Liudvikas Bukys

Snoop Software Shreds Reality. Wired News Feb 11 2002 6:39AM ET

David Gelertner,­ the world-renowned computer scientist, Yale professor, author and art critic — says he has a prescription for companies to avoid Enron-Arthur Andersen-type scandals: better management of corporate e-mails, Web pages, calendar items and other electronic documents.

…
Gelertner has more than a passing interest in pushing a solution for corporate ills that center around “knowledge management,” as it’s known in IT circles. He’s the chief scientist for a startup,
Mirror Worlds Technologies, which makes such a system. Xerox, Autonomy and Lotus are some of the company’s knowledge management competitors.

[via Moreover – Tech latest]

Apple, Genentech deliver open-source BLAST [MacNN]

CIO: The Meter is Running… but CIOs are saying “STOP THE CAB!”

Microsoft’s wildly unpopular Licensing 6.0 and Software Assurance plan unleashed outrage from CIOs and forced the company to make major concessions. Licensing 6.0 replaces confusing upgrade rules and options with a yearly subscription plan known as Software Assurance. Customers pay for the original license and a yearly fee, and are covered for all upgrades. But CIOs were enraged to find that Software Assurance would raise software costs 25 percent to 29 percent over the cost of the original license every year companies use the software. Not signing up for Software Assurance by Microsoft’s deadline would cost companies two to three times more than it did under the old licensing rules because they would be forced to buy the new license to get upgrades. Microsoft claims the plan won’t cost most customers any extra, and it conceded two deadline extensions and waived some hard-line requirements. But organizations ranging from the $10 billion Burlington Northern railway to the hamlet of Murray, Utah, say they want no part of Software Assurance, and polls indicate they are in the majority.

Jakob Nielsen, Useit.Com: Avoiding Commodity Status. However, industrial design is not the main road ahead for computers. Improved software design is much more important. This does require some thinking, and it’s not Steve Job’s strategy, but I believe that software innovations are the main way to differentiate both high-tech products and websites. [Tomalak’s Realm]

Weakened encryption lays bare al-Qaeda files

Relatively weak encryption appears to have been used to protect files recovered from two computers believed to have belonged to al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan.

The files were found on a laptop and desktop computer bought by Wall Street Journal reporters from looters in Kabul a few days after it was captured by Northern Alliance forces on 13 November. The files provide information about reconnaissance missions to Europe and the Middle East.

A report in the UK’s Independent newspaper indicates that the encryption used to protect these files had been significantly weakened by US export restrictions that existed until last year.

The files were reportedly stored using Microsoft’s Windows 2000 operating system and protected from unauthorised access using the Encrypting File System (EFS), which comes as standard on this platform. They were protected with a 40-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES), according to the Independent report. This was the maximum strength encryption allowed for export by US law until March 2001. All systems are now sold with the standard 128-bit key encryption, exponentially stronger than 40-bit.

Wall Street Journal reporters say that they decrypted a number of files using “an array of high-powered computers” to try every possible combination, or “key” in succession, a process that took five days.

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Dave Winer: General comment on software patents. It’s terrorism, something we’re familiar with after Sept 11, applied to technology. Our terrorists wear suits and have law degrees. It will result in bankruptcies, orphaned software, and users without tools to use. The lawyers will get rich (and the technologists who think like lawyers). Ethical technologists who welcome competition because they want to be compelled to create the best products will go by the wayside, replaced by pseudo-technologists who use lawyers as competitive weapons. Who’s to blame? In the US, it’s the USPTO who grant patent abusers a legal basis to hijack open formats and protocols and crash them into products and services offered by developers of all sizes. State-sponsored terrorism. [Scripting News]

Gartner: Creating the Next-Generation IS Organization
(Goodhue, Chris)
[Requires direct access to Gartner web site.
Within UR, contact me for a copy of this presentation.]

Intel Open Source Vision Library. Intel has announced
a new release of the Open Source
Computer Vision Library (OpenCV) developed by researchers at their
Software Development Center in
Nihzniy Novgorod, Russia. OpenCV provides “human-like” stereo vision
capabilities that include depth perception, gesture recognition, object
tracking, and face recognition. The library source code is
available under a GPL-compatible license which has been approved by both
the Free
Software Foundation and Open Source
Initiative.
[robots.net]