Microsoft meets Monty Python

Posted on by


I originally wrote this to go in an email in response to an email from a friend saying:
"Nothing wrong with office 2000 other than security concerns 😉" but I liked it so much I decided to put it on here. 🙂



In my defence I’ll just say that I’ve had a morning of mind-bending debugging…!















Cardinal Gates:

 Our main weapon is security holes!
Security holes and proprietary formats, are our two main weapons.

Security holes, proprietary formats and unwanted features are our three main weapons.

Security holes, proprietary formats, unwanted features and forced upgrades are our four main… I’ll come in again.


[exits & re-enters]


Cardinal Gates:
Amongst our many weapons are such diverse elements as
security holes, proprietary formats, unwanted features, forced upgrades, vendor lock in and a fanatical devotion to the stock market.



Cardinal Ballmer, the CDROM!

October 17th Melbourne Consultation on United Nations World Summit on the Information Society

Posted on by

The COIN Internet Research Network (COIN-IRN) at Central Queensland University and the Centre for Community Networking Research (CCNR) at Monash University are being sponsored by the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) to coordinate the development of a Civil Society statement to supplement materials developed by the Australian Government for the World Summit on the Information Society(WSIS).

As part of this they are holding a consultation meeting in Melbourne on October 17th which you need to RSVP to the CCNR organiser if you wish to attend.

This process is intended to produce a response to a challenge to guide and inform this process to produce a "clear statement of political will and a concrete plan of action for achieving the goals of the Information Society".

This seems, to me, to be an excellent opportunity to try and promote strategies to permit open and equal access to information and documents through open standards for document formats so that everyone can gain access regardless of what they choose to use to access it, and to guarantee the ability for future generations to also be able to access it.

This is the reason that I support Open Source Victoria’s push for governments to use open document formats.

Spammers forging email from csamuel.org

Posted on by

It would appear some Y^$%&($#%& have been forging spam from my email address at csamuel.org.

I use GnuPG to PGP sign all my emails. If you get something from me that isn’t signed with GnuPG then it’s unlikely that I’ve written it.

I don’t spam, I hate spam, and the emails in question have never been near a system I control.

From the headers that I’ve seen they seem to be being sent from an IP address in China (218.11.213.132) belonging to “CHINANET hebei province network” as well as an IP address in Venezuala (200.44.150.90) belonging to CANTV Servicios, Venezuela.

I’ll be taking this up with them when I get back from work.

Where’s a big LART when you need one ?

SCO – Ultimate Hypocrites ?

Posted on by

Oh dear oh dear oh dear, SCO do seem to be able to make a complete pigs ear out of things, don’t they.

First of all they say Linux has copied code, then they give two examples, the first being a malloc() routine appearing in V3 Unix and written in 1973 (the algorithm appeared in a book in 1968) and released under a BSD license by Caldera (now SCO – yes the same ones pursuing the law suit) and the second being part of the Berkeley Packet Filter suite written by Lawrence Berkeley Labs and released under the BSD license. Read more here.

Then they say the license that many open source projects are released under, the GPL, is worthless and bad, and yet the same day announce that they’ll be using the Samba 3.0.0 release in their systems. Now guess which license Samba is released under ? Read more here.

To cap it all off, their webserver, according to Netcraft, is running Apache on Linux!

Have a look at what it, and the other systems it shares space with, run, by looking at the Netcraft Summary for the IP block it lives on says.

Lots and lots of Linux, some Windows and no SCO or Unixware…

Open Source Victoria urges Governments to adopt open source protocols & file formats

Posted on by


Open Source Victoria (OSV) has issued a press release which urges governments to adopt open source document & file formats as well as network protocols.



As a member of OSV I would ask anyone who deals with government bodies to point their contacts towards the press release and especially the methods we advocate to ensure that governments use open formats to promote interoperability and communication.