My Archives: May 2001
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
Posted by Elmer @ 06:01 AM EST [Link]
Computerworld IT Resources Home
Posted by Elmer @ 05:41 AM EST [Link]
CERT officials downplay last week's attack | Computerworld News & Features Story
"On a daily basis, the CERT/CC is the target of attack attempts by intruders, and has been for many years," Carpenter said. "The nature of the protocols and technology used for the Internet causes organizations to be dependent on the security of others. Thus, no organization, including the CERT/CC, is completely immune to occasional service disruptions."
Carpenter went on to say that DDoS attacks, "in particular, can cause operational problems that take time to resolve.
Posted by Elmer @ 05:40 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, May 29, 2001
Welcome to LinuxProgramming.com!- Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links (May 28)
Posted by Elmer @ 09:38 AM EST [Link]
The Finicky Financial Trading System (FFTS)
What is the FFTS?
The Finicky Financial Trading System (FFTS) is an open-source front-office trading and risk management system licensed under the GNU General Public License. Its underlying architecture is flexible enough to be applied to many different markets, though the current implementation has been developed for the equity derivatives market.
With the FFTS you can book trades, organise your trading accounts, manage the risk of your positions, explore trading strategies, and all the other front-office activities needed to support a trading floor.
Yikes, I could use this to open my very own securities trading floor. Cool, but you do need fed apporvla to deal securities.Posted by Elmer @ 09:36 AM EST [Link]
InternetWeek > PCs As Supercomputer > May 29, 2001
United Technologies Corp. is stealing a page from academia to make use of the countless hours that PCs sit idle across the giant corporation.The $26 billion manufacturing conglomerate is equipping more than 100,000 Wintel computers with its own peer-to-peer software that divvies up scientific calculations and solves complex modeling problems during off hours.
Posted by Elmer @ 09:26 AM EST [Link]
Monday, May 28, 2001
ZDNet: Interactive Week: Consortia Set Web Services Standard
New consortia in the financial and health-care arenas are setting standards for online collaboration - and the spread of Web services.Ten Wall Street securities firms have invested $40 million to set up EquiLend, an independent company that will operate a common platform for clearing securities trades. Separately, a group of 13 medical societies and three universities, including Johns Hopkins University, have formed MedBiquitous, a nonprofit organization that will develop standards and technological infrastructure to enable online certification, electronic research and error tracking.
Posted by Elmer @ 07:46 AM EST [Link]
ZDNet: Interactive Week: Hotel Broadband Fizzles
Millions of hotel rooms are being left without the broadband connections their owners planned, as service providers close shop or ask hotels to split the costs.Most business travelers these days just don't want to pay the typical $10 daily fee for the service. Fewer than 5 percent of business travelers use high-speed Internet access in their hotel rooms, service executives said.
One of the biggest players in the market, CAIS Internet, plans to announce this week its intent to shut down most of its in-room broadband business.
Posted by Elmer @ 07:45 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, May 26, 2001
eTour accused of selling customer info
Direct marketing company eTour violated its privacy policy when it sold some personal information about its 4.5 million customers to Ask Jeeves this week, a privacy watchdog group alleged Friday.The Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center ( EPIC) has sent letters to the Federal Trade Commission and several state attorneys general asking that they investigate eTour's sale of assets to Ask Jeeves.
Posted by Elmer @ 11:22 AM EST [Link]
Friday, May 25, 2001
Dr. Seuss Went to War
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991) was a life-long cartoonist: in high school in Springfield, Massachusetts; in college at Dartmouth (Class of 1925); as an adman in New York City before World War II; in his many children's books, beginning with To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street (1937). Because of the fame of his children's books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist. But for two years, 1941-1943, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM (1940-1948), and for that journal he drew over 400 editorial cartoons.The Dr. Seuss Collection in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego, contains the original drawings and/or newspaper clippings of all of these cartoons. This website makes these cartoons available to all internet users. The cartoons have been scanned from the original newspaper clippings in the UCSD collection.
Posted by Elmer @ 11:27 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, May 24, 2001
ZDNet: eWEEK: AskJeeves turns tables, buys eTour
With a proven technology, shaky financials and a rock-bottom stock price, AskJeeves Inc. seemed to be a prime takeover target in the consolidating CRM software arena.But instead the Emeryville, Calif., vendor of natural language search and customer service applications did some buying of its own Tuesday, scooping up the assets of direct marketing and Internet media company eTour Inc. for an undisclosed amount of cash.
Posted by Elmer @ 10:30 AM EST [Link]
GAO: NIPC late on cyberattack alerts, lacks expertise | Computerworld News & Features Story
An agency intended to be the federal government's focal point for combating computer crime, the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, is falling short in its ability to provide timely cyberattack alerts and often issues warnings about attacks that are already under way.In fact, its alerts may come too late for recipients to take mitigating action, according to a General Accounting Office report released today. The GAO also said the NIPC's efforts to gain private sector cooperation have so far been "mixed."
Posted by Elmer @ 10:26 AM EST [Link]
Web Service Announcement
The CERT/CC has been experiencing a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack since approximately 11:30 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) on Tuesday May 22. The CERT web site may be unavailable at times, or performance may be reduced.
Posted by Elmer @ 10:22 AM EST [Link]
Review: Linux vs. Windows 98 Scanning
I finally broke down and shelled out some dollars for a scanner, an Epson Perfection 1240U Photo in order to add a few pics to LinuxMedNews.com. Having plunked down my money I thought I might as well do a side by side test of the scanner on Linux and Windows. I was prepared to be disappointed in Linux due to previous experience with sound card and video configuration. Read on to see what happened.The Epson Perfection 1240U Photo I bought was $217 from Computers4Sure. It is a USB device which includes a transparency adapter for scanning negatives and other films. The scans were done on the same machine dual-booted to Windows 98SE and RedHat Linux 7.1 using the defaults for all software.
Posted by Elmer @ 07:10 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, May 22, 2001
NBC to cue up PC "convergence" - Tech News - CNET.com
Millions of TV sets will be hooked up to new wires beginning this summer--if NBC and technology company DigitalConvergence have their way.On Monday, the two companies launched CueTV, a technology that acts like a remote control linking TV programming with the Web. The debut is set to kick off an NBC giveaway of $400,000 in prizes from June 13 to July 11.
To ensure the promotion gets off the ground, beginning this week more than 7,000 RadioShack retail outlets around the country will start giving away millions of technology kits, which include a special cable and software for the PC.
Just call it revenge of Cue::Cat!Posted by Elmer @ 02:05 PM EST [Link]
Monday, May 21, 2001
ZDNet: Interactive Week:
As of tomorrow, you will no longer need to buy an Internet Protocol phone to make and receive IP calls. Cisco Systems is rolling out a $210 box that links a broadband modem with a plain old phone. And other companies are right behind.
Posted by Elmer @ 08:23 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, May 20, 2001
markpasc: Code: Stapler
Stapler is a tool for Radio UserLand that creates RSS feeds from sources you select, scraped hourly (or every N hours, variable for each source) from HTML web sites. A flexible script for scraping with selectors similar to CSS2 selectors is included, but Stapler is expandable with your own scraping scripts. Stapler features a full tool website compliant with web standards, for browser-based configuration and documentation. Stapler is made available under a BSD license.
Posted by Elmer @ 07:10 PM EST [Link]
Heyu Home page
The CM11A is a device built by the X10 company for controlling devices by sending signals through the power lines. It's a small box that plugs into an AC outlet and connects to a serial port. The CM11A is shipped with a Windows application called "Activehome".
Posted by Elmer @ 07:44 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, May 19, 2001
SandStorm
SandStorm is a loose framework for creating cross-platform, multi-language, modular and distributed "middle-ware" web applications.SandStorm employs XML-RPC as it's communication mechanism, but builts several API's on top of it, adding service discovery via a central registry, as well as Eric Kidd's introspection API
Posted by Elmer @ 11:46 AM EST [Link]
Friday, May 18, 2001
ZDNet: eWEEK: Lessons learned
Distance learning is growing up, as companies and institutions look for efficient ways to reach as many "students" as possible. The tools for creating distance learning objects that deliver instruction online are changing the way organizations package and deliver knowledge.In its eValuation to gauge the progress of these authoring tools for learning objects, eWeek Labs took four products to school—MindLever Composition Suite, from MindLever.com, which has since been acquired by Centra Software Inc.; Hypercosm Inc.'s Hypercosm Studio; Macromedia Inc.'s Web Learning Studio; and NYUonline Inc.'s iAuthor. Adobe Systems Inc. was invited but did not attend, and Click2learn.com Inc. withdrew, citing plans to de-emphasize its ToolBook authoring tool.
Posted by Elmer @ 10:58 AM EST [Link]
ZDNet: Story: Get a flat-panel monitor without flattening your wallet
Posted by Elmer @ 10:56 AM EST [Link]
New group formed outside ICANN for Internet top-level domain owners | Computerworld News & Features Story
A group of Internet top-level domain (TLD) holders have formed a nonprofit association to prevent what they fear will become a splintered Internet domain naming system.The new group, the Top Level Domain Association Inc. (TLDA), announced yesterday that it will begin accepting membership applications Saturday from an estimated 200 operators of some 500 TLDs around the world.
Posted by Elmer @ 10:51 AM EST [Link]
UCITA opponents slow software licensing law's progress | Computerworld News & Features Story
Opponents of the controversial UCITA software licensing law appear to have succeeded in stalling the bill in states where it's being considered this year, robbing the vendor-backed measure of the early momentum it gained last year following relatively quick adoptions in Maryland and Virginia.
Posted by Elmer @ 10:49 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, May 12, 2001
Sun/Microsoft worm may have hit 'thousands' of Web sites | Computerworld News & Features Story
The worm code that has been targeting Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix servers and then using them to attack Web servers based on Microsoft Corp.'s software may have successfully compromised and defaced thousands of Web sites, according to security analysts who are tracking its progress.Posted by Elmer @ 09:17 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, May 10, 2001
The Register: France backs Jabber IM for 3G parlez-vous
The Instant Messaging wars could be over sooner than you think, thanks to an inspired investment by the French.The open source instant messenger project Jabber has been blessed with a major investment from a leading telco, namely France Telecom, which has agreed to fund development to the tune of $7m. France Telecom will take a 23 per cent stake in the commercial Jabber company, Webb Interactive Services, which employs many (but not all ) of the far-flung Jabber developers. Jabber.com shouldn't be confused with Jabber.org, which is where the community hangs out.
Posted by Elmer @ 08:32 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, May 9, 2001
PCWorld.com - Keep Your PC Purring: More Troubleshooting Tips
Having trouble with Windows? Hey, join the crowd. Because no matter what kind of shape your system is in, you'll eventually face a Windows crash, a quirky error message, or the obnoxious Blue Screen of Death.Even after writing a troubleshooting article and a Home Office column on the subject (see below), I know many of you are still bothered by Windows problems. I know because I received a virtual tractor-trailer full of e-mail, most with specific questions about driver problems at boot-up, shutdown errors, DLL hassles, and Internet Explorer crashes.
Good article giving tipps on shutting down your PC. This note provides readers with a basic understanding of how Windows goes about its work.Posted by Elmer @ 09:13 AM EST [Link]
The Standard: A&P Bets the Store
Christian Haub is plotting one of the most audacious comebacks in retailing history. The 36-year-old chairman, president and CEO of A&P plans to spend $250 million in after-tax money during the next four years - more than half of the company's market value - to arm the grocery chain with some of the most sophisticated technology in supermarket retailing.
His aim: returning the 142-year-old fading corporate icon to glory by anticipating and fulfilling the customer's every need. The stakes are high for the company and for Haub.
Posted by Elmer @ 08:48 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, May 6, 2001
BusinessWeek Online: ebiz 25
What's a tech exec to do in the midst of what experts say could be the biggest slowdown in 15 years? These 25 heavy hitters offer bold advice: Don't just hunker down and wait it out. Now's the time to take aggressive steps--to invest, build, develop new products, and prepare for the upswing
Where else can you see a list containing both Courtney Love and Larry Lessig?
Posted by Elmer @ 08:40 PM EST [Link]
Friday, May 4, 2001
User queries prompt new Microsoft attack on open source | Computerworld News & Features Story
(May 03, 2001) Microsoft Corp. today renewed its offensive against open-source software development, a move that the software vendor said was made in response to repeated queries from corporate users about how it's responding to the open-source movement.
The latest salvo against open-source efforts -- the third by Microsoft since January -- came during a speech in New York by Craig Mundie, the company's senior vice president of advanced strategies. Speaking at New York University's Stern School of Business, Mundie claimed that the open-source movement could result in "product instability" and "inherent security risks" for software users.
Posted by Elmer @ 05:04 AM EST [Link]
The University of South Dakota becomes first in U.S. to provide Palm Handhelds for first-year students (5/3/2001)
Handhelds to Go to Incoming Undergraduates and First-year Law and Medical Students
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. In a move that puts it at the forefront of mobile technology use on campuses, The University of South Dakota (USD) today announces it will provide Palm™ handheld computers to all first-year undergraduate students as well as first-year law and medical school students. The initiative, the first in the United States to provide the use of handheld computers by undergraduate students, takes place beginning with the 2001-2002 academic year and affects approximately 1,300 students.
Posted by Elmer @ 04:46 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, May 1, 2001
[fmII] - Search results for 'search engine'
Posted by Elmer @ 08:58 PM EST [Link]
SecurityPortal - Weekly Linux Security Digest - 2001/04/23 to 2001/04/29
Another week of catch up. Various vendors have issued fixes for Netscape, Hylafax, nedit and gftp, among others. Kernel updates from several major vendors (such as Red Hat) are expected soon. Samba updates are still going strong. If your vendor hasn't issued one, you should ask them why. Kernel 2.4.4 is out. Expect vendors to start releasing new kernels based on it, since it fixes a slew of security bugs present in 2.4.3 (local root hack, denial of service, the IPTables FTP bug, and others). Nedit also has a flaw in the way it creates temporary files while printing, allowing a local user to gain root access. gftp also has a format string bug and should be upgraded as well.
Posted by Elmer @ 08:26 AM EST [Link]
Jason's Majordomo Page
Wilma is the Web Interface to List Mail Archives, written by Dave Wolfe and Jason Tibbitts with nods to Achim Bhonet and Tom Christiansen. WIlma is a relatively simple bit of Perl which links together the MHonArc mail-to-HTML converter and the Glimpse search engine. The result is a useful tool for allowing folks to browse your list archives over the web. It works very well with the archives generated by Majordomo's archive2.pl script.