hmmm

I just discovered something I'm not sure I like.

Whenever I post something to slashdot, slashdot connects back to port 80 on the machine I post from, looking for an open proxy on port 80.
This isn't behavior I really like to see. It's unsolicited, and more to the point, it takes advantage of a local firewall possibly being temporarily open for traffic FROM an address for a short while after connecting TO it.
There might be a "good cause", like collecting a list of open proxies for the poor guy behind the Great Firewall of China or something similar, but it's still unsolicted, clandestine and not documented.

Here are a couple of web log entries showing this:
216.34.181.45 - - [10/Sep/2008:15:47:47 -0400] "GET http://news.slashdot.org/ok.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 271 "-" "libwww-perl/5.812"
216.34.181.45 - - [10/Sep/2008:20:32:18 -0400] "GET http://mobile.slashdot.org/ok.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 273 "-" "libwww-perl/5.812"

Big brother is at it again. The Department of Homeland Security is issuing new regulations requiring reporting on, and guarding of, hundreds of common chemicals with "terrorist applications" (such as propane, hydrogen peroxide, chlorine, ...). This impacts farms, universities, industries from pool supplies to medicine to janitorial, small business, startups, and the general public.

A thread in the Slashdot article The 700MHz Question drifted into a discussion between me and rcw-home/rcw-work on using multiple antennas to synthesyze multiple patterns. This allows a particular hunk of bandwidth to be reused to generate several full-bandwidth links simultaneously - either between a base station and several remote stations or even between the base station and a single remote station that itself has multiple antennas.

The thread is beginning to horzon out on my user info history. So this journal entry is a new venue for its continuation after rcw-*'s most recent post.

I'll respond to that after he posts here to indicate that he's also making the move.

A new report says that the increased speeds and other features of 802.11n should be enough to replace Ethernet on any companies' WANs in the next two to three years. While 802.11n speeds still fall far short of those of gigabit Ethernet, The Burton Group believes that they should be good enough for most uses. In fact, in its list of recommendations on when to deploy 802.11n, one of the criteria listed is "when fast Ethernet (100Mbps) throughput is good enough."

Technology Daily features an overview of each major U.S. Presidential candidate's record on technology issues. The information was "compiled from the Congressional Record, speeches and statements on campaign Web sites." Third party candidates are ignored, but eight Democrats and eight Republicans are covered. This information is an important jumping-off point for the informed Slashdot voter.

The Volokh Conspiracy, a legal blog, writes about James Madison and his opinion on intellectual property. Madison, "Father of the Constitution" and author of the Bill of Rights, disliked the idea of intellectual "property," viewing it as a dangerous grant of monopoly. While he stressed that such grants ought to be strictly limited, he apparently went further saying that the government ought to be able to buy back the grant of monopoly to protect the public from being fleeced or placed under inconvenient restrictions.

It's been a long time coming, but the Camino browser for Mac OS X has reached a new milestone. Camino 1.5 is based on Gecko 1.8.1, and includes a slew of new features including spell checking, session saving, improved pop-up blocking, enhanced plug-in control, and window zooming, among others. All this comes wrapped in a website redesigned by Jon Hicks. You can read more about the release at Camino Planet.

A number of stories have recently surfaced asking where Mozilla is going as a platform and whether it risks being outflanked by proprietary rivals. Chris Messina, a former Flock developer and SpreadFirefox volunteer, posted a 50-minute vlog enumerating his concerns about Mozilla. His discussion centered around Mozilla 2 potentially missing the forest for the trees, becoming overly focused on the short-term successes that Firefox has enjoyed, while failing to outrun the proprietary flanking actions being undertaken by Adobe and Microsoft for the next generation internet technologies.

Richard McManus at Read/WriteWeb expands the discussion of Mozilla's direction. His central concern is the adoption of microformats and what that will mean for Mozilla's position. He comments that microformats are already a step in the direction that Messina is pointing toward--a web that remains open.

Mike Shaver, technology strategist for Mozilla, has posted his own discussion of Adobe and Microsoft's proprietary tools intended to close off the web--Apollo and Silverlight--and what this means for Mozilla, if anything.

Finally, concerning Mozilla missing the forest for the trees, Ben Goodger, lead Firefox developer, reports on a Mozilla Corp board member, Brendan Eich, essentially writing off the non-Firefox products offered by Mozilla. Goodger wonders whether it would be a better strategic move for non-Firefox developers to begin seeking greater autonomy from Mozilla Corp, a speculation that Mike Pinkerton, lead developer of Camino, caught flack for a couple months ago when he opened the possibility of dropping Gecko for WebKit.

John Siracusa writes a brief article at Ars Technica pointing out an exchange between Andrew Morton, a lead developer of the Linux kernel, and a ZFS developer. Morton accused ZFS of being a "rampant layering violation." Siracusa states that this attitude of refusing to think holistically ("across layers") is responsible for all the current failings of Linux--desktop adoption, user-friendliness, consumer software, and gaming. ZFS is effective because it crosses the lines set by conventional wisdom. Siracusa ultimately believes that the ability to achieve such a break lies more with an authoritative, top-down corporate capacity, rather than with the grass roots, fractious Linux community.

The New York Times reports that schools are abandoning their laptops-for-students programs. It turns out that the expense of providing laptops, expense of repairing laptops, difficulties of school network management, and discipline problems stemming from pornography, cheating, and cracking more than outweighed the educational benefits. Indeed, a number of schools have concluded that far from improving student achievement, laptops either had no effect or actively hindered academic performance. Apparently, politicians embracing technology as a quick fix for social problems doesn't always work out.

Social news site Digg has been flooded with stories reprinting the HD DVD processing key covered earlier here. At one point, the entire front page was comprised of stories which in one way or another were related to the hex numbers that were removed by Digg administrators. Digg users quickly pointed to the HD DVD sponsorship of Diggnation, the Digg podcast show. Is this outburst a hissy fit thrown by immature users acting without regard to Digg's legal liability, or is it a legitimate act of civil disobedience?

In a slashdot posting titled "Hollywood vs. Sealand" on April 2 2007, I:
  - Made a movie proposal,
  - Asserted copyright,
  - Offered to license it,
  - Threatened possible infringement suits if such a movie is made sans license, and
  - Directed anyone wishing to license it to contact me by leaving a message in my journal. B-)

This journal entry is to receive such messages.

AppleInsider reports that Apple and Cisco have settled their dispute over the iPhone trademark. Both companies will be free to use the iPhone mark throughout the world. Additionally, the two companies will "explore" interoperability opportunities.

As is tradition, on any significant holiday, major or minor, Google produces a special version of its logo. However, its Valentine's Day logo this year seems to be missing the "L". But it's the thought that counts--so Happy Valentine's Day from Googe!