Yet another reason to not bother with Windows or other DRM crippled software, Microsofts Genuine disAdvantage servers all crashed..
The result? Every single Windows XP and Vista installation — except possibly those with volume license keys — is being marked as counterfeit when it tries to check in. Installations which are flagged as counterfeit switch to a “reduced functionality mode” which results in features like Aero and DirectX being disabled.
Talk about Defective by Design..
As a member of the technical program committee for VTDC 2007 I present the following Call for Papers, please feel free to pass on the text version to others that you know who may have an interest in this workshop.
Courtesy of the spellchecker that the Kate editor is using under KDE:
Unknown word: OpenSolaris
Replace with: Epistolaries ((
Epistolaries are books that are written in the form of, or carried on by letters or correspondence. ))
Unknown word: Nexenta
Replace with: Exeunt
Unknown word: Namesys
Replace with: Nemesis
Umm, right, I think my spellchecker is biased.. 🙂
Back in 2004 Sun’s then CEO, Scott McNealy, stated in an interview with Jem Matzan (NewsForge reprint) about CDDL’ing OpenSolaris:
We had to pay SCO more money so we could open the code — I couldn’t say anything about that at the time, but now I can tell you that we paid them that license fee to expand our rights to the code
However, now that Judge Kimball has ruled that Novell actually owns the copyrights and not SCO I presume it’s now up to Novell to decide whether or not that deal is still valid, probably at least partly dependant on whether or not SCO can find the cash to pony up the dues on it they illegally withheld from Novell.
Could be interesting given Novell’s stake in Linux.
Groklaw has the details, but Judge Kimball has ruled in SCO versus Novell that:
[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.
Additionally he has ruled that:
SCO is obligated to recognize Novell’s waiver of SCO’s claims against IBM and Sequent
There is now a text version of the judgement.
Woo-hoo! KDE4 Beta 1 has been released!
KUbuntu packages are on their way (not linked from the Kubuntu front page yet as they’re still compiling).
So it appears the Federal governments attempts to censor the internet at ISPs is not dead after all..
Coonan said one privately funded trial had been cancelled, but the planned pilot managed by the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) will go ahead as planned. The tender for companies wishing to take part closed last week and three bids were received, according to the government.
What they are going to be testing out is..
Under the ACMA scheme, ISP-level filtering products will be tested on blocking “inappropriate and illegal content”, whether such products would clog ISPs’ networks and if such products have improved since the government last examined their capabilities in 2005-2006.
Today I noticed my site getting a thorough spidering by the user agent “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; heritrix/1.12.1 +http://www.page-store.com)” and appearing to be sourced from what appears to be an Amazon Web Services IP address, 72.44.62.136 (domU-12-31-37-00-02-76.usma3.compute.amazonaws.com.).
The Page-store.com web site is minimal, with just a single page and a robots.txt that forbids all crawlers. It does describe what they are trying to do though, which is to spider everything and then sell some digested form of that gathered information onto new search engines so they don’t have to do the work themselves. In their words:
Page-store positions itself as a web wholesaler, supplying page and link information to vertical search engine companies on a per-use basis. The effect is to level the playing field between vertical search and general horizontal internet search.
If nothing else it scores highly on the buzzword bingo scale.
Just to show what not to do when writing drivers, this just in from LWN:
A LinuxFR reader has sent out an alert (in French) about the Samsung SCX-4200 printer driver for Linux. It appears that the driver author had some trouble with the Linux permission model; the response was to make a few applications run setuid root. A quick look at the install script shows that the affected programs are xsane, xscanimage, and the major OpenOffice.org components. The script also replaces some CUPS executables and does some other fun things. This seems like code to avoid for anybody wanting to run a remotely secure system.
Ugh.
“Perl, in a Nutshell” sung by Pudge, thanks for the pointer Alec!