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HP

Submission + - HP Skates Away From SEC Charges

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "In return for the SEC dropping charges that HP improperly deprived investors of important information and violated the public reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act by failing to disclose the circumstances surrounding a Board member's resignation over an out-of-control press leak investigation, the computer maker simply agreed to cease and desist from doing so in the future, without admitting or denying having done so in the past. 'HP acted in what it believed to be a proper manner,' said the company in a press release."
Software

Submission + - Novell and EFF together against patents

Submitted by
mrcgran
mrcgran writes: "ArsTechnica is reporting that Novell and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are joining forces. From the article: "In a surprise announcement earlier today at the Open Source Business Conference, Novell and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that Novell would be contributing to the EFF's Patent Busting project. In addition, the two entities will work for legislation and policies that will "promote innovation," specifically targeting the World Intellectual Property Organization.""
Novell

Submission + - Novell, EFF Announce Patent Reform Partnership

Submitted by stewart_maximus
stewart_maximus writes: EFF is partnering with Novell to try to get rid of software patents that are hurting innovation all over the world," stated Shari Steele, Executive Director of the EFF in an interview prior to the panel session. Novell will assist the EFF with it's "Patent Busting Project" and by lobbying the US (and other) governments about patent reform. "The news is notable because it's the first time, Steele confirmed, that a corporate entity has publicly thrown in this level of support for the EFF on the patent issue."
Security

Submission + - Lessons From a Honeynet Attacked 700,000 Times

Submitted by JMoon
JMoon writes: The attacks have been thick and steady, and the relentless attackers appear hell bent on taking control of as many vulnerable systems as possible. This article will focus on providing some basic guidelines that will serve to assist you in conducting your own vulnerability management and performing scans against your own systems and networks, in the hope that you will identify and remedy any serious vulnerabilities and bugs in advance of the unyielding hackers, ultimately resulting in computer systems that are secure and protected.
Novell

Submission + - Novell To Reveal Patent Deal With Microsoft

Submitted by ramboando
ramboando writes: Watch out for Novell's SEC filing at the end of this month, says ZDNet Australia. Novell execs says their patent agreement with Microsoft will be detailed in there. At the ongoing Open Source Business Conference, Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry said the information would have been released earlier but the investigation into the company's stock option compensation practices has delayed things.

Jonathan Corbet, Linux kernel programmer and executive editor of LWN.net, thinks it all stinks. During a panel discussion, he said Novell effectively has legitimized accusations of open-source code impurity. "We are proud about the quality of our code. If Novell comes along and says my code is not mine and cannot be distributed without paying a tax to Microsoft, I feel I have been called a thief," Corbet said. "It is divisive to the community."
Printer

Submission + - Boring Old Corporate Printers Get Colorful

Submitted by decaf_joe
decaf_joe writes: "Yes, I know it's hard to get excited about big, honking network printers, but take a look at what Panasonic is doing with them: Panasonic's new C3 multifunction printers will eschew the usual beige case in favor of color bodies. The new printers will be available in red, yellow, or blue. For old sticks in the mud, black is available. Note that these aren't printers designed for a teenager's bedroom. They're big office printers, designed for multiple users and all-day activity. It's the first time I've heard of this kind of design shift in the stodgy corporate printer market. Why color? Panasonic says color in the office improves worker morale and productivity. While the effect of a single piece of hardware being red instead of white might not be enormous, it is at least a start. Here's what various colors are said to do to you on a subconscious, psychological level. I was amused to find that the dark green walls of my office are "masculine, conservative, and imply wealth." What do you think? Would you put a yellow (enhances concentration and speeds metabolism) or red (the color of love) printer in your office?" http://tech.yahoo.com/blog/null/26457#post
Movies

Submission + - MPAA Trumpets Spiderman 3 Camcording Crackdown

Submitted by ZDRuX
ZDRuX writes: (From Michael Geist's website) Jon Healey of the LA Times points to a joint rellease [pdf] from the MPAA and the National Association of Theatre Owners trumpeting their success in stopping the camcording of Spiderman 3. The release notes that the industry stopped 31 camcording attempts worldwide, which it credits with helping lead to the movie's record opening. Healey focuses on the economic side of the story — he rightly says camcording is wrong, but also wonders about the actual box office impact of camcording.

Canadians will find the release interesting since it lists the various countries where Spiderman 3 camcording was stopped. Given the recent hysteria about Canadian camcording, one would expect a sizable percentage of the 31 incidents would be traced back to Canada. In actual fact, the industry says there were nine incidents in the U.S. (including theatres in California, Florida, Indiana, NY, and Texas) along with 22 other incidents in Argentina, Germany, Malaysia, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Not one Canadian incident is mentioned in the release.
Businesses

The Man Who Owns the Internet 369

Posted by samzenpus from the what-a-way-to-make-a-living dept.
Tefen writes "CNN Money posted this story about Kevin Ham, who has made a fortune gobbling up lapsed domain names and has recently launched a lucrative business partnership with Cameroon, the country which controls the .cm TLD. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue."
Biotech

Submission + - Got Flu? Some Experts are Betting on it

Submitted by
Observercorps
Observercorps writes: "Financial market traders bet on whether stock price will go up or down, but Stacy Coffman goes online to bet on how bad the flu season will be in Iowa. She admits that she is a risk taker, but her attitude has made her one of the most successful traders in the online flu prediction market. Scienceline talks with Coffman as well as the Iowa scientists who founded some of the first prediction markets."
Privacy

Submission + - Hack My Son's Computer, Please

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Jennifer Granick of Wired News writes in her blog, "Can an elderly father give police permission to search a password-protected computer kept in his adult son's bedroom, without probable cause or a warrant? In April, a three judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said yes. This week, the son's attorney, Melissa Harrison, an assistant federal public defender in Kansas City, will ask the court to reconsider the panel's ruling. At stake is whether law enforcement will have any responsibility to respect passwords and other expressions of user privacy when searching devices which contain the most sensitive kinds of private information."
Role Playing (Games)

MMOG Industry Community Vet Speaks Out 61

Posted by Zonk from the oh-the-stories-she-could-tell dept.
Sanya Weathers, known for many years as Tweety, was the Community Manager for Dark Age of Camelot essentially since that game's launch. Known throughout the games industry as truthful, caring, and innovative, she almost created the position of Community Manager out of whole cloth. Many elements of Massively Multiplayer communities we take for granted today originated at Mythic in Sanya's hands. Now doing work freelance, she has time to blog about her experiences keeping Massive gamers happy. It is entitled Eating Bees, after a Penny Arcade strip on the subject of forum management. So far she has two posts up, one looking at what professionalism looks like in the position, and a hilarious fictional day in the life for a CM. "Bob forwards Gertrude's email to Jake, a programmer. Jake is not the one who coded the original element on which Gertrude's system is based. THAT guy, Wayne, is somewhere in the Caribbean coked up along with a bunch of strippers, where he has been ever since he cashed his FunFactory stock options, opened his own studio, and sold THAT one to MegaCorp for millions of dollars. Wayne was also a self-taught genius who adhered to no known coding formalities and whose comments were in haiku. Since Wayne left, approximately two dozen programmers of various levels of ability have added layers of complexity. Jake is very young and enthusiastic, but his joy at finally being in the gaming industry is starting to dim from coping with a ten year old pile of what is called "spaghetti code.""
Microsoft

Submission + - Open Source Challenges for Microsoft Administrator

Submitted by
rtobyr
rtobyr writes: "Let me start by saying that this is not intended to be a criticism. It is my hope that this story can be one of those rare cases where Microsoft aficionados and the open source community can engage in productive dialogue. Nothing here deals in common criticisms such as "I shouldn't have to endlessly edit text based config files." This discussion asks more fundamental questions about industry specific solutions, choice management, and back office management. The best case result of this article will be that I get good advice that helps me take better advantage of open source opportunities. Hopefully, even if that doesn't happen, the open source community will understand a bit better why the rest of us haven't switched yet, and think about how to change that.

When I started my first network administration gig in 1997, I had heard of Linux. I had even installed Red Hat Linux 5 on one of my computers at home. It was good, and I could see the value in open source products. Unfortunately, I never could convince management of that value, so I wound up with really strong experience in Microsoft network administration.

My current employer's budget consists of tax dollars. Management is keenly aware of this, so they are quite frugal. Consequently, I get away with using Linux and other open source products wherever I can. There are reasons why we don't have Linux on the desktops of line workers. One I wrote about previously. Others include the need for applications that are very specific to my industry and location. For example, I work for a court of law. To my knowledge, there are no Linux based (or open source for Win32) programs for dynamically generating jury instructions. Even if there were, what are the chances that the program would accurately reflect current laws that change semi-annually regarding jury instructions in my specific state? How would it look if the Judge had to stop proceedings because the program that calculates alimony and child support for divorce cases crashed W.I.N.E.? It certainly would not reflect the dignity of the Court, which is very important to Judges. In medicine, it might be a program that analyzes symptoms and lists probable diagnosis. In banking, it could be something else. You get the idea.

As I've said, I do get away with using open source software sometimes. I've found that one of the big challenges is lies at the very heart of the open source philosophy: choice. Here's what I mean. If I'm running a Microsoft shop, and management says, "We need an intranet portal," then I say, "OK. Microsoft Share Point Portal Server costs $4,500." While you guys will debate this until we're all blue in the face, I assert that I say it knowing that Microsoft has put a lot of work and research into that product to make sure it has the features that businesses need in portals. I do a week of research and evaluation of that product. If I'm uncomfortable, I evaluate one or two other big name competing products. Then it's go time.

Now, I have choices. Free choices. Suddenly spending $4,500 (plus client access licenses) on an intranet portal is no longer attractive, but the choices are overwhelming. There's Drupal, Metadot, XOOPS, and 147 other hits on Freshmeat for "portal". Many of these products may be really good, but there isn't any more written about some of them other than a blurb on Freshmeat and a nearly empty Sourceforge page that serves as the product's home page. How do I even begin to narrow my choices down to a reasonable subset that will make it to the evaluation phase? Not only are there too many products, there are too many buzz words: How do I distinguish "portal" from "content management system" from "intranet system"? Another example: it took me two months of searching and evaluating products to settle on Nagios, and that's only after I'd done the process two years ago and then spent two years being dissatisfied with Big Brother. A real Microsoft administrator would have bought Ipswitch's What's Up for Windows, and been done and satisfied in a week.

Be careful to remember the purpose of this article: I'm not saying that choice or open source is bad or inferior. I believe quite the opposite. I just think that we MS administrators need additional guidance from the open source community about how to best take advantage of the open source way of doing things. How to manage a firehose of choice needs to be part of that guidance.

Then there's my environment. It used to be that we had one public web server and one intranet server. These servers ran IIS. All databases were on one MSSQL server. All our [commercial] vendors supported this. Any in house programming that needed to be done was done in ASP.NET. Now we have at least seven web servers running various combinations of Linux, Windows, IIS, Apache (with various and differing modules), PHP (with and without safe mode), and Tomcat. One of our more screwy servers has Windows+Apache+Mod Rewrite+PHP+Pear+Apache Perl Mods+IIS+ActivePerl. Then we have our MSSQL server and three other MySQL servers. Every home-grown or open source web application seems to have a set of requirements that conflict with another commercial, home-grown, or open source product that we are using for production. Each platform has differing procedures for administering settings and security. Administration is much, much more difficult. The IT documentation manual has become a nightmarish jumble of garbage that no one person can reference or understand. That's my fault for implementing open source solutions first and writing this article after the fact.

I recommend open source software to nearly everybody I meet. I even try to educate laypeople about the speech vs. beer thing. I especially advocate for Open Office. I'd like to be able to save the taxpayers a lot of money by standardizing on open source platforms. But how? I'd love to see open source experts advocate the cause by addressing three issues that don't get a lot of attention:
  • What should consumers do when they want to make the move to open source, but they need industry specific solutions that only run on Windows? This problem in particular is what bugs me about what I'll call open source crusaders who are always posting about how everybody should switch to Linux. If, after reading about the options that are not viable, you cannot recommend Linux on the desktop, then the last item (back office management) becomes even more important. After all, not running Linux on the desktop, but going open source in the back office complicates things:
    • Running Windows apps in VMware, dual booting, or separate Windows machines: This defeats the purpose. If I'm going to save money by running Linux, then why should I continue to buy Windows licenses for virtual machines or dual boot partitions? This also makes it harder on the end-user. My job is to make the end-user's job easier.
    • W.I.N.E.: Many of my industry specific apps use the latest Dot Net frameworks. WINE/Mono doesn't always run them.
    • Providing Windows only to employees that need to run the industry specific apps: Even if this group was smaller than every employee of my organization, I am still interested in standardizing. My department has enough work supporting one desktop platform. Two desktop platforms is not a viable solution.
    • Developing your own solution: We do not have the staff or the money to do this. It would cost more to develop and maintain our own solutions than commercial software is currently costing us.
  • What are the best techniques and recommendations for open source software choice management? Books could be written on the subject. I'd buy those books! If you participate in development of an open source project, please have a web page with a complete list of features, a comprehensive pre-evaluation FAQ, and maybe even a comparison of your product to popular Windows alternatives. For example, one important question to answer for us MS administrators is: If this product has a logon feature, then how well does said logon integrate with Active Directory?
  • How do I maintain a sensible back office environment when various premier open source solutions require differing platforms? What questions should I ask myself when deciding on a back office platform (ie Perl vs. PHP vs. Python) to standardize on, or at least have a preference for?
My last request to open source evangelists is this: Every layperson who asks you for computer help ought to get a sermon about Open Office, not Linux. I believe that Microsoft has more to fear from Open Office than Linux for two reasons:
  1. Microsoft makes more money from Office than from Windows.
  2. Open Office is an easier introduction to open source for laypeople than Linux is. They're more likely and able to accept it. Hopefully, acceptance of one open source product will lead to acceptance of others, including Linux. In other words, free open source software becomes like the Force: once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny!
"

Feed Arcane Senate Rule Helps Preserve Antiquated Senate Practice (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
Back in February, we pointed to a story about the absurd system that Senators use to disclose their campaign contributions. Unlike their counterparts in the House, Senators don't have to file their contributions electronically, and instead file them using a tortuous process that involves needless photocopying and hand entry of the data. Not only is this time consuming, but it also costs taxpayers $250,000 per year. That's not a whole lot by government standards, but since it's a total waste it's still depressing. It looked like the Senate was all set to scrap the old system, but just as it was set to come to a vote, another arcane Senate rule came into play as Senator Lamar Alexander stood up and announced that on behalf of an anonymous Senator he would block the vote. Yes, the Senate has a rule that allows an anonymous coward, as we'd call them around here, to block any vote. So at this point it's not clear if or when electronic disclosure will be adopted in the Senate. It's lovely how democracy works, isn't it?
Programming

Submission + - VMware Releases new Recording/Replay feature

Submitted by
owenhsu
owenhsu writes: "In Steve Herrod's blog (http://blogs.vmware.com/sherrod/), he tells us that VMware releases a new recording and replaying feature in VMware workstation 6.0 RC2. The screenshot on linux kernel debugging looks pretty cool!"

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