Internet Archive

"Are you ready to take a look at a fairly new technology that promises you to save bandwidth? Maybe you're even more interested when the promises range from a 50% to a 80% amount of savings? Jump in, and take the ride to see if it works out as well as you were promised. I'm going to take a walk down Apache 2 server lane and benchmark mod_deflate in a real life situation instead of a synthetic setup."

A new resolution introduced in the US Senate offers political backing to the Bush administration by slamming a United Nations effort to exert more influence over the Internet. At the heart of this international political spat is the unique influence that the US federal government enjoys over Internet addresses and the master database of top-level domain names - a legacy of the Internet's origins years ago. The Bush administration recently raised objections to the proposed addition of .xxx as a red-light district for pornographers, for instance, a veto power that no other government is able to wield.

A few days ago I wrote a tutorial on how to connect your Mac to a GPRS service via Bluetooth and a Bluetooth-enabled phone. However, not everyone owns a Mac or a higher-end phone. And so here is a quick tutorial on how to connect your Linux laptop to a GPRS service using an infrared-enabled phone. For this article we used a Sony Ericsson K700i phone, a Sony Vaio N505VX laptop (which has an onboard IrDA) running the latest Arch Linux and Cingular's GPRS. In the following weeks I will also be publishing two more tutorials showing how to do the same thing under Linux but via Bluetooth and the USB port.

We will try to get a GPRS internet connection using Linux-based phones as modems and route the connection to Mac OS X via Bluetooth. This guide is for Mac OS X, the US Cingular GPRS service only (other providers might work out of the box with the phone, others might not at all -- you never know with GPRS) and any of the Linux-based Motorola smartphones like the A760, A780, E680/i etc (they are all identical regarding their 'modem' functionality).

Here's the 5th installment of LinuxJournal's NX series. This time out, learn how to navigate with hands-on exercises that demonstrate all NX can do.

In a potential blow to Microsoft, Netscape's Internet browser will be included inside every new Hewlett-Packard and Compaq computer sold starting early next year, Netscape said Monday. The arrangement allows for those buying new HP or Compaq personal computers to choose Netscape as their default Web browser and to start the Web browser using icons on the desktop or Start menu.

Matsushita showed off an exceptionally high-speed Internet through an ordinary electrical socket at a Japanese trade-fair. Matsushita Electronics has claimed a breakthrough in powerline broadband by running an Internet connection through an ordinary electrical socket, using a new chip. At a tradeshow in Japan on Thursday the company demonstrated a network capable of running at 170Mbps over the electrical network.

At PrepCom3, a dramatic last-minute deal drawn up by the EU may mark the end of the US government's control of the internet. In essence, a new version of the current overseeing body ICANN and an end to the US government's overall control of the DNS. The US was scathing about the proposals, within minutes telling delegates that it "can't in any way allow any changes" that would prevent it from having overall control of the internet. Other countries, like Brazil, China, Iran and Cuba support the proposal. Brazil's ambassador outlined: "It is not a question of being anti-ICANN, it's about having a very clear and open and democratic and inclusive mechanism of overview of certain functions that today are performed by ICANN with no kind of supervision."

A recent blog post on ZDNet contends that Firefox is not as secure as promised by counting exploits. Joseph Huang contends that severity and the number of unpatched vulnerabilites matters, not just the number of exploits discovered.

"WordPress is a powerful tool, and in many ways exemplifies open source at its best. It gives any user an array of features with minimal technical effort, and its extensibility and versatility are displayed by the large pool of user-designed plugins. This power and versatility extends beyond WordPress's traditional use of blogging."

The Debian administration website has a nice introduction to using CFEngine for managing a whole LAN in three parts. The first part introduces the engine, the second part explains what you can do using CFEngine, and the final part describes how to setup a client-server setup to allow a whole LAN to be managed centrally.

The last few years have seen the introduction of the concept of "extensions" in most popular web browsers. While Mozilla natively supports extensions, Opera and Safari come feature-packed and can be easily hacked via config files, and a market has cropped up around the IE engine which supports adding new functionality to your browser. In the interest of sharing a good thing, which are your favorite browser extensions?

Linux finally has a free mDNS/DNS-SD implementation (Apple Rendezvous/Bonjour, Zeroconf). Avahi 0.1 has been released yesterday and provides a LGPL'd embeddable mDNS core. See the homepage for more details.

Kellen wrote a nice introduction to incremental encrypted backups which might be useful to Linux users who've never setup anything similar. Often Encryption isn't given a lot of focus when creating remote backups; but if you don't trust the remote host it is essential.