Asteroid narrowly missed Earth
Should I rate this as positive or negative now?
At Spiegel Online: Wissenschaft you can find the original article.
Archive 6. October 2003
The VeriSign Special Session Approaches
You could almost feel sorry for Verisign given the speakers against them. But only almost...
Update: Verisign has convened its own Technological Review Panel. Let me translate the charter here:
- Solicit and gather technical information and data regarding the implementation of the Site Finder service from interested parties. : First collect the complaints and see who among them might look important. The rest simply aren't interested parties according to our definition.
- Distill the received information and data to implementation issues. : If we have to deal with a complaint anyway because the complainant can't simply be ignored, then we can maybe just claim it has nothing to do with the implementation.
- Based on the implementation issues, determine which issues are based on fact concerning the service. : If possible, just claim it's all lies or not real.
- For each issue associated with the service, determine the likelihood of the issue arising for Internet users, and the consequences of each issue for Internet users. : If we have to acknowledge there's actually a problem, try to weasel out of it by claiming it basically never happens anyway.
- Based on the resulting factual analysis of the issues, determine what enhancements could be made to improve the service. : If there's no way around it, make non-binding concessions - we won't implement the whole thing anyway.
- Report the observed implementation issues to VeriSign along with any data supporting such issues. : All the complaints we can't simply lie about, push aside, or ignore get printed out and filed away. Guarantees of fixing problems? Commitment to follow the panel's recommendations? Yeah right, forget it.
And the panel participants even volunteer for this stuff for free. There's certainly no recognition here that SiteFinder was simply monopoly abuse and should never have existed. And no sign that the idea would be dropped.
At Wortfeld you can find the original article.
European iTMS in May 2004?
It's about time...
At Industrial Technology & Witchcraft you can find the original article.
Good Question
The question of what happens to Java if SUN goes bankrupt is quite simple to answer: we'll delete it and everyone will use Python instead!
At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.
Multithreaded Python for DOS
A Python 2.2.1 for DOS that supports all essential features. Hmm. If someone were to port all the additional modules, you could even run the Python Desktop Server on it. Or how about an AS/400 or VMS? Here's the original article.
Code more beautifully
And there's also HyperEdit. I quite like it because the preview is next to the source rather than below it. That's practical since my monitor is wider than it is tall — this way I don't lose as much context. However, I have to admit that I rarely launch it, since I almost never create any HTML by hand anymore, but instead generate almost everything in some form programmatically.
At Der Schockwellenreiter there's the original article.
System of info screens in Hamburg U-Bahn cracked
No wonder - such a system tempts you to hack it. And if it runs on WLAN without encryption, it practically begs for hacks.
At heise online news there's the original article.
Unheard of false assumptions
In this context, perhaps not entirely unimportant is Haim Saban's criticism of Middle East reporting by German television broadcasters. Haim Saban was, together with Rupert Murdoch (among other things owner of Fox News Network), for example each holding 49.5% of Fox Family Worldwide (meanwhile sold to Disney - the money probably went into the Kirch deal). Murdoch was also the one who bought Saban's Power Rangers import and thereby established Saban's wealth. I think given that background it's fairly clear what he meant with his criticism. That we would be informed equally fair and balanced as Americans are through Fox News. At Telepolis News there is the original article.
Why I hate Microsoft ...
Security holes in Internet Explorer are a dime a dozen - of course there are patches for them too. So just install them. That's quite simple, right? Wrong. IE 5.5 is installed - the patch is only available for IE 6. But you can just update the browser, right? Wrong. IE6 requires Service Pack 6a on NT4. But you can just install that, can't you? Wrong.
And now it got really wild: I have an NT4 with IE 5.5 on it. Installing the normal SP6a gave me a message that I was trying to install a normal encryption version over a high-encryption version and that wouldn't work. But there's no high-encryption SP6a - you literally have to patch the normal SP6a by hand! So unpack the service pack, search for update.inf, search for the checksecurity.system32.files section, throw out schannel.dll from there. Now you can finally install the service pack. And the first reboot, because I just want to patch a browser.
Ok, then finally install IE6. It churns away for an eternity and what comes next? Of course, the reboot. Because I just want to patch a browser. The fact that it keeps working after the reboot was clear. What the heck is it doing with all that? It's just a damn browser!
Then finally install the cumulative patch for IE6. Which, surprisingly, doesn't require a reboot. I thought. Until the question came up whether I wanted to restart now. It's just a browser! A damn browser! A crummy application program that needs to be patched because the manufacturer is too stupid to do it right!
That's just bullshit. (Side note: Of course this isn't a real Windows system, but a VMware - so I could work in parallel, namely under a real operating system
)