Wednesday, August 1, 2001

Something Must Be Happening -- 3:55 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

While the Internet may not have ground to a halt, the Code Red worm seems to be back at it. Slashdot pointed to Incidents.org's tracking of the worm, showing that it continues to try to spread. As of right now, over 115K hosts have been infected today. My firewall has been hit all day with the same kind of traffic as before. Apparently an awful lot of sysadmins are still having trouble dealing with the concept of applying security patches.

CD Protection Broken -- 2:44 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Macromedia's SafeAudio technology that was supposed to make it impossible to rip a CD audio track has, to no one's surprise, been cracked. The worst part of SafeAudio is that is corrupts the CD in order to prevent copying. When will the recording industry learn that they can more effectively counter piracy by complying with a government order to lower CD prices and by not releasing records with only one decent track? Thanks Slashdot.

Q3A Routing -- 2:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Eric Webb made a couple of .plan updates today regarding some network issues that some people are experiencing with Quake III Arena. It seems like things are fixed, but check his .plan for all the details.

Tuesday, July 31, 2001

AbiWord 0.9 Released -- 7:25 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

AbiSource has released version 0.9 of their AbiWord word processor. Versions are available for Windows, Linux, BEOS, *BSD, and others. AbiWord is open source software. I'm trying it in Linux right now. It seems very nice. It's not as feature-laden as WordPerfect or MS Word, but since most people only use 10% of what a word processor can do, that might not necessarily be a bad thing. It looks like a very viable alternative for me. I'll have to try some "real world" tasks on it and see how it behaves.

In Red Hat 7.1 (and other versions of Linux if you get a font error on startup), you need to execute the following command as root before AbiWord will run properly:

/usr/sbin/chkfontpath -q -a /usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts

After that, restart the xfs daemon and you are all set. I imported a rich text document and it converted flawlessly. Most impressive. Thanks Linux Today.

Q3A 1.29h Released -- 5:14 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Robert Duffy updated his .plan with word that a new 1.29h patch has been released. Here are the fixes:

The 1.29h point release is up. You can auto-update to it from 1.29f or 1.29g or grab the whole sha-bang from our ftp. The Linux version will be up asap. This is STILL a beta, we plan to go final with it after QuakeCon.

Changes

• Fixed Server exploit
• Fixed Mouse wheel
• Fixed NT 4.0 Sound
• FPS Boost
• in_mouse set to -1 will provide 1.17ish sensitivity, in_mouse set to 1 will provide current sensitivity

Hopefully the server exploit fix is the one I just posted about. Here are some mirrors:

Win32 (25.5M): id Software, Blue's News.

Q3A/Linux Vulnerability -- 3:38 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

A vulnerability has been discovered in the 1.29f and 1.29g versions of Quake III Arena for Linux. Sending a certain string of characters to a server in an attempt to connect will cause a server to segfault. Check out the Bugtraq information here. The only workaround is to go back to 1.17, which is a pretty miserable option. Hopefully id will address this soon. Thanks Linux Games.

WinXP Desktop Not Quite So Free -- 8:50 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In an obvious response to AOL's deal with Compaq to feature their online services prominently on new WinXP-running computers, Microsoft has changed the license again for the desktop. Now it's either no icons, or if you do include icons, you much also include the MSN icon. Of course, I don't know which is worse, having MSN branding or AOL branding. It's sort of like asking how you'd like to be stabbed to death. Thanks Slashdot.

The Master comments: Microsoft Marketing: Okay, change the licensing so the government will get off our backs. !**! our biggest rival just got a deal! Change the license again. Now they lose. He he he.

Is anyone ever going to take down this corporate monster? Blatent abuse of monopoly power IN THE FACE OF A COURT RULING takes balls of solid rock, let me tell ya. Wonder who M$ has bought that they think this can keep going on . . .

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