Liudvikas Bukys

Jakob Nielsen: 10 Best Intranets of 2002:
Notable points:

• “In terms of management structure, the only trend we found was that there was no clear picture of who winning intranet teams report to within the organizations. The two most common organizational homes for the intranet teams were information technology departments and human resources (HR) departments, but we also found good intranet teams reporting to the corporate secretary and the corporate communications department.”
• “Much of the value of an intranet comes from making it a communications tool that all employees check every day. This can be a challenge, especially if the old intranet was universally hated for being clumsy and impossible to work with, as was the case in some of the companies.”
• “The one-stop shopping approach extended to the security features for most of the winning intranets. Single sign-on is finally becoming a reality on many good intranets, following years of persistent user requests.”
• “The winning intranets had all made great strides toward consistency and were typically successful at overcoming internal politics by the sheer quality of the central design, as opposed to the dubious designs usually produced by individual departments.
  Wal-Mart has a particularly fruitful strategy for managing its intranet for consistency: Users own the content and the central team owns the design.”

and you can buy a
158-page report on the annual competition, including 104 screenshots of the 10 winners.

Brad Templeton on
E-Stamps:

I first started thinking about this at the very start of the spam problem, (around 1995) as an interesting technical solution that hits at one of the root causes of spam. I leave it up here since it was my first idea in the quest for a solution to spam. I may have been the first to think of it, but many have also come up with the same idea independently, based on the thought that if you can make even a small negative cost to spam, the problem would go away.

However, I have since abandoned now even
oppose the idea for a variety of reasons. These include the total failure of the several serious attempts to build an online money micropayment system or other such infrastructure, and the almost impossible problems raised by any solution that needs new software at both sender and recipient. There are also free speech concerns. As such, it remains an academic exercise.

White Hat Security:
Cross-Site Tracing (XST)
[Press Release]
[White Paper]

The GUI Toolkit, Framework Page
“User interfaces occupy an important part of software development. This page provides a comprehensive reference on toolkits for building graphical user interfaces (GUIs), with emphasis on resources for Free Software (Open Source).”

I just came across the following in a David Friedman essay,
Mail Me the Money!, published August 2002:

My email contains much of interest. It also contains READY FOR A SMOOTH WAY OUT OF DEBT?, A Personal Invitation from make_real_money@BIGFOOT.COM, You’ve Been Selected….. from friend@localhost.net, and a variety of similar messages, of which my favorite offers “the answer to all your questions.” The internet has brought many things of value, but for most of us unsolicited commercial email, better known as spam, is not one of them.
…
There is a simple solution to this problem — so simple that I am surprised nobody has yet implemented it. The solution is to put a price on your mailbox. Give your email program a list of the people you wish to receive mail from. Any mail from someone not on the list is returned, with a note explaining that you charge five cents to read mail from strangers. Five cents is a trivial cost to anyone with something to say that you are likely to want to read — but five cents times ten million recipients is quite a substantial cost to someone sending out bulk email on the chance that one recipient in ten thousand may respond.

It’s a pretty good idea.
I must point out back in November 1992, when the “com-priv” mailing
list was where the action was, I made essentially the same proposal,
to quote:

A better “free market” social convention is that senders negotiate
delivery prices with recipients. People who want junk mail from some
source arrange for free delivery, people who don’t want junk mail
demand that senders pay them big bucks for the privilege of putting
something in their mailbox, tricksters try to make money by looking
like attractive targets for junk mail, the mailing list industry is
reborn as high-quality mailing lists become much more important for
reaching your target audience and avoiding the tricksters, an
electronic stamp industry is created for the purpose of organizing
third-party mailing lists that recipients like being on, and a
wonderful equilibrium settles over the network as the financial
incentives are there for people to receive only what they are
interested in.
Unfortunately, this requires a lot of work on the protocol side
(electronic money transfers, stamp authentication), but if the
protocols were there, I think that the social aspects are attractive
enough that people would go through the cataclysm willingly.

At the time, there were a few friendly remarks,from Steve Crocker
and Ken Laws, with Christopher Locke expressing a little interest,
but the itch wasn’t strong enough, nobody implemented or adopted,
so here we are ten years later with a spam crisis — one so severe
that (I predict) this will be the year in which solutions will be
adopted almost universally — and that solution will in most cases
be automatic text classification and machine learning tools applied
as spam filters.

But there may be room still for innovation in money flows
as well, for two reasons: (1) The population of people whose base expectation is “don’t send me email” may become significant —
and that population may have no resistance to adopting new protocols
for “pay me to read this”. (2) This population will balloon because
of the same issues arising on metered portable devices such as cell
phones.

Yes, “bonded senders” are a small incremental step along this path.

Yahoo: Reuters Internet Report: Music Exec: ISPs Must Pay Up for Music-Swapping

“We will hold ISPs more accountable,” said Hillary Rosen, chairman and CEO the Recording Industry Association of America (news – web sites) (RIAA), in her keynote speech at the Midem music conference on the French Riviera.

“Let’s face it. They know there’s a lot of demand for broadband simply because of the availability (of file-sharing),” Rosen said.

…

Rosen suggested one possible scenario for recouping lost sales from online piracy would be to impose a type of fee on ISPs that could be passed on to their customers who frequent these file-swapping services.

…

Rosen’s other suggestions for fighting online piracy were more conciliatory.

Jack Russell, the Inquirer:
RIAA’s attempt to hold ISPs to account is risible:
“
Hilary Rosen — Jack Valenti’s RIAA female clone — has now gone on record saying that as part of the fight against music piracy, ISPs should be held accountable for the actions of their users and charged a fee for giving their customer’s access to services such as Kazaa or Morpheus.
”

The year in scripting languages
« This is a joint review of 2002 for the programming languages Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl. It was a cooperative effort by people from the five communities. »
[Zope Newbies]

Karen Kent: Evaluating Network Intrusion Detection Signatures:
[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
(via Bruce Schneier’s crypto-gram)

Vianney (IBM): Hyper-Threading speeds Linux: Multiprocessor performance on a single processor
The results on Linux kernel 2.4.19 show Hyper-Threading technology could improve multithreaded applications by 30%. Current work on Linux kernel 2.5.32 may provide performance speed-up as much as 51%.