Thursday, August 21, 2003

Ernie Ball and Linux -- 2:02 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Sterling Ball, the CEO of Ernie Ball (a well-known maker of guitar strings), talked about their switch to Linux after a visit from the BSA Gestapo. The interview is refreshingly free of jargon or free software rhetoric. It's basically, "We switched and we're very happy." A very nice read indeed. Thanks Linux Today.

Hmmm. I may need to check out some Ernie Ball strings next time I restring my guitar.

J.t.Qbe comments: I read this article early this morning and thought I'd wait for our resident guitar player to post it ;). Overall this is one of the funnest Linux articles I've read in quite a while. It's worth a look to see what Linux can mean to the typical small business--it cuts through the, um, you know, and gets right to the point: no more worries about licensing woes, lower overall cost, and the business is in control. Good stuff.

The Dangers of Worms -- 1:06 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Computer worms are more than just annoying. They could be deadly. Witness two different account where the recent worms have taken down a safety monitoring system at a nuclear plant (which thankfully was offline) and a train scheduling and signaling system. I don't know which is worse, that the worms caused this damage or that the systems were designed and maintained in such a way that this attack was possible. Thanks Slashdot.

And along those same lines . . .

Bogus Email Due to Sobig -- 9:35 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Zombie emailed me this morning to let me know that my "Returned mail" were due to the Sobig worm. Symantec has all the gory details on it. Windows users, scan your boxen!

The Master comments: However, FWIW, there ARE some spammers out there who take their measure of revenge on those who report them by adding reporting email addresses to their From: alias DBs. Nice.

More Perens and SCO -- 9:23 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Bruce Perens posted comments on SCO's entire slide show. It seems that the majority of the code that they claim is "stolen" is, in fact, code released under the BSD license. Code they claim is "obfuscated" is in fact this:

The Linux version of BPF [Berkeley Packet Filter] is not an obfuscation of the BPF code. It is a clean-room re-implementation of BPF by Jay Schulist of the Linux developers, sharing none of the original source code, but carefully following the documentation of the Lab's product. The System V and Linux BPF versions shown in slide 15 implement the same virtual machine instruction set, which is used to filter (allow, reject, change, or reroute) internet packets. And the documentation for that VM even specifies field names. Thus Schulist's and the Lab's implementations appear similar. Had Schulist chosen to directly use the Lab's code, it still would have been legal. But the version in Linux is entirely original to the Linux developers. There is no legal theory that would give SCO any claim upon it.

I bet IBM's and Red Hat's lawyers are drooling over all of this. Thanks Slashdot.

Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Pondering the Imponderable -- 9:37 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Great. Either some idiot spammer or an email virus is using my thehaus.net email address to send garbage all over the place so I'm getting "Returned mail" bounces from AOL's mail servers. Somebody apparently needs a beating.

Fan Filter Follow-Up -- 11:43 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Oh, the alliteration! Anyway, I checked the air conditioner filter that I put in front of my front case fan a month ago (story). It certainly did trap a lot of dust. I guess I'm going to need to change it every month. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to affect my CPU temperature too much. I'll try it over the course of the next six months and see how things look.

Past Two Days' News

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