Microsoft Promised to Guarantee BayStars Investment in SCO ?

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The thlot pickens! Groklaw has “IBM’s Memo in Support of its Motion for SJ on SCO’s Interference Claims” (SJ is summary judgement I believe) and has the interesting quote from Lawrence Goldfarb, a BayStar Capital’s managing partner, about what happened when BayStar invested in SCO after Microsoft introduced them:

“Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would ‘backstop,’ or guarantee in some way, BayStar’s investment…. Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar’s investment in SCO.”

Apparently Mr Emerson was Microsoft’s “senior VP of corporate development and strategy“, but when BayStar invested things changed:

“Microsoft stopped returning my phone calls and emails, and to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Emerson was fired from Microsoft.”

Richard P. Emerson is on the MSFT’s 2002 list of directors, but is absent from the 2003 list..

SpamHaus Lawsuit (Updated)

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There’s been a lot written about a spammer listed by SpamHaus sueing them in the US, but this lawyers account is worth a read. Basically it looks like SpamHaus made a legal mistake in the way they dealt with the US court:

3. That said, Spamhaus had a likely winner of an argument if they’d made it from the beginning: the U.S. court does not properly have jurisdiction over the U.K.-based company. […] it would have been possible for an attorney to make what is known as a “special appearance” before the court without acknowledging the court’s jurisdiction in the case. Reading the record, I’m puzzled that this wasn’t the strategy Spamhaus’s counsel chose.

4. Unfortunately, since that’s not what happened, Spamhaus may have waived personal jurisdiction as a defense early on in the case when they not only appeared, but then asked for the case to be removed from state court (where it was originally filed) and moved to federal district court (where it is today).

Most importantly, he says:

9. Finally, one last point: anyone who has a chance to talk publicly about this, if you are a friend to Spamhaus I would strongly urge you to refrain from making derogatory statements about the judge or the legal system in the U.S. Talk all you want about the evidence that you believe demonstrates e360 is a spammer. Talk about how important Spamhaus is to the functioning of email. But calling the judge stupid doesn’t help the case. Given the record, the judge had little choice other than to do what he did. So far as I can tell, Spamhaus presented no argument that would let him get out of this case, even withdrawing the answer that had been filed from the proceedings.

Anyway, he says a lot more than that so please go and read.

Update: The spammer who is suing SpamHaus is now being sued themselves in California on 87 counts of spamming.

LUV (Melbourne Chapter) October General Meeting: Intel Architecture and Hacked Slugs

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Paraphrased from the original.

Start: Oct 3 2006 – 19:00
End: Oct 3 2006 – 21:00

Location: The Buzzard Lecture Theatre. Evan Burge Building. Trinity College Main Campus. The University of Melbourne. Parkville. Melways Map: 2B C5.

Intel’s Core Architecture by David Jones

David Jones is a Solutions Specialist with Intel Australia specialising in Server Architecture, working directly with end users such as Westpac Bank, Ludwig Cancer Research, VPAC and others advising on latest technologies available from Intel. David has been with Intel for 10 years and in IT for 20 years, coming from a UNIX background. Today David will introduce Intel’s latest Architecture (Core Architecture) and explain the differences between Hyperthreading and Dual Core technologies.

Hacked slugs, solving all your problems with little NAS boxes by Michael Still

This talk will discuss how to get your own version of Linux running on a Linksys NSLU2, known to the Linux community as a slug. This is a consumer grade network attached storage (NAS) system. These devices are quite inexpensive, are physically small, and run on low voltage DC power. I also discuss how to handle having your firmware flash go bad, and provide some thoughts on projects made possible by these devices. The presentation will also include extra demonstrations of the process of flashing and setting up one of these devices.

Ed: as usual there will be a pre-meeting curry at 6pm

Default ATM Passwords

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Dear gods, it’s the 80’s all over again, only this time with ATM’s..

In the operator manual freely available on the Web site of a Canadian reseller, a section titled “Programming” provides the specific key sequence that will pop up a screen on the ATM that asks for the master password. It then lists three default passwords – master, service and operator – that could be used to hijack and possibly rig a machine. (emphasis added)

Lets try this again – default passwords are bad, OK ? Sheesh…

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE Camera Returns First Low-Level Image

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Yay! After months of waiting NASA’s MRO has reached its science orbit and taken its first snap with its HiRISE camera. NASA has a press release with a link to the gallery page of the image which has a scale of about 1 foot per pixel. They also have an 8MB TIFF “sub-image” available for download from the MRO’s calibration gallery.

But for the very latest you’ve got to check out the HiRISE team blog where they already have the fact that the second image is down, of layered deposits at the Martian North Pole.

Below is the first image!

First MRO HiRISE Image (NASA)

Update: the page with the full image from which the above sub-image was taken is also available, but be warned, the full size JPEG is 23444 x 23377 pixels and ways in at a hefty 111.8 MBytes!

Research Challenges in Astronomy

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I’ve been at the first APAC All Hands Meeting this week, generally hearing what all the other people in the APAC Grid project are up to and meeting folks from around the country that I only otherwise get to see via Access Grid.

Today was the turn of some of the science areas to tell us what they are up to and what they see their big challenges being, and the most scariest (from an HPC perspective) was the session on Astronomy and Astrophysics by Peter Quinn (formerly of the ESO and now a Premier’s Fellow at UWA).

The most intimidating points I picked up from his presentation were:

  • Data explosion – doubling time T2 was < 12 months, with new big survey projects such as VST and VISTA that will become T2 < 6 months!
  • Disk technology T2 is 10 years at present (according to Peter), and slowing.
  • The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is reckoned to capable of producing 7 PetaBytes per annum of data.
  • The ESO’s data archive is currently (2006) 100TB in 10 racks and using 70kW of power. By 2012 it is forecast to be 10PB in 100 racks and consuming 1MW of electricity.
  • A recent Epoch of Reionisation simulation of 5,0003 particles on a 1,000 CPU Opteron cluster used 2 months of CPU time and 10TB physical RAM (about 10GB per core) and produced about 100TB of output data.
  • Catalogue sizes are exploding, in 2000 there were about 100,000 galaxies in a catalogue, by 2010 that will be 1 billion.
  • Algorithms are not scaling with these data sizes – an algorithm that took 1 second in 2000 will take 3 years in 2010!

But these problems pale into insignificance when you consider the massive Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, it is forecast to produce 100 ExaBytes (that’s one hundred million TeraBytes) of data annually!

This raises a number of very fundamental issues:

  • The terabit speed network technologies needed to get the data off the detectors does not exist (yet).
  • There is no storage technology to cope with the volumes of data.
  • This means they will need to process the data on the fly in a highly parallel manner.
  • This is a radio telescope, so there is no time when it cannot take data, unlike an optical ‘scope. This means you cannot somehow buffer the night time data and then process it during the day.
  • If the ESO estimate of 1 megawatt of power for 7 PB is correct, and assuming that power per PB stays roughly and they do store all 100 EB of data, then the storage of one years data will need about 14GW of generating capacity.

Fortunately construction of the SKA isn’t due to start until 2013, so we’ve got a bit of time to solve all these.. 🙂

Google Co-Op – Annotating The Web

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Looks like Google is working on a new service to allow users to add labels to topics that they (hopefully) know something about. The idea then is that other people then subscribe to your labels if they feel you are accurate and that then influences their search results. Sort of like routing by rumour protocols in computer networks.

So their intention is to get around the fact that webmasters don’t put explicit semantic markup in their pages yet by exploiting the fact that it’s much easier to get other people who know about topics to provide annotations for existing pages through a third party site that (many) others can then use in their normal searches.

I guess the first thing there that springs to mind for me is “what an opportunity for guerrilla marketing” – PR companies subscribe as “ordinary people”, but skew their recommendations towards the people paying them. If that sounds far fetched then don’t forget that techniques like this have been around for over 2 decades – consider it the marketeers version of computer security’s “social engineering“.

Initially found via the Evolving Trends blog.