Community

LinuxWorld.com> Community > Columns > 'Net Insider

'Net Insider

By Scott Bradner

Microsoft: Invisible patents as a uniform
05-21-07
Fortune magazine thought the story was important enough to put above the magazine's name on the front cover of its May 28 issue: "Microsoft takes on the free world." The story makes it clear that Microsoft thinks it's again time to trot out its Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) campaign against Linux. This attempt rings as hollow as previous ones.

Obeying Microsoft: Is Wine the way?
02-26-07
If you are a Mac or Linux user and need to run an application that works only on Microsoft operating systems in theory, you have a number of options. But Microsoft has decided to make some of the options harder, or at least more expensive, than they should be.

SCO Group’s last gasp?
12-05-06
At the beginning of the year I predicted that SCO Group would: 1) get its case against IBM thrown out by the judge; 2) fail to show any examples of protected code; and 3) declare (financial) bankruptcy, but not edge closer to a 2007 trial date.

WGA: When is a planet a black hole?
07-17-06
Microsoft is not stupid, so why does it act so stupid? Did it think the spyware functions of WGA would stay hidden from the user community? If so, what planet was it on? Now it has a world of upset users, it has had to back off some of the intrusiveness, and it is being sued for, among other things, violating antispyware laws.

Are VoIP and CALEA incompatible?
06-26-06
A new report shows it may be nearly impossible to implement comprehensive wiretapping of VoIP without reengineering and rebuilding most of the United States' Internet. Not only would such reengineering be extremely costly, it would also relegate the United States to second- or third-class status in Internet-related technological innovation.

Do you have to be ready to be tapped?
06-19-06
Just what will your corporate network need to be ready to do? So far, the FCC has not made it clear that enterprise network managers will need to do anything in response to its order extending CALEA to the Internet and VoIP. There is an ominous hint, however, in footnote 100 on page 19 of the original FCC order.

Laptop security: Do companies care?
06-12-06
I see no possible reason for an auditor such as Ernst & Young to ever have Social Security or credit card numbers on a laptop. In any reasonable society this would be illegal - but don't hold your breath for that to happen in the United States. Note that good security practice is to assume that any laptop will be (not "may be") stolen. A cryptographic hash of the Social Security or credit card number can be used if a unique identifier is needed.

The future library: A 50-petabyte iPod?
05-29-06
I started playing with digitized literature almost 25 years ago. A lot has changed in the digital books biz since then.

Mac OS X gets wrong kind of attention
05-01-06
Recently there has been a growth industry in pundits whining about the security of the Apple Mac OS X operating system. To read some of the coverage, you would think someone deciding to use OS X instead of Windows would have to be dumber than a fence post. Methinks the security worries are rather misplaced and may be the result of hyperventilating, nontechnical reporters and some gloating on the part of Windows users.

Microsoft: Delaying product, spewing FUD
04-03-06
Things may be changing on the patent front. In mid-March the U.S. Supreme Court heard an important case concerning what can be patented, and soon will hear another concerning when injunctions can be employed to stop others using a technology. In addition, Congress is pondering reforming the U.S. patent system. The combination of the courts and Congress just might make it harder for a Microsoft to sell with intellectual-property rights FUD. But don't hold your breath waiting.

An iPod as a legislative force
02-13-06
Sen. Ted Stevens' experience with his new iPod clearly sensitized him to the user end of this discussion on the broadcast flag, and that may make a real difference in the outcome. That is good news for consumers and maybe not so good news for the RIAA.

Carbonaceous computers at Christmas
12-19-05
If things go as some people in the French government have proposed, Parisian parents may not be able to buy a computer for their kids next Christmas. I bet you can guess, without much difficulty, what narrow-minded topic would cause such a possibility.

Advertising arrogance or stupidity
07-04-05
I guess Sprint figures that the disgust level with phone companies is so high already that there is no additional downside to using adware to promote itself, and Vonage must be trying to go that last mile in imitating what is bad about phone companies.

'Death of Microsoft,' compressed GIF at 11
06-06-05
Microsoft is a very powerful player in the computer biz and I doubt it will fade away anytime soon. But Microsoft might find the going harder in some areas - which I would not find troubling.

A handful of Unix
01-24-05
As far as I know, the Mac mini is the first Unix computer from a major manufacturer (if Apple can be called that) to be this small and cheap. This is a full multi-user operating system and reasonably speedy computer for $100 more than a 40G-byte iPod, $200 less than the single-server license that The SCO Group wants for the intellectual property rights it claims in Linux, or just $200 more than Windows XP Professional by itself. A company like HP could do a lot worse than to re-label Mac minis as its basic Unix workstation core like HP already re-labels iPods.

Predictions with the world in mind
01-10-05
My first prediction is that corporations, at least outwardly, will continue to ignore the world around them. A quick and decidedly non-scientific survey of a number of the Fortune 500 corporations' Web sites shows that, for most of them, it's business as usual. Only a few, including Microsoft, Wal-Mart and Dell, bothered to acknowledge the South Asian disaster and include links to relief organizations. Only one that I found, Apple Computer, took almost all business content off its home page to focus on how people can help.

Quality of threats rather than quality of software
11-29-04
Microsoft seems to have switched to a protection-racket approach. The company has warned users that the intellectual property rights picture with open source software is fuzzy. Now it has moved past merely issuing warnings to issuing implied threats.

Core software as security vulnerabilities
10-18-04
The whole list comes across a little bit like telling someone to stop breathing in order to avoid getting cancer from air pollution - accurate but useless advice. I'll focus on the Windows part of the list because many more people can relate to Windows vulnerabilities than Unix ones (including, I suppose, Mac OSX).

Is part of the future of VoIP open?
10-04-04
The Apache Web server and Linux have both proved that open source can be quite successful within big companies. It will be interesting to see if California and other VoIP users embrace the Apache/Linux example or would rather the traditional phone system vendor picture painted by Nortel, Lucent, Avaya and others, maybe even by Microsoft.

UFOs and flying penguins
05-24-04
News reports now say that maybe the Mexican pilots just saw ball lightning and not some manifestation of otherworldly intelligence. At least for now, we might have to rely on the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution for that.

Lessons from the e-voting mess
05-10-04
Quite a few observers have said the basic lesson from the voting system debacle is that all software for this type of critical system should be open source. I don't think that is an unwarranted conclusion, but maybe the lesson is deeper. Just maybe, general-purpose operating systems are not the best solution to all problems. Maybe stripped-down specialized code is better in some cases.

The butterfly as protector (or petty censor?)
03-15-04
For the past week or so the comic strip Fox Trot has been running a series in which the characters imagine what anti-Apple, anti-Netscape, anti-world special code might be in the recently leaked Windows source code. A corporate environment that could lead to the petty blocking of searches for a potentially competitive product might just make the comic strip not so funny.

Reach for the stupid juice
10-20-03
Then along comes some geek who tells the world that your technology can be defeated with the little finger of the left hand. Not only does the emperor have no clothes, the underwear is also missing. What should you do? It is far too late to have developed a product that did what the hype said it would do. You are in a bind. The future of the company depends on your next move. If you are the CEO of SunnComm, you reach for the stupid juice and take a big swig.

Slime for sale
05-26-03
I've seen a number of theories about just what the heck The SCO Group is trying to accomplish in suing IBM for a billion dollars, but collecting a billion dollars is not one of the believable theories.

Purina paranoid chow?
11-11-02
Maybe the judge is a secret supporter of open software and wanted to prod people, like the Chinese government, to be distrustful of Microsoft operating systems so they would switch to Linux where you can see what is going on.