A soap opera is playing out on the mailing lists of several security newsgroups this morning, complete with people hiding behind pseudonyms, people “outing” one another and rumors of death threats against the major players. At stake? A possible worm for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system.
(from CNET News.com, News of a Mac OS X worm incites death threats and intrigue)
Diamond Dave will be appearing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien Thursday July 13th, 2006. The performance will be in support of the Van Halen tribute album, Strummin’ With The Devil – The Southern Side of Van Halen. Dave will be performing “Jamie’s Cryin'” with his bluegrass friends.
For more information: http://www.nbc.com/Late_Night_with_Conan_O’Brien/
I do not remember my biological father. I was two or maybe three when my biological parents split up, and I do not remember anything from when I was that young (my memory from before the age of ten or eleven is actually pretty spotty — I remember snatches of things, but there are large spans of time I do not recall at all).
A while ago, a friend of mine asked if I’d ever tried contacting my biological father. I said “no”. To be frank, it just never occurred to me. Why would I? He said I might regret it if I never tried to contact him. At the time, it just seemed like a senseless thing to do. Why would I bother trying to contact some stranger?
But after thinking about it a while, I decided to go ahead and try. What the heck? It might be interesting. I guess I was just curious. So I asked my mother for my biological father’s complete name and last known address. She had his name, but not his address. She told me the last city she knew of where he’d lived, but that was decades ago. Well, I was a private detective for a brief time, and that was enough. I found him in about ten minutes. Yeah, I’m pretty awesome. 🙂
I called him on the phone, asked if he was the man I was looking for, and told him who I was. He seemed a little taken aback, but welcomed the suggestion that we meet at some neutral place to meet and see what kind of people the other person is.
Well, that’s not going to happen. He called me back the other night, and said that he’d given it a great deal of thought, and he’d decided that 40 years apart is too long a span to get to know someone again. He said he had a wife and a son, and a good life, and that I was a stranger to him and there’d be no point in our meeting. I said I understood completely, and there were no hard feelings. I told him that I didn’t want to disrupt his life, and that I didn’t want anything from him, and that I didn’t blame him at all for not wanting to meet after all this time.
He seemed a little defensive. Maybe he thought I’d take it badly. He also seemed to have some unresolved issues with my mother. He said things like, “I’m sure you’ve been told a lot about me, and I want you to know that a lot of it isn’t true,” and “I don’t know anything about how your mother is doing, and I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know anything about her.”
I told him that other than his name and the fact he was my biological father, I hadn’t been told anything about him, and that I wouldn’t mention my mother at all if he didn’t want me too. Not a problem. I didn’t look him up to discuss her. He seemed to relax a little after that, and said that he’d be willing to answer a couple of questions, “within reason”.
He answered a couple of medical questions for me, and we talked a few more minutes. He said that he had a good life, he’d been married for 37 years and was proud of his (other) son, that he’d never been arrested, and so forth. I said that sounded great, that I’d been married 16 years, and that I also was happy and had a good life, and that I was glad that we had that in common.
At the end of the conversation, he said I could call him again some time if I wanted, and that maybe we could meet some day. I don’t think I’ll bother. I think my curiosity is satisfied, and what I told him was true: I really don’t want anything from him. I am glad I called him, though.
The Wave Magazine presented a field guide for testing if the San Francisco mayoral candidates were human or not.
Turns out that San Francisco elected a replicant — not even a top of the line replicant, just a Nexus 5 (Gavin Newsom).
But seriously, you can tell by looking at him that he isn’t human. That hair is a dead giveaway.
Okay, I have had enough. HTML mail is the primary vector for trojans and viruses, and the vast majority of it is spam even if it doesn’t carry a virus payload (and what little isn’t spam is nonsense from clueless users who probably shouldn’t be allowed to use a computer to begin with).
This crap is overflowing my inbox and it’s the cause of untold numbers of zombie computers spreading spam like the plague. So I want to reject it at the gateway so that it never reaches me or my users.
I’m not sure how to do that yet, but it has to be possible.
Enough is enough: I am going to kill HTML mail.
Several years ago, I ran a series of games I called “Scooby Cthulhu”. Daphne and Her Dog could have taken place in that universe.
At long last, the final draft of the GNU GPLv3 (General Public License, version 3) is out. While companies and attorneys are taking their time in reacting to this latest version, two of the GPLv3’s three primary authors have shared their opinions on the almost-completed work.
In a public letter, “Why Upgrade to GPL Version 3,” Richard M. Stallman, the GPL’s chief author and founder, opens by explaining why open-source developers should upgrade their programs to the new Version 3 GPL. In the past, prominent Linux developers objected to the new license. More recently, a Microsoft-sponsored study claimed that open-source programmers actually don’t want GPLv3-style patent protection.
In response to such concerns, Stallman stated that “Software patents are a vicious and absurd system that puts all software developers in danger of being sued by companies they have never heard of, as well as by all the megacorporations in the field. Large programs typically combine thousands of ideas, so it is no surprise if they implement ideas covered by hundreds of patents. Megacorporations collect thousands of patents, and use those patents to bully smaller developers. Patents already obstruct free software development.”
While the ultimate answer for making “software development safe is to abolish software patents,” that’s beyond what the GPLv3 can do, according to Stallman. Instead, he said, “the explicit patent license of GPLv3 makes sure companies that use the GPL to give users the four freedoms cannot turn around and use their patents to tell some users ‘That doesn’t include you.’ It also stops them from colluding with other patent holders to do this.”
On May 31, Red Hat’s sponsored and community supported open source Fedora Project released the latest version of its distribution: Fedora 7. Besides being a cutting edge Linux distribution, it features a new build capability that enables users to create their own custom distributions.
Fedora 7 now boasts a completely open-source build process that greatly simplifies the creation of appliances and distributions that can be targeted to meet individual needs.
Max Spevack, leader of the Fedora Project, stated: “With our new open source build process, our community of contributors will enjoy much greater influence and authority in advancing Fedora. The ability to create appliances to suit very particular user needs is incredibly powerful.”
[…]
In addition, Fedora now supports live CD, DVDs, and USB devices. Spevack believes that this capability, combined with the new development toolchain, will make Fedora very popular with those that want to create software appliances.
[…]
In addition to the new, open build system and live media support, Fedora 7 supports KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and Qemu virtualization technologies, as well as Xen. The Fedora graphical virtualization manager can be used to manage all of its virtualization programs.
Time to upgrade my servers again… 🙂
Microsoft is back with more vague threats and bogus claims concerning their patents being violated by open source software.
In an interview with Fortune, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, claims that the Linux kernel violates 42 of its patents, the Linux graphical user interfaces run afoul of another 65, the Open Office suite of programs infringes 45 more, e-mail programs violate 15, while other assorted free and open-source programs allegedly transgress 68.
(from eWeek, Microsoft Claims Open-Source Technology Violates 235 of Its Patents)
You first heard this noise back in 2004. It was piffle then, and it’s piffle now. The fact that a company would continue to make empty threats like this, year after year, should be enough reason for you to stop doing business with them.
That’s aside from the practical ramifications of using Microsoft’s software. Anyone who runs a mission-critical server on a Windows machine rather than a Linux or Unix machine, anyone who runs a web server on IIS rather than Apache, anyone who chooses to use Microsoft Office instead of OpenOffice, anyone who chooses to use Internet Explorer rather than Firefox — these people are all technological illiterates who shouldn’t be allowed near a computer keyboard or an IT architecture meeting.
Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN –news) said on Wednesday the company will launch a digital music store later in 2007 with millions of songs, free of copy protection technology that limits where consumers can play their music.
(from Yahoo! News, Amazon to sell digital music free of copy curbs)
Way to go, Amazon. Great move.
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Blackmoor Vituperative