Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 7, 2008
by sjvn01
4 Comments

Millionaires, Billionaires, and Open Source

Thanks to a recent column by my friend Andy Patrizio, I found out that there’s “been an ongoing debate among bloggers and industry observers over one simple question: Where are the open source billionaires?” OK, I’ll buy that some people think that’s a real question, but I think it says more about they don’t understand the connection between software development genius and what it takes to become a billionaire.

My short answer is that the open-source billionaires are the same place where Tim Paterson (Quick & Dirty DOS) and Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina (Mosaic) are today: Doing well, to the best of my knowledge but they’re not in the Fortune 500. In case you don’t recognize those names, QDOS became MS-DOS and Mosaic became Spyglass Mosaic, which in turn, became Internet Explorer 1.0. We don’t ask though why they and their companies faded into relative obscurity and Microsoft and Bill Gates are worth more than most medium-sized countries.

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May 7, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

WiMax finally gets real

I am, shall we say, more than a little cynical, even by my standards, when it comes to wireless networking. For example, I really, really have doubts about the wisdom of moving up to 802.11n. That said, I think the monster Mobile WiMax deal, which was announced today, may actually go places.

Why? Well Mobile WiMax (worldwide interoperability for microwave access), aka IEEE standard 802.16e, is a real standard-unlike the never quite approved 802.11n-and the WiMax Forum actually tests and certifies equipment for interoperability.

In other words, if you buy a WiMax device from any vendor say a laptop with the next generation of Intel’s Wi-Fi chips, the Montevina/Centrino 2, which will start shipping in June, it will work with any WiMax ground-station. In other words, you won’t have to sweat matching vendors for your WiMax connectivity to work.

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May 6, 2008
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Apple TV keeps getting better

With a tweak here and a bit of tuning there, the Apple TV is going from the best available media extender to becoming to movie watching what the iPod is to music: the device that defines a category.

First, you can now rent and buy movies for Apple TV on the same day that they’re released on DVD. Numerous studios including 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney , Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, Sony, and Lionsgate among others have finally free Apple from the silly restriction that Apple couldn’t sell or rent movies until they had sat in movie rental stores for 30-days.

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May 6, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Pondering when your next break-in will happen

As my friend Ryan Naraine, soon to be security evangelist for anti-malware company Kaspersky Labs, recently observed, “This list of 0days is always a source of content for me.” The list in question is the Zero Day Initiative’s list of vulnerabilities.

This list is perfect for any cyber cynic. It shows for the whole world to see who’s been good and who’s been naughty about working on zero-day vulnerabilities. These aren’t, we hope, publicly known security holes. They’re the ones that have been discovered by researchers, who then turned over their results to Tipping Point. No one, we hope, know about them except their discoverers, Tipping Point’s engineers and the vulnerable software’s programmers.

The list serves two purposes. One is, of course, to get you to buy Tipping Point’s IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) device. The other, and the one I also rather enjoy, is that it’s an attempt to shame the big software vendors into cleaning up their programs, if not their acts.

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May 6, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Malware vs. anti-malware, 20 years into the fray

As I recall, Nov. 2, 1988, started as an ordinary day at Goddard Space Flight Center where I was working in the data communications branch. By the end of the day … well, actually, that day never ended. We just kept fighting to bring our servers and networks back to life. Our SunOS and VAX/BSD systems, which were connected to the Internet, had slowed to a stop.

We didn’t know it yet, but we were fighting the first Net-propagated malware program: the Robert Morris Internet worm. Twenty-four hours into our “day,” we received a fix developed by the University of California at Berkeley, and we were back online.

As it turned out, the Morris worm wasn’t a deliberate attack. It was a self-replicating program with a bug that caused it to reproduce at a rate so fast that it brought down the (then much smaller) Internet. That was almost 20 years ago, and eventually it came to light that Robert Morris Jr. didn’t intend to wreak the havoc he did. He was simply trying to get a hard number as to how many systems were attached to the Net.

In contrast, today’s malware causes less overt havoc but far more deliberate harm. Most 21st-century crackers aren’t making malware to show off their skills or wreck systems for the sheer malicious fun of itall. They’re making malware that hides in your system so they can use your personal information and PC resources to make money. Welcome to the era of capitalist hacking.

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May 5, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

As the SCO rolls

Reality, as good writers know, is sometimes stranger than fiction. SCO’s recent performance in the U.S. District Court in Utah is a perfect example. With years to prepare, SCO executives made some remarkable statements in their attempt to show that SCO, not Novell, owns Unix’s copyright.

While this case is not about SCO’s claims that IBM and other companies placed Unix IP (intellectual property) into Linux, Novell’s attorneys decided that they would address this issue as well. One presumes that, since this may be their one and only chance to attack SCO’s Linux claims in a courtroom — what with SCO facing bankruptcy — they decided to address this FUD once and for all.

Before getting to that, though, Novell hammered on Christopher Sontag, one time head of SCOSource, the division of SCO devoted to selling Unix’s IP. Sontag, while dodging around what code SCO was actually selling — UnixWare code or the whole Unix tree leading to UnixWare — was finally cornered into admitting that SCO had received $16,680,000 from Microsoft and $9,143,450.63 from Sun and did not report these deals or income to Novell as it was required to do under the terms of the Novell/SCO APA (Asset Purchase Agreement).

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