OSNews

In the line of upcoming interviews, we've also secured one with Michael Dexter, who is the program director of Linux Fund. We want your input, so we'd love it if you would input any questions or even ideas that may lead to questions in the comments below. We'll thoughtfully consider them and be sure to include as many as possible when finally conducting the interview.

Thank you all again in advance

Apple Inc. continuing its strong commitment to standardization has [link]http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3581.htm|| ||registered[/link] the Mac OS X version 10.6 ("Snow Leopard") system as conforming to the UNIX 03 Product Standard.


For more information about this certification and to see the latest list
of UNIX registered products, please go to the Open Brand Register at

[link]http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register|| ||Registration[/link]

For more information on UNIX 03, see
[link]http://www.UNIX.org/unix03.html|| ||UNIX 03[/link]

To follow the UNIX 40th anniversary world tour, see
[link]http://www.flickr.com/groups/unix/|| ||UNIX Plate World Tour[/link]

My Gravatar image looked neat on my netbook, okay on the Gravatar site, but totally weird on OSNews. So yesterday, I added a really cool avatar and deleted the weird one. My OSNews avatar still looks weird.

How often are Gravatar avatar updated?

I used to think the biggest mistakes in life were hair style choices.
Now I am not so sure.

A few users have shared some conspiracy theories about the privacy violation of using gravatar services. I'd like to explore them quickly.

One user shared that we should change our privacy policy since we now share email addresses. I'd like to point out that that assertion is completely false and, frankly, absurd. The best way to crack an md5 string, usually a password, is by comparing the encrypted string to a known md5 string, in what is called a "lookup table." This is why using a dictionary word as your password is so bad: comparing your password to a known string will quickly allow someone to find your password.

But, that's just it, we're encrypting an EMAIL address. There are hundreds of millions of addresses in this world, if not billions, and no one keeps a table of every email address every invested, hashed. It wouldn't make sense: it rarely pays off, and there are so many ways to get email addresses off the net with so much less effort. So of course, this fear is nonsense.

One user suggested a script could crawl the net and find your email address everywhere and build a profile. Perhaps. I work in reality, and I think this is too much effort for too little payoff. You still won't have an email or a real name.

In fact, there are several ID services out there, but in the end, it's just not that hard to piece together pieces of someone identity based on what they share and post online. So any entity using gravatar as their starting point is wasting their time: there are so many more effective ways to harvest personal data - start with Google, Twitter, Facebook public pages, - it just seems like being scared the window panes can be cracked with a hammer, when your house has no doors.

There are several legitimate reasons to be concerned about identity today, but gravatar use shouldn't be one of them.

<quote>

[Google] executives are accused of breaking Italian law in allowing a video of a teenager with Down's Syndrome to be posted online.

The video, showed a teenager with Down's Syndrome being bullied by four students in front of more than a dozen others.

Prosecutors argue that Google did not have adequate content filters or enough staff to monitor videos.

They also argue that Google broke Italian privacy law by uploading the content without the consent of all parties involved.

Google's lawyers point out that, in addition to withdrawing the video, the company provided information on who had posted it.

The four students were later expelled from the remainder of the academic year from their school in Turin, northern Italy.

The victim withdrew a complaint but the nearby city of Milan lodged a civil suit along with a Down's syndrome advocacy group, Vividown.

The executives face up to three years in jail if convicted.

</quote>

Hi all,

If anyone has ever sent me an email to slakje@osnews.com, there's a large chance I never actually got your email. As it turns out, the GMail backend that we use at OSNews was NOT properly configured to forward emails to my personal account.

We figured out the issue, and fixed it, and as it turns out, I have a backlog of hundreds of emails sent to slakje@osnews.com. I'm very sorry for the mix-up.

In any case, instead of sifting through all those emails (no time), I'm proposing a clean break starting... Now. If you sent me anything particularly important, you can resend it to slakje@osnews.com - it all works now.

Again, sorry for the inconvenience.


Thom

As many of you have undoubtedly heard, this storey was put out by Information Week (and others)

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterpriseapps/showArt...

So. Microsoft cannot sell Word in the U.S., starting 60 days from now! Obviously this will be over-turned, but it shows how broken the U.S. Patent system is. In addition, though, it shows just how broken the U.S. legal system is. Eastern Texas obviously should have no jurisdiction in this case. Well, the Patent Trolls pick out some small software company (even if it is no longer in existence) in eastern Texas to add to the suit so they can get the case heard there. What nonsense!

Help, my country is going nuts! Somebody helps us. Maybe St. Obama can save the day!

In this post:

http://www.osnews.com/thread?375947

... the poster has a go at yours truly for modding him down. I don't do that, and I have no idea who actually did mod him down.

My point is, however, that no-one who has already posted on a given thread can mod down subsequent posts on that thread. Since I had already posted on the thread, this proves it was not I who modded down the post in question, yet the thread still carries the accusation that I did. Replying to nonsense like this post only gives it more air time.

Should there be a mechanism to request an apology for undeserved vitirol such as this post here on OSNews?

I've got myself into a company feasibility project right now where I'm looking at the possibility of putting Linux on the desktops of our Rails developers. If you've developed for Rails then you'll have probably come to realise that Windows simply isn't a great environment for it unless you run Cygwin and start plugging everything into it. Yes we could use Macs and we might well still do, but we have a bunch of existing laptops that are OK for us.

To cut a long story short, don't buy ATI if you use Linux. They've had their chances. They have two pointlessly different open source drivers in radeonhd and ati that often leaves 3D non-functional on many chipsets and fglrx is a poorly coordinated piece of software that leaves things like Xv non-functional on many chipsets and has a habit of deprecating chipsets like the X1200 for no reason whatsoever.

Until we have confirmation that AMD have kicked their heads in avoid like the plague and use Intel, or nvidia.

I'm going to have a piss and moan; what is it with American companies who refuse to sell to international customers. Take Amazon for example, I looked up Windows 7 hoping to pre-order it and get a discount for my parents two computers and this is what I face:

"Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S."

What is it with American business hatred of overseas customers? Isn't our money good enough? are most America business still living in an age where only a handful of countries matter?

It bloody frustrates me when I see businesses with such a myopic vision that they deliberately exclude people from purchasing a product. I don't care whether it is Amazon or Microsoft, which ever the case maybe, its a stupid policy.

What does everyone else think of it? for me, this isn't the first time I've been pissed off with US businesses refusing to ship outside of the US.