Hackers exploiting a loophole in America Online’s signup process have begun taking their pick of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) accounts, hijacking them virtually at will.
The technique emerged early this month on AOL-Files, a meeting place for AOL hackers, where it was born as a harmless hack that allows users to establish AOL accounts with screen names that are — unconventionally — indented.
The more sinister applications of the bug became clear later. “It wasn’t until recently that anyone noticed that it could be used to hijack Instant Messenger accounts,” says Adrian Lamo, founder of Inside-AOL and a longtime chronicler of AOL’s foibles. “And it only became a significant problem in the past week.””
“On the Semantic Web, the target audience is the machines rather than humans. To satisfy the demands of this audience, information needs to be available in machine-processable form rather than as unstructured text. A variety of information models like RDF or UML are available to fulfil this purpose, varying greatly in their capabilities. The advent of XML leveraged a promising consensus on the encoding syntax for machine-processable information. However, interoperating between different information models on a syntactic level proved to be a laborious task. In this paper, we suggest a layered approach to interoperability of information models that borrows from layered software structuring techniques used in today’s internetworking. We identify the object layer that fills the gap between the syntax and semantic layers and examine it in detail. We suggest the key features of the object layer like identity and binary relationships, basic typing, reification, ordering, and n-ary relationships. Finally, we examine design issues and implementation alternatives involved in building the object layer.”
“In a market overflowing with Internet-enabled applications, vendors increasingly are
counting on the magic words “open source” to attract venture capitalists, partners, and
customer interest.
But are software vendors using open source merely as a way to stand out from the
crowd? Or do open-source versions of applications merit consideration above and
beyond the buzzword factor?”
“”Basically, their message is, the only way to run your business is to have one very-powerful database,” Error said. “Maybe you can have one back-up [database] server for redundancy, or if you really want to get crazy you can adopt their parallel server product, but most companies can’t afford that. [Oracle] is really neglecting the whole distributed idea, that you can partition a database across multiple machines and take advantage of the scaling effects that come as a result.”
In other words, the same market forces that three years ago forced many Internet Service Providers to use Linux and Apache as Web servers have created the opportunity for growing open source marketshare in the database market as well.”
“So I guess if I had to formulate a succinct answer to Joe’s question, I’d have to say this: Linux is not behind Windows because Linux isn’t following Windows. We’re doing things a different way, the correct way. We admit bugs when they happen and do our best to fix them. Our feature sets are not dictated by marketing and PR departments. We give back to the community. We help each other. We foster the belief that stability and correctness are fundamental to design. We do not lie to our users or to each other. Money is nice, but it’s not our primary motivator. We are proud, passionate, nettlesome, partisan, opinionated, occasionally muleheaded and foul-mouthed. Linux is a belief system and a philosophy as much as a body of software.
I choose to belong to this society because I want to stand for something. I want my code to stand for something besides profit and loss.”
“People don’t buy operating systems. They buy solutions to a business problem. I think back on this because there were 14 applications running on Red Hat Linux at the time of our IPO. Today we guesstimate that there are between 5,000 and 6,000 applications.”
“The place that we have is at the root-directory level of Linux. So imagine our capability: being able to get inside of somebody’s network architecture, server architecture, with complete open source solutions that allow me to automatically configure systems for you, with over 600 different open source products and packages that have been certified by Red Hat. That can be mirrored and delivered to you all online.”
“A powerful OS that runs popular applications would represent a Unix that has finally grown up. And it would present us with a truly interesting question: Should Microsoft be worried? I say yes, because Mac OS X can potentially challenge Windows both in usability and in industrial reliability; but, no, because Apple’s slice of the market is still too small, and Microsoft’s sway with developers and independent software vendors is too high.
Apple’s chances would increase greatly if instead of merely incorporating portions of an open-source operating system in Mac OS X, the company fully committed to the open-source software development model and freed all of its OS source code.”
“Commercial software companies face many challenges in growing their business in today’s fast-moving and competitive industry environment. Recently many people have proposed the use of an open-source development model as one possible way to address those challenges. This document investigates the business of commercial open-source software, including why a company might adopt an open-source model, how open-source licensing works, what business models might be usable for commercial open-source products, what special considerations apply to commercial products released as open source, and how various objections relating to open source might be answered. The target audience is
commercial software and hardware companies and individual software developers considering some sort of open-source strategy or just curious about how such a strategy might work.”
“BlogVoices is a free discussion system for Blogger-powered blogs.
BlogVoices is provided to members of the Blogger community who (1) do not have the resources to create a discussion system for themselves or (2) choose not to pay for the built-in system available
in Blogger Pro. ”
i have been toying with the idea of adding a new sub.section that will include a discussion component and this makes my life alot easier [if it works, i haven’t tried it out yet].
however, i really have no idea if anyone that visits is active enough to contribute to a discussion. i know how infrequently i contribute anything worthwhile to online discussion communities and i presume most people are similarly [un]motivated.
if you have an opinion one way or another, drop me an e.mail. i suppose it would be instructive to see if there was any differences in responses between the visitors to the different sections of the vast wasteland.
“Our exploratory user study on the use of a major portal site in Belgium shows that a category of “skeptical Internet users” has abandoned searching the web. The skeptical Internet user has made a return-on-investment evaluation of his Internet experience, and has come to the conclusion that the return on some sites is just not worth the investment of his personal time and energy. What about your site?”
“Cybergeography is also somewhat of a counter reaction to much of the off-hand reporting of the net that it makes geography redundant, that implies that distance, location, and place no longer matter. That cyberspace has enabled anything, anytime, anywhere. The classic utopian fantasy that you can transcend material world and exist in the digital ether. Clearly, this not happening, cyberspace is not immaterial, it is very much an embodied space.
However, cyberspace is *changing* geography, it is warping space, shrinking distance and reconfiguring our sense of place. It is this warping and distorting that is very much the heart of cybergeography. It is also increasing of interest to geographers.”
i’ve been hankerin’ to start my own radio station. on the internet, of course. but, right when i was just about ready to give it a go, webcasting: doing it legally made me a little jumpy:
“If you want to operate an internet radio station legally, you need to do these things:
Follow the play limits and other restrictions on content
mentioned in the DMCA, and summarized above;
Fill out the licensing forms from ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC,
and send each of them at least a couple hundred dollars a year;
Fill out the webcasting licensing
form for RIAA,
and expect them to start hitting you with a large bill some time
next year.”
i think, though, if i want to forego the licensing fees, i can use a service like live365.com or myplay, although i think i need to do some decision trees and flowcharting to understand the play limits and restrictions.
