Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 16, 2008
by sjvn01
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WhitePages.com grapples with privacy in a Web 2.0 world

WhitePages.com does exactly what you’d expect from the name — it tries to provide phone book-style listings for both the U.S. and Canada. Of course, there’s nothing new about that, so WhitePages.com tries to do an especially thorough job. The company claims that at the end of 2007, it had 180 million U.S. adults, about 80% of the population, in its records.

As Web 2.0, social networking and a changing idea of personal privacy have come to the fore, WhitePages.com has also started to ask itself how it might offer users more control over their information while providing more and different kinds of information. Forward-thinking, maybe noble even but, as experience is showing, far easier said than done.

Specifically, founder and CEO Alex Algard has said that the company would start adding features to let people edit and/or hide portions of their directory information. At the same time early this year, the company promised that it would work on a way to let people send text messages or e-mails, using the directory information but without revealing their information — something along the lines of a social-networking site such as LinkedIn or Facebook.

For example, let’s say you were looking for your old high school girlfriend, and she’s listed in WhitePages.com’s records, but chooses to keep her information hidden. With the system Algard envisions, you could send her a note via WhitePages.com, and she could then decide whether to get back in touch with you or to call the police because you’re still stalking her after all those years.

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May 16, 2008
by sjvn01
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Fixing Debian OpenSSL

Debian, the popular Linux distribution, has just been shown to have made an all-time stupid security goof-up. They managed to change OpenSSL in their distribution so that it had no security to speak of. Good job guys!

OpenSSL makes it possible to use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) in Linux, Unix, Windows and many other operating systems. It also incorporates a general purpose cryptography library. OpenSSL is used not only in operating systems, but in numerous vital applications such as security for Apache Web servers and security appliances from companies like Check Point and Cisco. Yeah, in other words, if you do anything requiring network security on Linux, chances are good, OpenSSL is being called in to help

Now, OpenSSL itself is still fine. What’s anything but fine is any Linux, or Linux-powered device, that’s based on Debian Linux libssl 0.9.8c-1 code, which was released September 17th 2006 until version libssl 0.9.8, which was released on May 13th. That includes the most popular Linux of all: Ubuntu.

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May 15, 2008
by sjvn01
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Open-Source Security Idiots

Sometimes, people do such stupid things that words almost fail me. That’s the case with a Debian ‘improvement’ to OpenSSL that rendered this network security program next to useless in Debian, Ubuntu and other related Linux distributions.

OpenSSL is used to enable SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) in Linux, Unix, Windows and many other operating systems. It also includes a general purpose cryptography library. OpenSSL is used not only in operating systems, but in numerous vital applications such as security for Apache Web servers, OpenVPN for virtual private networks, and in security appliances from companies like Check Point and Cisco.

Get the picture? OpenSSL isn’t just important, it’s vital, in network security. It’s quite possible that you’re running OpenSSL even if you don’t have a single Linux server within a mile of your company. It’s that widely used.

Now, OpenSSL itself is still fine. What’s anything but fine is any Linux, or Linux-powered device, that’s based on Debian Linux OpenSSL code from September 17th, 2006 until May 13, 2008.

What happened? This is where the idiot part comes in. Some so-called Debian developer decided to ‘fix’ OpenSSL because it was causing the Valgrind code analysis tool and IBM’s Rational Purify runtime debugging tool to produce warnings about uninitialized data in any code that was linked to OpenSSL. This ‘problem’ and its fix have been known for years. That didn’t stop our moronic developer from fixing it on his own by removing the code that enabled OpenSSL to generate truly random numbers..

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May 15, 2008
by sjvn01
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Adobe releases Adobe Flash Player 10 beta for Linux

Adobe Systems is reaching out for Linux desktop users with its announcement today that the first beta of Adobe Flash Player 10, a.k.a. Astro, is now available for Linux, as well as Windows and Mac OS X.

In a statement, David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe, said that “Adobe had been working closely with the community; we are delivering groundbreaking creative features that will be transformative for interactive designers and developers, and revolutionary for end users.”

Unfortunately, not all those new features are available in the Linux version. The new release gives Windows and Mac OS designers the ability to create custom filters and effects that can be used with Flash’s native effects. To create these custom filters and effects, users need Adobe Pixel Bender toolkit, and this program, which is now a release candidate, is not available for Linux developers.

Adobe promises that some of the toolkit’s functionality will be incorporated into Adobe AIR, which does run on Linux in alpha release.

Flash Player 10 comes on the heels of Adobe’s Open Screen Project, whose goal is “to enable a consistent runtime environment” by relaxing some restrictions on the Flash format and releasing some Flash specifications. According to Adobe, some of Pixel Bender’s functionality will also be included in Open Screen. That said, Open Screen, isn’t regarded as being all that useful by open-source Flash developers.

The new beta provides for variable bit-rate video streaming. While this functionality isn’t usable today, it’s designed to automatically adjust the video quality between the next version of the Adobe Flash Media Server and Player depending on the available bandwidth.

Flash Player 10 also includes native support for 3-D effects to position, rotate, and animate 2-D objects while retaining interactivity. This functionality is already available for developers thanks to the PaperVision3D open source library for Flash Player 9.

Microsoft is attempting to compete with Flash with its Silverlight platform for .Net-based media files. Adobe’s beta release comes days after Miguel de Icaza, lead developer of Mono, the .Net Linux implementation, announced that the first code was available for Moonlight, a Mono-based implementation of Silverlight. While not even feature-complete, it’s the first published code that supports the Silverlight 1.0 profile for Linux.

Microsoft, as Roy Schestowitz pointed out on his Boycott Novell site, has not opened up Silverlight at all nor offered support for it on Linux. Thus, neither Flash nor Moonlight/Silverlight is really all that Linux-friendly. Both, especially for Linux creative content developers, continue to be difficult to work with. That said, for Linux users who just want to watch Flash movies, Adobe’s new beta deserves some attention.

Linux users do have another option for Flash viewing. Gnash released Gnash 0.8.2 of its GPLv3 SWF (Shockwave Flash) movie player and Firefox browser plugin in late March. Besides the browser plugin, Gnash also offers standalone players for both KDE and GNOME.

The prerelease version of Adobe Flash Player 10 beta is now available as a free download from Adobe Labs in RPM and DEB binaries. Users must uninstall Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux before installing the beta.

A version of this story first appeared on NewsForge. >

May 15, 2008
by sjvn01
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Five Reasons — Wait, Six! — to Start Considering WiMax Today

t’s a Wi-Fi world, but Wi-Fi has its own set of problems. Now, mobile WiMax may provide corporations with another, better way of networking the mobile workforce.

Today, everyone in the user community swears by IEEE 802.11–based wireless networks. But IT people all swear at it. The high-speed, 100Mbps-plus, 802.11n standard still hasn’t been finalized; covering space adequately with PoE (power over Ethernet) 802.11g access points (APs) continues to be difficult; and it’s all too easy to overrun a single AP with too many clients.

So, while Wi-Fi is far too useful to consider getting rid of, it also continues to be an IT deployment and management headache. This is why mobile WiMax, IEEE 802.16e, is beginning to catch the attention of CIOs and CTOs.

Here are several good reasons to consider WiMax for your future wireless network needs.

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May 14, 2008
by sjvn01
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Why Mac OS isn’t the best OS Around

When I recently explained one of the many reasons why I prefer desktop Linux to Windows, even over my favorite desktop Windows, XP SP3, I got a lot of people telling me I was full of hooey because I barely even mentioned Mac OS X.

Good enough, here’s my take on Apple’s Mac OS X.

First, I really like Mac OS X. I’ve liked it, in fact, since before there was a Mac OS X. I loved it since its first incarnation, as NeXTStep back in 1993. One of my computing regrets is that in 1995 I swapped my Color Turbo NeXTStation (Sob!) for an Adtran T1 Network Facility Interface. What can I say? I really needed a 1.544Mbps Internet connection when that kind of speed was almost unheard of for a home office.

These days I run Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4 on my PowerPC Mac Mini and Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5 on my Intel Core Duo iMac. Oh, and for the sake of completeness, I should also mention my still running Mac IIsi from 1992, which uses System 7.6.1. Finally, when I can afford it, I really want a MacBook Air.

So, with all that, why isn’t Mac OS X my favorite operating system? Because, even though its family tree goes back to open-source BSD Unix and the Mach kernel, Mac OS X is a proprietary black box. I have some very good clues, because I’ve worked with the BSDs and Darwin, Max OS X’s most immediate open-source ancestor, as to how it works, but I don’t know that for sure and Apple is making sure that I never will know.

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