the screenshots and stuff that I've seen from SUSE Enterprise 10 look pretty nice too. Also, SUSE Enterprise 10 should be able to do some cool stuff with Xen. I think I've read somewhere that it will let you use Xen to run stuff that was made for the Netware kernel to help their people migrate from Netware to Linux.


And please don't take this as a flame, but what distros were you thinking were more relevant? I mean, for servers, RedHat and Debian would arguably be, Ubuntu maybe for some home-user desktops, I can't think of too much else that would actually be used by normal companies too much.
Of course, I'm sure a lot of people will go on about how they love Gentoo or Slackware, but how many businesses really use those distros? I'm not saying they aren't fine distros (I personally wasn't impressed too much by Slackware, and I don't have time to install Gentoo), but outside of the really hardcore Linux people, I don't think they get much usage.

SuSE 10.1 Update

[AaronW]

The online update support for SuSE 10.1 is horrible compared to past versions. It is *extremely* slow. Adding a new repository took well over 30 minutes to process it, the CPU remaining busy the entire time. Granted, the machine is only a 1.5GHz P4, but it should take nowhere near this amount of time.

Bringing up the software install tool takes 150MB of RAM. This is excessive.

Then OpenSuse keeps moving repositories around, or deleting them. They removed the KDE 3.5.3 repository recently, for example.

I'm almost ready to switch to another distribution, maybe Kubuntu or some other up-to-date KDE based distro.

SIDEKICK

[Anonymous Coward]

This bad publicity is really going to cut into my business of selling Sidekicks off of subway platforms! ;-) *JK*

~

Actually, here's another recent story. My girlfriend, who works as a cashier at a local Dollar General, just got interviewed by the police and FBI for selling 25 cellphones to some customer. I assume they were Tracphones or such pay as you go things.

The question is, why would they be interested in such things. Maybe he needs them as a contractor for his business, maybe he resells them to imigrants who can't speak English (and he can, say for example, speak spanish), maybe they were at a great deal and he's going to resell them elsewhere. Since when is it illegal to buy cell phones?

I told her not to tell them anything. For one, its none of their business. For two, Dollar General hired her to ring up merchandice they sold and that's what she did, her job. There is no policy about how many of anything to sell to anybody, or anything singling out cell phones. She said they were all sweet and so and called her sweetheart and sweetie... I told her the only person that has any business doing that is me, her boyfriend, and that they are two faced scumbags looking for anything to prosecute her who has nothing to do with anything, just is just a cashier like a dozen others there.

Re:what's wrong with this picture?

[matt21811]

Mostly because Digg had the story first. They were the ones who took this from nothing to huge internet exposure.

It seems that in order to get a particular type of story up on slashdot it must be submitted by many people. This way the editors get a vote of confidence about stories they would not normally publish. Rest asssured that there is no way Slashdot would have led the pack on this one.