Posts

MacWeek has a nice syndicated story from the the Register covering Apple’s operating system plans, as told at the WWDC. Propaganda or denial? You be the judge.

I have high hopes for http://internet-pioneers.org/. Adam Engst offers a primer on mailing list etiquette in this week’s TidBits. He leaves out the most important rule, though, which is that you should never, ever, under any circumstances, send email messages formatted in anything other than plain text. Nor should you use lame things like VCards that send an attachment with every message, nor should you send attachments to mailing lists at all. ...

rc3.org gets a nice mention in Tasty Bits from the Technology Front, a weekly Internet zine. (Thanks to Lawrence Lee of Tomalak’s Realm for spotting the link.) I’m relenting to external pressure and changing the name of this page from “Outraged! Daily Edition” to the more staid “rc3.org daily.” Not because I like the latter name better, but because almost every site that links to this page just uses “rc3” as the name of the link, so it’s easier to just go with that. Besides, I’m not usually all that Outraged!, and billing the page as such is false advertising. ...

It looks like there are some security problems with Microsoft IIS and Site Server relating to some Web-based site management applications that ship with the server. These programs, whcih allow you to do things like remotely view the source code of your ASP pages over the Web, have security holes that can enable users to view the contents of any file on the server. These problems are interesting for two reasons; one is that they’re really similar to the recently exposed security hole with Cold Fusion that allowed malicious users to attack Web sites through the example programs that are installed with the Cold Fusion documentation. The second is that problems with these particular ASP programs are nothing new. A quick Web search on the name of one of the affected IIS programs (viewcode.asp) returned a security alert from over a year ago describing a denial of service attack that could be launched by abusing the program. ...

Be is going public. Wow. Their financials are awful, and their future prospects are bad. This is a company that I want very much to succeed, but I’ll be surprised if going public is what they really need to do right now. Answering to shareholders is probably not what a company that did $1 million in revenue last year needs. However, since the bullet is already out of the gun, my advice to them is to change the name of the company to Be.com, and make their main selling point the fact that they own both the Be.com web site, and Becentral.com, portals for Be users! They also own BeDepot.com, a sales portal for Be software. It’s all about the pitch … ...

Why is it that every story Declan McCullagh writes quotes a paid libertarian flack from the Cate Institute? Kevin Mitnick’s victims claim that he did 300 million dollars worth of damage by compromising the security of their systems, but 2600 magazine is reporting that the damages were, in fact, a lot less. Basically, the companies who claim these absurdly high damages didn’t report such losses to their shareholders or the IRS. Reuters is reporting that Microsoft is about to invest 5 billion dollars in AT&T.; People are speculating wildly about the areas of the industry that this will give Microsoft inroads into. ...

Outraged! Daily Edition is kind of boring. I know that you, my loyal readers, will be upset to hear that, but don’t flame Leslie too harshly. After all, all press is good press. Things are heating up again in the anti-trust trial. Microsoft is going to call a hostile witness, AOL’s David Colburn (no relation to me), who has already testified and performed well. Could be a reach … An interesting look back – Hobbes’ Internet Timeline. ...

One of my goals for 1999 is to replace UltraEdit as my editor of choice with GNU Emacs. I bought the O’Reilly book Learning GNU Emacs today, and I’m gradually going to try to phase in Emacs as I learn the commands. For what it’s worth, my main motivation for doing this is to take advantage of the powerful macro writing features in Emacs. A Risks Digest article on software bloat that explains how a Microsoft application that should consume 45k manages to use up 1 meg of disk space. ...

There’s a romance novel out there called Taming Rafe, I don’t think it’s about me though. It seems ironic to me that the greatest threat to the future viability of the Web may not be anti-smut crusaders but rather advocates for the disabled. Section 508 of the Workforce Investment Act makes it mandatory for any federal Web site, or the Web site for any company doing business with the federal government to be accessible to the disabled. The goal among advocates for the disabled is to apply this rull to all Web sites. Read this article from the Freedom Forum to get more information on this wrongheaded new government activity. The bottom line is that if the government enacts complex new regulations for Web publishing, many companies and people will simply opt not to publish, rather than going through the trouble of publishing in a compliant manner. ...

The Washington Post has an article about the now missing eBay auction for a team of employees from a major ISP that I linked to the other day. According to this lame article from News.com, calendaring is the next important feature for the portals to implement. The article talks about the “treasure trove of detailed personal information” available to the portals from the calendars. Do I really want to post dates in my calendar if someone is going to filter through them and use the information to try to sell me more crap? Give me a break. That kind of makes you wonder what the free email services are doing with your email messages. ...