Red Hat proposes to enhance Microsoft settlement offer. Red Hat offered to provide open-source software to every school district in the United States free of charge, encouraging Microsoft to redirect the money it would have spent on software into purchasing more hardware for the 14,000 poorest school districts. … Unlike the Microsoft proposal, which has a five year time limit at which point schools would have to pay Microsoft to renew their licenses and upgrade the software, the Red Hat proposal has no time limit.
Go Red Hat! Embrace and extend — in a good way for once. I love it.
Wow, my book looks like shit on my Linux machine. It’s a font thing. Many “standard” fonts don’t exist on Linux, so browsers have to translate into fonts that do exist. Or they exist as free alternatives which look awful. I think that’s what happened; Georgia doesn’t exist but it gets translated into Palatino, which looks wretched. Unless I’m missing something really simple, fonts appear to be a big problem on Linux.
This weblog looks OK; I guess Tahoma translates into… looks like Helvetica, which looks pretty good at any size, at least on my machine. This is such an obvious problem, I have to assume that smart people have thought about it and are trying to solve it.
‘Drive-by’ hacking a real threat. Hacking wireless networks is ridiculously easy. According to [a recent] survey, 41 percent of 500 executives within multinational companies believe their company is susceptible to a serious security breach. Of this number, 60 percent believe that it can be solved with technology.
Yes, throw even more technology at the problem. That’ll solve it.
What’s in a name? Even though real-world use of this hack (which is real — most wireless networks are wide open, and the rest are easily crackable) will not involve actual cars, the term ‘drive-by hacking’ was obviously chosen to associate it with ‘drive-by shooting’ and therefore make it seem more dangerous. Of course, in a drive-by shooting, people actually get shot. So it’s a little different.
Playboy.com cracked, credit cards stolen. Playboy.com learned of the breach after a person claiming access to its systems and customer information began e-mailing customers Sunday night. Although Playboy.com did not say when the intruder first got into the site, the hacker in the e-mail claimed to have had access since 1998.
Playboy.com is running Netscape Enterprise on Solaris, so all you Microsoft-bashers can just zip it this time.
Microsoft settles. This is really a brilliant move on Microsoft’s part: they “spend” a billion dollars helping the poorest schools, and they get to bully the rest of the states to go along because it sounds so irresistable. (“Think of the children!”) Meanwhile, it won’t really be a billion dollars because they’ll no doubt get to claim a loss of full retail price for Windows and Office for each workstation they install, even though those installations cost them literally nothing since they wouldn’t have been sales in the first place (and certainly wouldn’t have been charged full retail price if they had been sales). Plus it gives Microsoft the incredible opportunity to inject Microsoft-only software into these schools, which gets them on the upgrade treadmill and will eventually cost these schools billions of dollars. Then there’s the question of whether computers, free or not, is really what these schools need in the first place. As a friend of mine (who worked in one of the poorest schools in West Philadelphia) once said: We don’t need free computers on every desk. We need desks.
Joel Spolsky: A Hard Drill Makes An Easy Battle. Joel uses VMWare to set up virtual environments to test tons of different software configurations. We did this at my previous job, not to test the same software in different configurations, but to be able to quickly set up different configurations for pilots, demos, and prototypes. VMWare rocks. I highly recommend it. It runs on Windows and Linux, and can even give you virtual environments of one on the other.
A Cryptanalysis of the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection System [via Slashdot] HDTV encryption thoroughly cracked. Decrypted film at 11.
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© 2001–present Mark Pilgrim