Archive for August 2003
Case Western Opens Its WiFi Network to Cleveland
Wi-Fi Networking News:
Case Western Opens Its Network to Cleveland:
It’s an ambitious project that allows the public to take advantage of an expensive, but bursty and abundant service. The university has over 1,200 access points, and unless it’s a unique case, there must be businesses, apartments, and houses sprawled all around and on top of it that can take advantage, as well as visitors to the campus. The project is labeled OneCleveland.
W3C Opens Public Discussion Forum on US Patent 5,838,906 and Eolas v. Microsoft.
Cover Pages: W3C Opens Public Discussion Forum on US Patent 5,838,906 and Eolas v. Microsoft:
- Eolas claims: ‘The patent covers Web browsers that support such currently popular technologies as ActiveX components, Java applets, and Navigator plug-ins. Eolas’ advanced browser technology makes possible rich interactive online experiences for over 500 million Web users, worldwide.’
- The article’s analysis: “People already of the opinion that US laws on software patents are hopelessly broken, that philosophical justification is fatally flawed, and that the patent review process is badly administered (patent application reviewers having no concept of what a “non-obvious” software solution might be) — will have no difficulty classifying this case as yet another in a long history of embarrassing episodes, giving the Europeans just cause for derisive laughter. People already of the opinion that software patents constitute a healthy mechanism for supporting innovation will applaud the entrepreneurial spirit of the University of California in (apparently) landing this big fish at the expense of a(nother) convicted monopolist. Open source software vendors are understandably worried about rulings such as this, as they have no adequate weapons with which to defend themselves against attack.”
Mike May regains his sight after 43 years of blindness
The Guardian: Mike May regains his sight after 43 years of blindness: “his remarkable account of seeing for the first time since he was three”
… I can’t fathom how sighted people go around seeing each other’s eyes without being flustered too.
RSA develops selective RFID blocker
RFID readers can’t talk to more than one tag at a time, so when multiple tags reply to a query, the readers detect a collision and revert to what’s known as a singulation protocol to communicate with each tag individually. To accomplish this, the reader queries each tag for its next bit, which identifies which portion of a binary tree the tag resides on. When queried, a blocker tag responds with a ‘0’ and a ‘1’ bit. This causes the reader to start over and explore the entire tree.
Such a tag could be programmed to block only a certain range of RFID serial numbers. This would still allow for benign uses of RFID tags while enabling users or corporations to control which tags are readable.
Easy subpoenas are bad law
Peter Swire: Don’t delete Internet privacy: Porn web sites file DMCA subpoenas to identify visitors.
Cheap network devices with embedded IP addresses
Flawed Routers Flood University of Wisconsin Internet Time Server:
NetGear equipment (500,000 unique devices observed, 700,000 manufactured) polls at one second intervals until it receives a response from the NTP server, after which it uses a longer poll interval such as one minute, ten minutes, two hours, or 24 hours, depending upon product model and firmware version.
Australian IT – Rogue routers cause havoc for CSIRO (Kate Mackenzie, JULY 08, 2003): about 85,000 SMC brand routers poll the CSIRO time server twice a minute when they don’t receive a response.
The Story of Nadine
The Story of “Nadine” — a Tale of Mailing Lists. It’s been out there for a while, but somehow I’ve missed it until now. A diligent system administrator writes up the story of one misaddressed opt-in and the subsequent sale of that information from one spammer to another. Particularly interesting was the effort one spammer put in, by apparently going to the trouble of looking up the name of a joint tenant in some public records somewhere.
Acrobat and InfoPath
Jon Udell: Acrobat and InfoPath:
The only missing InfoPath ingredient is a forms designer that nonprogrammers can use to map between schema elements and form fields. That’s just what the recently announced Adobe Forms Designer intends to be. I like where Adobe is going. The familiarity of paper forms matters to lots of people. And unless Microsoft’s strategy changes radically, those folks are far likelier to have an Adobe reader than an InfoPath client.
