March 29, 2010
by sjvn01
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Is this the end for SCO?

I’ve given up on predicting when the zombie movie series staring the undead SCO monster is finally going to stay quietly in its grave Still, this week a jury is deciding whether SCO or Novell owns Unix’s intellectual property rights.

You may have thought that this was settled. Most of us who followed SCO certainly thought that was a done deal. After all, the matter of who owns Unix comes down to a fairly simple issue of contract law and not some esoteric IP (intellectual property) legal gymkhana. And, no matter how SCO sliced it, Judge Dale Kimball decided that Novell owned Unix’s copyrights. Alas, another judge decided last August that Kimball had had no right to make that call and that a jury should decide who Unix’s copyrights instead.

So, here we are again: SCO vs. Novell, and the known Linux-using universe round 743.

I don’t think for a minute in a rational universe that SCO can win this case. But, it is in front of a jury and, after-all, a jury is made up of twelve-people who weren’t bright enough to get out of jury duty.

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March 29, 2010
by sjvn01
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HTML 5: Less than it’s cracked up to be

The core idea behind HTML 5, the latest proposed version of the Web’s foundation markup language, is to make all resources, not just text and links, widely and uniformly usable across all platforms. Well, that was the theory. In practice, things aren’t going to change that much from today’s Web, with its reliance on proprietary media formats and methods.

In the 20 years since HTML appeared, companies — including Adobe with Flash, Microsoft with Silverlight and Apple with QuickTime — have added their own proprietary media formats to the Web. In addition, other businesses — such as Google with Gears and Oracle/Sun with JavaFX — have created technologies for the Web that make it possible to create offline and user-side-based Web applications. This is all fine, but these proprietary formats and application platforms get in the way of the universal use vision for the Web.

The W3C’s (World Wide Web Consortium) plan was to answer these proprietary approaches with HTML 5. This open standard, yet to be fully approved, takes HTML from simply describing the basics of a text-based Web to one that includes specifications for presenting animations, audio, mathematical equations, offline storage and applications, typefaces and video. In short, HTML 5 is meant to incorporate all the functionality that Web users now expect from proprietary add-ons.

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March 25, 2010
by sjvn01
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And the browser losers are …

As usual at Pwn2Own, the contest to see who can hack ‘secure’ programs and systems the fastest at the CanSecWest security conference, the big loser was Microsoft, which saw IE 8 on a fully-patched Windows 7 system get cracked in less than two minutes. That said, everyone’s Web browsers were being cracked open left and right at the show … except for Google Chrome.

While Firefox and Safari may be better than IE, these Web browsers didn’t last very long either. As for Google’s own Web browser, at this point, it’s seemed no one’s even tried to bust Chrome according to the group sponsoring the contest, the TippingPoint’s ZDI (Zero Day Initiative).

Why not? After all, everyone who hacks a browser gets a cool $10,000 for their efforts. The reason was predicted by Aaron Portnoy, TippingPoint’s Security Research Team Lead, to be that while Chrome is often affected by vulnerabilities due to its inclusion of the WebKit library, I predict the browser will remain untouched throughout Pwn2Own. This is due to the difficulty in producing an impactful exploit that can break out of the security sandbox.”

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March 25, 2010
by sjvn01
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Ask not what Google can do for Asheville…

but what Asheville can do for the world.

Of course, people in Asheville, NC want ultra-high-speed Internet. Who doesn’t?

But, one thing that Asheville has that many other towns and small cities don’t are resources for a better, technically adept, society. Whether it’s Green Technology or terabytes of data at the National Climate Data Center proving that climate change isn’t just a liberal myth, Asheville has resources that the rest of the world, at a gigabit per second, can use.

It’s more, though, than simply resources. Asheville also has a proven, major ‘can do’ attitude. Like too much of America today, the community is suffering from bad times. Despite that,, many of the people who live and continue to come to Asheville are ambitious and creative technological entrepreneurs. They include businesses such as the Elumenati, with its virtual reality designs and Open Health Tools, an open-source community devoted to creating interoperable systems for patients and their care providers. Asheville is not Mayberry. It is a modern city where creative professionals are working on building both new businesses and new, sustainable, ways of improving society.

So, Google,consider Asheville not just for all that high-speed networking can bring to the region, but for what Asheville can offer to those everywhere else.. By bringing the world to within a few milliseconds of Asheville, both will prosper.

Want to know more about Asheville’s efforts to become the home to the Google Fiber Initiative? Visit Asheville’s Google Fiber site.

March 24, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Good-Bye IE 6

I hereby officially proclaim Internet Explorer 6 to be a dead browser walking. Even though IE6 still somehow manages to keep 19.8% of the Web browser market, IE6 is a late Web browser! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If Microsoft hadn’t nailed it to the operating system, it would be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are of interest only to historians! It’s shuffled off this mortal coil! It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This…. is an EX-Web browser!

Excuse me for the Monty Python moment there, but I was so pleased to learn that Amazon would no longer be supporting IE6 for its seller accounts at the end of March, I couldn’t help myself. I’m sure that this is only Amazon’s first move in dropping support for this hopelessly obsolete Web browser.

With this move, Amazon joins Google in stopping support for IE6. But don’t think that this is just a move by third parties. Microsoft itself wants you to stop using IE6. Heck, Microsoft even sent flowers to a recent mock IE6 funeral.

Of course, they’d rather have you move to IE8. Personally, I think you’d be better off with Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

In any case, it’s clear that everyone with any sense is abandoning IE6 as fast as possible. I’m also sorry to report that some companies and government agencies aren’t helping matters by still running Web applications that won’t work correctly with anything except IE6.

Come on, people. It’s time. If you’re still running applications that are IE6-specific, you have to dump them. You’re doing your customers a disservice by requiring them to use a Web browser that’s infamous for its lack of security and is clearly on its way to the trash can. The sooner every company dumps support for IE6 and starts requiring that its Web applications can work with any generic HTML 4-compliant Web browser the better.

A version of Good-Bye IE 6 first appeared in ComputerWorld. >

March 24, 2010
by sjvn01
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Windows’ Boll Weevil problem

You don’t have to be a security expert to know that Windows and its software have serious security problems. It seems that no sooner than Microsoft fixes some holes then more are revealed. Part of that is because Windows is insecure by design. But, another part of it is that Windows is much too popular for its own good.

Windows defenders like to claim that all other operating systems would have just as much trouble if they were as popular as desktop Windows is. They’re wrong of course. Windows was designed as a single user operating system and to make it easy for applications to share data. That single-user, no IPC (interprocess communication) DNA remains in Windows to this day. That said, they do have a point, which is why I like to say that Windows has a “Boll Weevil” problem.

Now, what the heck do I mean by that? Get ready for a little history lesson. After the Civil War, the U.S. South became more dependent on cotton production then ever. To make any money in the South in the late 19th century you probably did it by raising cotton.

Then, starting in the mid 1890s, “Mr. Boll Weevil” arrived and almost completely destroyed the cotton crop and the South’s economy along with it. With only one cash crop, this bug destroyed not only crops but hundreds of thousands of people’s livelihoods.

Windows is the 21st century money-making mono-crop.