Posted 5:56 PM (0) comments

Flash: Patent Office not all brainless morons!

The US patent office, in reviewing the claim of Eolas to technology that controls execution of remote code embedded in hypertext pages, has withdrawn the patent. You'll remember that Eolas won an infringement suit against Microsoft last year when the judge refused to consider the validity of the Eolas patent.

Now if we can just get them to take another look at the rest of the dubious software patents (which is, pretty much, all of them)...

Posted 5:05 PM (0) comments

Smoking gun - or smoking something.... [update 3/11]

Eric Raymond (he of the Cathedral and the Bazaar fame) was sent (anonymously) an email purporting to be from a consultant to SCO VP Chris Sontag, and published (with annotations) as Open Source Initiative OSI - Doc10:Halloween Documents.

Lot's of crowing and crying that this is the "smoking gun" which indicts Microsoft as SCO CEO Darl MacBride's paymaster. SCO, through PR head Blake Stowell, confirms the email is legitimate but denies most of the speculation Raymond draws from it. In truth, why would Microsoft need to hide any money it paid to SCO? Redmond is on record as "purchasing licenses" (which almost everyone took to be a euphemism for "paying off"). Whether the price was 10 million or 100 million - what difference does it make?

We all know (that is, anyone who can read a quarterly report) that SCO isn't making any money. We know that Microsoft is putting up cash to have SCO spread FUD about Linux and Open Source. We also know this email was from a consultant trying to justify his commission, a rather hefty one. Who's to say he wasn't fudging the numbers and/or the degree of involvement of any particular player?

Bottom line: its interesting and gives a tiny bit of insight into SCO culture but in the grand scheme of things it hasn't very much meaning.

UPDATE 3/11/04 - Business Week has revealed that BayStar Capital did indeed invest in SCO after Microsoft suggested it might be a worthwhile venture. Wow, just think, Microsoft encouraging someone to invest in a company that's fighting Linux and Open Source. Hard to believe, isn't it? But illegal, its not. Nor is it unethical. And its not even fattening. So what's the point of even mentioning it? The Register's Andrew Orlowski, not known as a great friend of Microsoft, has an excellent take on these "revelations".

Posted 6:10 PM (0) comments

Chicken Luddles

I've used the term "Chicken Littles" to refer to those who see technological advances as fostering the end of Society As We Know It, or worse. This is a reference to the children's story about the barnyard denizen who, on being struck on the head by an acorn, believes that the sky is falling and rushes off to tell the king.

I've also used the term "Luddites" for these people. This refers to followers of Ned Ludd who attempted a revolution in England to stop the spread of industrialization. The term has spread to refer to anyone who opposes technical or technological change.

I'll be using a combination of these two terms - Chicken Luddle(s) - to refer to a person or persons whose unwarranted warnings of impending disaster have the effect of thwarting the spread of good and necessary technology. You can use the term, too if you remember (and acknowledge) where it came from.

Posted 5:56 PM (0) comments

Democracy is falling - go tell the king!

I'm sure the popular press, and especially the Chicken Luddles will have a field day with the blogged report "election machine security. - first hand experience", but will ignore the real message - nothing bad happened!

Had a stack of ballots and an empty ballot box been left unguarded, then any fool could have stuffed a few. But the odds of someone with both the knowledge to hack the eTerminal as well as the ability to re-seal it adequately wandering through that hallway at that time are more remote than Howard Dean's chances to become our next president.

Let's keep it in perspective people.

Posted 8:50 AM (0) comments

In defense of computers

Lot's of reaction to my column, Rock the 'Net vote, in last week's Network World and most of it came from the chicken littles. The best line, I think, was:

"Finally, I think most people in this country should be a little bit offended by your comment on ballot box stuffing. In my neck of the woods, the rule of law is sufficiently established that the public trusts that a ballot box that is sealed at the polling place and transported to election headquarters by an election official and a police officer will not be tampered with en-route. Nor is it likely that any observers who wish would be prevented from watching these ballot boxes at either the polling place or election headquarters."

And this was by someone in Massachusetts, a state in which elections were routinely stolen into the second half of the twentieth century (if not later)!

Computerized voting machines are not 100% secure nor are they 100% reliable but I've watched elections for 40 years and I stand by what I said in the column, "The bottom line is that computerized voting machines - even those running Microsoft operating systems - are more secure and more reliable than any other 'secret ballot' vote tabulation method we've used in the past," and that's the only standard that should be applied.

Posted 8:38 AM (0) comments

Microsoft to become traffic cop?

Ellen Messmer reports in Network World that its Bill Gates' intention for Microsoft to make its software 'behave'. Or, more precisely, to reign in activity that the OS considers to be "problematic" as a way to improve security. Gates sited an example: "For example, the Blaster worm caused the RPC service to open a back door and download some malicious code on the machine. In this case, behavior blocking would recognize that this behavior is out of the ordinary for the RPC service and block it." This raises two questions -
1) suppose I want the RPC service to download some code? What happens then?
2) if RPC should never download code, then shouldn't Microsoft simply take out that functionality?

This looks like another half-baked idea from Redmond, like last week's "caller ID plan".