ITS News

Filed under: Industry

Now that Digg has stopped deleting posts and comments about the HD-DVD key fiasco, maybe we can get back to some real tech news. Proactively deleting content means Digg gives up their Safe Harbor status, and they would be required to censor all posts and comments.

If instead they stick to Safe Harbor, the MPAA will need to submit a Cease and Desist for each infringing page. And then Digg can take the same classy approach the Slashdot did when the Scientology nuts came after them about a comment. Remove the comment, and explain exactly what is going on, who is censoring things, and where the content can be found elsewhere on the ‘net:

http://slashdot.org/yro/01/03/16/1256226.shtml

As they say…

Filed under: Industry

Just when I (and many others) were ready to give up on Digg as a purely user-driven social experiment, due to their repeated story and comment deletions, Kevin Rose steps up and listens to the community:

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

by Kevin Rose at 9pm, May 1st, 2007 in Digg Website

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

Filed under: Industry

The folks at Digg.com have let the social news genie out of the bottle, and now they can’t control it. Since the HD-DVD encryption code was discovered and published, readers at Digg have been repeatedly submitting stories with the 16 digit hex code in the titles and bodies. Just as quickly as these posts crawl up the Digg charts, admins seem to be deleting them.

Just search Google for 09 F9 and you’ll find the key. Will AACS send a Cease and Desist to InfoWorld because I posted the text “09 F9″? If so, we might as well give up on this whole Internet thing right here and now.

Can a simple, short string of numbers and letters (the full key) really be copyrighted? And is Digg.com receiving a proper takedown notice for each case, or are they taking things into their own hands and deleting posts willy-nilly?

The same sort of thing happened when the DeCSS code came out - I even have a t-shirt with the code printed on it. This just goes to show how useless the DMCA is, and how information cannot be controlled, and that DRM will never truly work.

CDFreaks story about the C&D

UPDATE: As of 10:30pm, every single story on the Digg News top 10 list, and on the Digg home page, is about this fiasco:

Filed under: Industry

Google announced today that it’s buying DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion in cash. Wow!

This will give Google a big leg up in the display ad market, since AdSense has been primarily driven by contextual text-based ads up until now. This is going to be a big shift for online advertising. Something we’re very keen to track at InfoWorld, now that we’ve shifted to an online-only model.

News travels fast via Twitter, from Scoble.

DoubleSense? AdClick? GooClick? Who knows.

New York Times

Filed under: Humor

The makers of iSquint (a Mac app which converts video files for AppleTV, iPod, etc) had a little fun with their Help menu:

They also make the excellent ($23.32) VisualHub, which offers many more options than iSquint, and is what I use for converting my video. It doesn’t have the groovy Help menu though. =)

Filed under: Mac OS X

After using several of the betas of Leopard since WWDC last year, I must say I wasn’t too surprised to read that Apple has delayed the launch of OS X 10.5 until October. Apple specifically mentioned a resource drain due to the iPhone in their statement. I’m not sure how true that is since they’ve known the project timelines for both products for a long time now.

Many of the new features are working well in the betas, but it just doesn’t have the polish that you would expect if it was going to be ready in the next couple of months. Beta 9a410 is downloading as I type, so we’ll see how much improvement there is. The Known Bugs list in this latest release is still pretty significant though.

Hopefully we’ll see most of the “Top Secret” Leopard features at WWDC in June.

Apple Statement

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price - we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007]

At least iPhone is on schedule. I’m planning to wait on the second revision of it, but the quicker they have the first version ready the better.

I think their approach of waiting until it’s ready to release, while frustrating for users, is the right way to go when you hang your reputation on delivering quality software. None of the release the beta and then ship a service pack mentality that Microsoft takes on such things.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews

Filed under: Linux

Debian Linux 4.0 (codename etch) was officially released today. Out of all available Linux distros, Debian has the most robust package management and updating system I’ve ever used. We primarily use Debian (currently 3.1) to run InfoWorld’s critical systems and we’ve been very happy with it for the past 5 or so years.

Go grab a copy via BitTorrent or other means.

From the official release,

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.

Using a now fully integrated installation process, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 comes with out-of-the-box support for encrypted partitions. This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to the installation system supporting scripts using composed characters and complex languages; the installation system for Debian GNU/Linux has now been translated to 58 languages.

Also beginning with Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, the package management system has been improved regarding security and efficiency. Secure APT allows the verification of the integrity of packages downloaded from a mirror. Updated package indices won’t be downloaded in their entirety, but instead patched with smaller files containing only differences from earlier versions.

This release includes a number of updated software packages, such as the K Desktop Environment 3.5.5a (KDE), an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 2.14, the Xfce 4.4 desktop environment, the GNUstep desktop 5.2, X.Org 7.1, OpenOffice.org 2.0.4a, GIMP 2.2.13, Iceweasel (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3), Icedove (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5), Iceape (an unbranded version of Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0.8), PostgreSQL 8.1.8, MySQL 5.0.32, GNU Compiler Collection 4.1.1, Linux kernel version 2.6.18, Apache 2.2.3, Samba 3.0.24, Python 2.4.4 and 2.5, Perl 5.8.8, PHP 4.4.4 and 5.2.0, Asterisk 1.2.13, and more than 18,000 other ready to use software packages.

Upgrades to Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 from the previous release, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 codenamed sarge, are automatically handled by the aptitude package management tool for most configurations, and to a certain degree also by the apt-get package management tool. As always, Debian GNU/Linux systems can be upgraded quite painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to read the release notes for possible issues. For detailed instructions about installing and upgrading Debian GNU/Linux, please see the release notes. Please note that the release notes will be further improved and translated to additional languages in the coming weeks.

Filed under: None

Filed under: Mac OS X, VirtualizationAfter an extensive Beta and Release Candidate cycle, the new release version of Parallels has now been finalized. This upgrade to the previous release of Parallels brings the following feature updates:

• Coherence view - Hides your XP desktop and floats Windows windows alongside your OS X windows
• Windows apps appear in the OS X dock
• Parallels Transporter - allows easy migration of your existing XP setup from a PC into the Parallels environment
• Plug-and-play USB 2.0 support
• Use of Boot Camp partitions as the Parallels drive - this lets you use a single XP image either running virtually under Parallels, or natively if you reboot via Boot Camp
• Vista Compatability
• CD/DVD burningDrag-and-Drop support (discussed previously here)

For those running Parallels RC3 (build 3170) won’t see much difference. Those still running the old Parallels public release (build 1970) will see amazing enhancements. As always, make sure you back up your full Parallels disk image, and your Mac just to be safe, before you upgrade.

Download release 3186 here

Filed under: Mac OS X, Security, VirtualizationIt sounds obvious that Parallels users who run Windows need to keep on top of Windows security and patches. However, a recent addition to the Parallels Beta, called Global Sharing, can open up OS X itself to possible attacks from the Windows side.

The basic issue is that this Global Sharing option, which allows easy drag-and-drop app launching between OS X and Windows, is given carte blanche access to your Mac hard drive. Worse yet, this option is enabled by default, at least in beta build 3150 which I am currently running. Users upgrading from a previous version, to get awesome features like Coherence Mode, booting from Boot Camp partitions, and full USB support, may be vulnerable without even realizing this feature was slipped in.

The basic problem boils down to privilege separation. Parallels runs with the full rights of your OS X user, so in theory an attack could be developed and spread via Windows vulnerabilities that could then drop malicious code into OS X. It could also delete files or alter security and other settings.

Allowing Windows, known to be so insecure, to have this sort of access rights to the host operating system is a major misstep by the Parallels team. So if you run Parallels betas, please make sure you disable this feature (Edit -> Virtual Machine -> Shared Folders then uncheck the “Enable global sharing for drag-and-drop” checkbox and save. You’ll need to shut down the virtual machine to have access to change this setting.