Posts

Yesterday, I mentioned the Model 2 architecture for Web applications written in Java. Here’s an article that describes it. More bad reporting from News.com: their article on Eazel talks about how the company has “deep roots in Apple and AOL,” which is all well and good except that all of the former AOL people at Eazel are really former Netscape people. Even worse, the main former AOL, former Netscape person is also a former Apple person. Why News.com felt compelled to plaster AOL’s name all over the story is beyond me. ...

Eazel is an extremely intriguing startup that I heard about for the first time today. They have an all start cast working on improving the desktop interface for Linux, including people who were key to the development of the Macintosh, like Andy Hertzfeld, Darin Adler, and Susan Kare. There’s an interesting article at servlets.com about the muddled world of developing Web applications in Java. JSP, servlets, beans … when will it end? This article compares the “Model 2” architecture for Java applications to using servlets and a template engine. Fun stuff, if you’re into that sort of thing. (Jason Hunter, the author, has also organized his reader responses rather nicely.) ...

Gene Spafford’s review of Database Nation, by Simson Garfinkel, was posted to the Interesting People mailing list last night. The recent troubles with DoubleClick have further driven home the need for awareness of how information about us is collected and used. Particularly bothersome to me is the idea that companies make money selling information about things that I do. Shouldn’t information about me be my property? Why should someone else be able to make money selling it. Isn’t that fundamentally wrong? (I haven’t yet read the book, so I have no idea if that position is discussed.) ...

Many people don’t know that lots of big software companies are big proponents of an extremely evil law called UCITA. The law is a classic Catch-22. It assigns liability for problems with software to the software developers. At the same time, it allows the company to eliminate their liability with a “shrink wrap license.” So even though it sounds like it’s tougher on software developers, it’s actually completely toothless when it comes to any companies that offer shrink wrapped software – in other words, every big software company. There are lots of other really nasty provisions in the law, too, like prohibitions on reverse engineering. You can also read about just how evil this law is at www.badsoftware.com. It’s dirty poker, and anyone who doesn’t like to get their teeth kicked in by big business should oppose it. This has been an rc3.org public service announcement. ...

You know how AOL said that despite the fact that Time Warner owns a huge chunk of the cable market, they were still going to fight for open access? They lied. I wouldn’t have expected anything else. Here at rc3.org, I try to avoid shooting fish in a barrel, but this time I can’t resist. ZDNet is reporting that Windows 2000 has 63,000 defects. Here’s the scary part: those are just the bugs they know about. ...

Last night, SourceXchange sent out an announcement on their progress so far. (They’re the guys who are linking up companies that want to pay people to write open source code and people who want to get paid to write open source code.) They’ve got 11 open RFPs, and they’ve completed a successful project. Seems like things are going pretty well over there. 2600 has issued a statement chastising the media for blaming the recent spate of DOS attacks on hackers. ...

More DDOS fun. David Dittrich analyzes the various DDOS tools available: Trinoo, Tribal Flood Network, and Stacheldraht. Aleph One, the moderator of Bugtraq, posted a pretty good rundown of what system administrators can do about these attacks today. Anyone up for an illustrative example of how the Internet isn’t changing the record industry? The Web site/TV show combination Farmclub asks musicians who agree to be on the show to sign a contract that basically allows the show to own them (sorry about the ugly layout, but the site uses stupid frameset tricks). And you thought dirty record companies and manipulative managers were just on Behind the Music … ...

It’s all Netscape all the time at Salon today. Andrew Leonard waves the Mozilla flag in a short article about the current status of the Mozilla project, and he also has an article about Netscape hacker emeritus Jamie Zawinski. Salon also has a roundup of the coverage of the DOS attacks today. I’ll summarize the Salon story in one sentence: Nobody knows anything but that doesn’t stop people from pretending like they do. Scott Rosenberg also has a column on the attacks, and it says everything I’d like to say, only better. ...

Arthur Andersen is going to start offering consulting to promising startups in exchange for equity. Of course, if the amount of equity Andersen demands is anything like their rate for paying customers, I can’t imagine that too many startups will be able to afford them. Declan McCullagh really is a good journalist, but he’s tragically predictable. What begins as an informative article on the history of denial of service attacks ends as an attack on the federal government. In this case, I agree him, but the constant stream of libertarian agitprop in Declan’s articles is a drag. ...

Thanks also to Matt for this link to a CBS Marketwatch story that mistakenly attributes today’s Yahoo! outage to hackers. I’m not one to get into semantic blow ups over whether hacker or cracker is the correct term for people who break into computers, but the fact is that neither term is appropriate here. Yahoo! was the victim of a denial of service attack, probably launched by some junior high kids with too much time on their hands. Naturally, the incompetent reporter didn’t bother to explain the nature of the attack. Declan McCullagh at Wired News is reporting that the outage occurred due to misconfigured equipment, and not a so-called “hacker attack” at all. ...