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Comment SafeDeposit for PalmOS (Score 1) 1007

One of the reasons I got a Palm (Zire and then Treo) was to keep track of the passwords. My list at that time was 4 pages long and growing. Since that time I have been using SafeDeposit on Palm - http://www.freewarepalm.com/database/safedepositpda.shtml

It does encrypt the passwords with a master password and having them on a PDA/phone is much more convenient than a file/application on a laptop.

Comment Why is this less secure than an online banking? (Score 1) 193

It all depends on the implementation. Nobody is shocked by a bank having a web site opened to a public where all one needs is a user name and password to part you with your money (transfer it to another account or send an bill payment). With the common password recovery options it is not impossible for someone to get a hold of your logon credentials.

On the other hand, an ideal banking service should make it impossible to perform a real transfer or payment (when your account is debited) without letting the customer know and receiving a positive confirmation that the customer (and not someone else) has been notified and approved the transaction.
From that perspective if someone manages to break into my banking account but can only view the information, it is a significantly lower risk that doing the same with a ability to send money out. So having this information on twitter may actually increase the security (e.g. I will know immediately that someone used my credit or debit card number).

Of course, once it comes down to the implementation, another external service will just open another attack vector. But twitter here is no more or less secure than another account consolidation service or electronic bank statements.

Comment "Linking" is the weakest link of GPL (Score 2, Interesting) 585

The whole idea of "linking" is too specific to a technology or architecture. It assumes that some code is "compiled" into some form of library and the functions become available through a "linking" process during the build.

What if I call functions in my library over SOAP? The application is still "linked" to a service ("library"), but using that logic a web browser would have to be GPLed if you access any GPLed web server.

Comment Re:SAP is open source (Score 1) 155

You are talking about modifying the SAP developed code. What was the last time you made your own changes to Apache or Linux kernel source? In the SAP world almost nobody is changing the SAP code, although almost everybody looks at it and uses parts of it. There are multiple ways to customize SAP application without changing their own code, that's one of their strong points.

I am not saying that SAP is an open source product in EFF terms (of course you cannot contribute back). But the source code is openly available to customers to peek into. Unlike most of the software vendors that only give you binaries.

Comment SAP is open source (Score 5, Interesting) 155

Technically speaking, SAP is probably one of the first companies to distribute the source code with their product. Any company that purchased an SAP product gets complete source code for the business application (except for the core, which is more like an OS). One does not even need to apply for access to it, the whole application part is developed in an interpreted language with the source, IDE, and debugger readily available.

The article complains that SAP does not support all the OSS community initiatives (as if nobody in OSS world ever has had any disagreement) and backs software patents.
As a software development company, SAP has no other choice than to hold on to their patent portfolio, even if for defense reasons. I am not saying that SAP will (or have) never sue anyone for patent infringement, but I have not heard of any widely publicized case of them doing so.

Comment Re:SMB (Score 1) 517

I got some noticeable (but still not reaching Win-to-Win speeds) improvements on Gigabit network when I replaced the NIC (and kernel modules, obviously). For some reason motherboard built-in Gigabit adapters are getting better results. I also noticed some strange degradation of HD performance when LVM is built on top of RAID (all Ubuntu server 8.10).

Comment Re:And... (Score 1) 155

The rebuttal article (http://www.rsoc.ru/main/about/858/887.shtml?id_news=628) cites a government regulation stating that any device in 2.4GHz range with transmission power less than or equal 100mW is NOT subject to registration. Google automatic translation did not do a good job on that particular piece, that might have caused the panic.

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