Posted 9:17 AM (0) comments

Dude, you're getting screwed.

A fantastic story of End-User License Agreements (EULA) gone way off the deep end. It seems that Ian Goldberg and Kat Hanna fell into a Kafkaesque tour de farce when they tried to setup their new Dell Laptop. Dell's software license policy required them to agree to accept licenses which they had no way of reading! (Dell suggested they lie, and pretend they had read the licenses).

I'd suggest you go ahead and click through since I can't imagine any court would uphold this bizarre practice. But, then, I'm not a lawyer.

Posted 9:44 AM (0) comments

Speech & Secrets

PCWorld (and others) headlines say California Court Okays DeCSS Ban, but that's not at all what the court ruled. The California state supreme court ruled that the first amendment to the constitution of the United States does not allow someone to publish someone else's trade secrets. That's neither novel nor surprising. The first amendment, primarily, allows you to voice your opinion. It has very little application to proprietary information. The crux of the case is the ability of the CD manufacturers to claim trade secret protection for their security code. That's still to be decided. And, while DeCSS proponents point out to the proliferation of the code (claiming that its no longer "secret"), that also is not germane. If you steal private documents and send them to me, I cannot publish them with impunity. The same goes for DeCSS.

Posted 9:42 AM (0) comments

This could be So Big!

Phil Wainwright at Loosely Coupled has another theory about SoBig - he theorizes that its a new spamming tool. Interesting thoughts about the commercializing of "grid computing" when virusized.

Posted 9:41 AM (0) comments

Vicious virus cycles

George Smith writes in SecurityFocus about the "Viral Opportunity" MSBlaster & SoBig have presented to us. Fighting virii (and worms) has evidently become "big stuff". So much so that the cure is becoming worse than the disease. Between the "good virus" (Naachi) and the anti-virus mail bouncing to forged addresses there's little bandwidth left - but Smith does have ideas on how to fill it!

Posted 8:32 AM (0) comments

NetWare exit strategy

With all the confusion Novell is generating around the question of NetWare and its continued development or even existence, best-selling NetWare author James Gaskin thinks you need to Form a NetWare exit strategy, just in case.

Its not a bad idea, even if you're going to continue using the venerable NOS. You should occasionally "what if" about replacing, improving or simply rearranging your hardware, OSes, services and applications. It should be in your "disaster planning" kit.