Brought to you each week by the 84 Online Team, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.
84 Online is broadcast live each Sunday from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM (EDT) on WHAS radio, 840 AM. You may call the show directly during this time period at 502-571-8484 or toll free at 1-800-444-8484. You may also interact with the team online by visiting www.84online.com and clicking on Chat Room. IRC users can access the room through irc://ucanweb.com/84online. Chat hours match the show on Sunday and generally some of the members are in nightly from 8:00 to 10:00 PM EDT.
If you’re new to the Newsletter you can read back issues at http://forums.84online.net/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=53. Team member JP Durbin mirrors the archive at
http://www.jpdurbin.net/84archive/.
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The WHAS Crusade for Children provides year round support for needy children throughout the Kentuckiana region. Visit http://www.whascrusade.org to make donations online.
The Louisville Linux User Group is a resource for local Linux enthusiasts to communicate with one another via BBS and mailing list. To subscribe to the LouLUG list, visit http://www.loulug.com for more information.
12-11-03
About a year ago I told you
how to sign up as a claimant in an Anti Trust lawsuit against the RIAA (http://online.ucanweb.com/forums/showthread.php?s=d0ecb2f681d492fad12795ff3d44179c&threadid=380). They had lost in a court action brought
by 43 State’s Attorneys General over a 20-year price fixing scheme. They lost a similar suit (http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CD_SETTLEMENT?SITE=1010WINS&SECTION=BUSINESS&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT)
earlier this month and, in July of this year, they were sued by the Webcaster
Alliance for yet more anti-competitive behavior (http://www.jpdurbin.net/84archive/84%20Online%20Newsletter%20Special%20Volume%203%20Number%2028a%207-20-03.htm).
Tired of having their
keisters handed to them by the courts, they have turned to their hand puppets in
Congress to legislate their culpability away. Enter Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), whom
the entertainment industry purchased this year for a miserly
$150,000.
You might remember Mr. Hatch
as the genius that declared that a technology should be developed to remotely
destroy the computers of file sharers.
Of course hilarity ensued shortly thereafter when it was discovered that
Mr. Hatch’s own website used pirated software. Is that hypocrisy I smell? Why yes, it
is…
Anyway, Orrin’s latest
legislative atrocity is the EnFORCE act (Enhancing Federal Obscenity Reporting
and Copyright Enforcement Act of 2003).
This Act would, in essence, exempt both the RIAA and MPAA from federal
Anti Trust laws. EXEMPT! They would be able to collude and
price-fix to their black little heart’s desire and IT WOULD BE
LEGAL!
What kills me about this act
is the title. I’ve read Senator
Hatch’s letter to the President urging his support for this bill over and over
and I can only find one sentence that has anything to do with reporting
obscenity, and even then it was only half the sentence, the other half having to
do with “intellectual property”.
You can read the entire load of horse offal at http://www.senate.gov/~hatch/index.cfm?FuseAction=Statements.Detail&PressRelease_id=215510&Month=11&Year=2003
but I’m referring to a statement close to the end.
“The bill also
requires the Department of Justice to report to Congress detailed information
about the scope of its efforts to investigate and prosecute crimes involving the
sexual exploitation of minors or intellectual property.” Is it me, or does that look like one of
those “Oops, I forgot what I was supposed to really be talking about” type
moments tacked on to CYA?
Mark Twain had
it dead on when he said, “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a
member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”
I could rant on this for days but this issue is going to run long, so I’ll shut up ;) I have a lot of timely material on hand and, with Christmas and New Year’s Day both falling on a Thursday; next week will be the last issue of the year.
Since we have a new year coming up I also want to take this opportunity to ask readers for their input. Are there things you like or dislike about the newsletter? Are there things you’d like to see that we don’t currently carry? This is an all-volunteer endeavor on our part and we’re only here because of you, the reader and listener. This is your newsletter and we always welcome feedback and try to incorporate reader suggestions into our content.
The SCO Lawsuit - Part
2
A few months ago in August 2003, I wrote an article about the SCO lawsuit against IBM and its implications to the Linux community.
http://www.jpdurbin.net/84archive/84%20Online%20Newsletter%20Volume%203%20Number%2031%208-7-03.htm
A lot has transpired since then, but the one thing that remains constant is that SCO has yet to produce one single piece of evidence that IBM, or anyone else for that matter, copied a single line of code into Linux, far less the "millions" of lines that they claim were stolen from Unix and incorporated into Linux.
For those who came in late, SCO sued IBM in March of 2003 for $1 Billion (later revised to $3 Billion) claiming that IBM stole their "Intellectual Property" from Unix System V and wrote it into Linux. I have already explained in my previous article how SCO's ownership of Copyrights of a certain portion of legacy Unix code came about through convoluted acquisitions and not really something they spent years developing. But as the months have gone by, SCO has made such outrageous claims in the Press that they have managed to effectively tick off the entire open source community (myself included).
Let me reiterate this point. SCO has said that millions of lines of code were stolen from Unix and incorporated into Linux. They claim that Linux would never have gotten to the point they are without this so called stolen code. But through all of this, they never have shown any evidence of a single line of code they say was illegally put into Linux. SCO has this crazy theory that if they show their "evidence" then the Linux community will remove the code from the OS. This is utter nonsense, as every version of Linux ever put out exists on millions of CD's worldwide. And if all of this is about copyright infringement, then isn't that what SCO should want? For people to remove the infringing code? Well, that’s where the true motives (at least one of them) of SCO come in. No, they want Linux users all over the world to pay them for using this code.
Now I don't live in the "bizarro" world that Darl McBride lives in, but in my world when you accuse someone of stealing, it is customary to inform them of what they stole. Let me give you an analogy. This would be like walking up to a car dealership and telling them that they are selling cars stolen from you. You wont tell them which cars are stolen, but want them to pay you compensation. Moreover you want all the people (Linux users) that bought cars from this dealership to pay you rental fees, and you will gladly supply them with rental agreements.
If you tried this in the real world, you would probably get shot for calling someone a thief without proof, or at least be laughed out of court. But apparently this is perfectly acceptable behavior in SCO's bizarro world. SCO's nonsensical ramblings lately have been on par with those of the "Iraqi Information Minister", but the general press seems to give them credence without ever checking the facts. Thank goodness for people like Pamela Jones of Groklaw (http://www.groklaw.net/), who has the absolute best website where one can get the real truth about the SCO Madness.
The few times that SCO has actually tried to show examples of this so-called "infringement", experts have disproved them within hours of their release. At the SCO forum they showed some examples (to a select audience), which leaked out, and turns out this was code that was in the public domain since 1979! Of course SCO wouldn't even show them without obtaining a Non-Disclosure agreement that was so restrictive that it effectively forbade you from ever working on anything open source once you saw this silly piece of code. SCO made assertions that they had a team of crack scientists from MIT that had done the comparisons of the code. These scientists have since mysteriously disappeared.
SCO at first said they had no fight with Linux users and just wanted to resolve a copyright issue with IBM, but within weeks they were launching a full front attack on Linux and now that has spread to all things Open Source. SCO said they were going to send out invoices and/or sue major Linux users for using their code. I wonder if they backed out of sending invoices in the mail because without proof that would be "Mail Fraud", a federal offense that carries "Jail Time" with it. But they can sue anyone and everyone with impunity in the hopes that someone would pay up rather than fight. Another important point to remember through all of this is that SCO sold Linux for years. So anything they are accusing the Linux community of doing is something they did willingly and did it to make a profit! And the fact that by selling Linux they actually legally gave away any code they had copyrights to since that is mandated by the GPL.
SCO is no longer a software company. They are professional litigates. I explained in my previous article how Darl McBride has effectively raised the stock price of this company and made millions by just suing IBM. They will continue to play this game as long as they can. They recently announced the hiring of the high profile law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner for around $9 Million. How did they pay them? By giving them $1 Million in cash and 400,000 shares of SCO stock. That means over 90% of the fees for the lawyers came through shares exchange. Now I am sure this is all legal, but to me this REEKS as far as ethical behavior goes. Having your attorneys own a substantial part of your company is one way of guaranteeing that the lawsuits shall continue despite the merits (or lack thereof) of any case you might have.
So what about those licenses that SCO was supposed to sell for Linux? There are hundreds of millions of Linux users around the world, including a bunch of Governments. This was supposed to be the big revenue (read extortion) source for SCO. So far they have sold licenses to only two companies. They are Sun and Microsoft. Yes, the ONLY Linux licenses that they managed to sell were to Linux competitors. And Sun has a long history of Unix Licenses, so that leaves Microsoft as the sole purchaser. Ever wonder why Steve Ballmer never misses a chance in every press conference to say, "Linux is a clone of Unix"? I will leave you to draw your own conclusions regarding that matter.
As the old saying goes. "When you have facts on your side, pound the facts. When you have the Law on your side, pound the Law. When you have neither, pound the table!" That is exactly what SCO is doing. They tried a shakedown of IBM with a lot of FUD in the press and IBM didn't budge. So they went after the Linux community and they got their hats handed to them when it came to burden of proof. Now the latest theory from "bizarro" world is that the General Public License (GPL) that Linux is distributed under is in itself unconstitutional. This is in a so-called open letter from Mr. McBride on SCO's home page. I don't want to give any more credence than necessary to this stupidity, so I refuse to post a link to it. Remember SCO has for years profited from tons of code that they acquired using the GPL. Darl McBride in his Open Letter is now invoking the intent of the “Founding Fathers” when it comes to copyright. SCO goes as far as to say that Copyright MUST be used to gain a profit, and he asserts that’s what the constitution says. This is of course idiotic. If I write a book, I have every right to either sell it for profit or give it away for free. That’s what the GPL is about. It’s about your rights to do whatever you like with your code!
SCO is going after Linux and IBM today, but they have made it abundantly clear that they are going to sue anyone and everyone. They are targeting Linux, AIX, BSD, Red Hat, SGI, Apple and your grandmother if she had anything to do with Open Source. They are spraying the whole world with bullets in the hopes that they will hit something. They have now even invoked the worst law written on the planet – you guessed it - the DMCA. Their latest arguments in court shows how far away from reality SCO has come. IBM in its discovery process asked SCO to tell them which code was stolen (infringing). Incredibly SCO's response was to tell IBM that they (IBM) need to give SCO the complete listing of AIX code and that they (IBM) need to point out which code they (IBM) stole from Unix and put into Linux! It is unbelievable how SCO could even make such a request with a straight face. Apparently even the Judge in this case has had enough of this nonsense, and she has given 30 days to SCO to put up or shut up. And SCO’s reaction to that? Well, they said they are going to pursue a new lawsuit! We will see what happens next.
Through all of this madness, I tried to discern what SCO was actually talking about when they keep harping on “millions of lines” of infringing code. After all even crazy people have a meaning behind their madness, however warped the logic may be. I happened to catch something in Darl McBride's latest ramblings in his open letter. For a while now there have been rumblings in the Open Source community that what SCO wants to do is to retry the AT&T vs. BSD case regarding Unix code in BSD. That case was settled in 1994 because AT&T was about to lose badly as there were only about 3 files out of 18,000 that belonged to Unix. The rest of the code was newly written and purely BSD. When the case was settled, the BSD code still had certain copyright statements put in by the old Unix hats that basically acknowledged the hard work of REAL programmers in AT&T Bell labs. Of course the code itself was under the BSD license and was open source.
In the open letter SCO states:
"SCO intends to fully protect its rights granted under these Acts against all who would use and distribute our intellectual property for free, and would strip out copyright management information from our proprietary code, use it in Linux and distribute it under the GPL."
That one line caught my eye. The following is pure speculation on my part, but that might be where all of this stems from. SCO owns the copyright to System V Unix. There were certain files of ancient Unix that were in BSD. So if somehow IBM programmers contributed BSD code to Linux but omitted the old copyright information from those files, they didn't give credit to BSD and thus by association to Unix. SCO's contention thus would be that since that copyright information was not carried over, ALL of Linux is now tainted. Hence their assertion that millions of lines of code were copied into Linux. Of course I think this is all a bunch of hooey anyways, but only time will tell.
In the meanwhile SCO's stocks have taken a little bit of a dive, but they are still trading at quite high levels. Remember when all of this started SCO’s shares were at $1 / share. Today they are still trading at around $15. The SCO shares are like a lottery ticket. If by some chance they prevail in court, the shareholders win big. It doesn't matter that these vultures will be effectively profiting of the blood and sweat of millions of programmers around the world who thought they were contributing to something meaningful in the form of open source code, where everyone benefits. So SCO will be doing exactly what they claim that the Linux community is doing to them today. They will be usurping something that never belonged to them in the first place, and profiting from the toil of others. But I guess in today’s “Greed is Good” world duplicitous, unethical behavior is no longer condoned. In fact it just makes one a more successful CEO. Just ask someone who lost his or her life savings in Enron. They can tell you all about it.
I guess it is time, once again, to discuss Internet
chain letters and email hoaxes. We
talk about this on the radio show regularly, but folks still want to clutter our
inboxes with this junk.
Here are some pointers:
* MTV will not give you backstage passes if you forward something to the
most people.
* Bill Gates is not going to give you
$10,000.
* IBM is not going to send you a free
computer.
* Disney is not giving you a free vacation.
* The Gap is not giving away free
clothes.
* Miller is not about to send you a free six-pack of their Miller brand
beverages.
* Coca-Cola won't send a free six-pack of Diet Coke to everybody you send
an e-mail to.
* Neither Nokia nor Ericsson is ready to send you a free cellular
phone.
* There is no baby food company issuing class-action
checks.
* The American Cancer Society won't donate 3 cents to cancer research
every time you forward an ASCII-formed picture of Tickle-Me
Elmo.
Another thing: just because someone said in a message
four generations back that "I checked it out and it's legit" does not actually
make it true.
* There is no kidney theft ring in New Orleans. No one is waking up in a
bathtub full of ice, even if a friend of a friend swears it happened to her
cousin.
* Proctor and Gamble is not part of a satanic cult or scheme, nor is its
logo Satanic.
* Neiman Marcus doesn't really sell a $200 cookie recipe. And even if
they do, we probably all have it already.
* There is no gang initiation plot
to murder any motorist who flashes headlights at another car driving at night
without lights.
* There is no bill pending before Congress that will allow long distance
companies to charge you for using the Internet.
* Microsoft has no technology to capture an image of you as you stare at
your computer monitor.
* Neil Armstrong never said, "Good luck, Mr.
Gorsky."
*No one has ever crashed a jet-powered car--or an old car with a stolen
jet engine strapped to it--into the side of a cliff (except maybe Wyle E.
Coyote).
I hope I haven’t burst too many bubbles with those
revelations.
Besides the annoyance of having these emails clogging
mail servers, most people forward this junk without using the BCC (Blind Carbon
Copy) feature. This exposes those
hundreds of email addresses to the spammers and their mail-bots. Ever wonder how that SPAM made it to
your mailbox? Your best friend
signed you up when she sent you that informative email about Bill Gates sending
you a gazillion dollars.
Here are some things to keep in
mind:
If an email urges you to send it 10 friends,
don’t!
If an email insists it is legit because a lawyer said
so, it isn’t.
Microsoft, Intel and IBM cannot track an email and
don’t.
You don’t have to take my word for this. Here are some sites that expose the
hoaxes:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blhoax.htm?once=true&
Wise up!
Art Maley
Is Linux
ready for the desktop? - Part 9
There are currently more
Linux distributions than you can shake a stick at, but what distributions are
best for the desktop? There are
currently several vendors creating their own flavors of Linux that are aimed
specifically at the desktop market.
This week we're going to take a look at these distributions and list
their strengths and weaknesses.
Note: Since Red Hat
and Mandrake Linux are generally the best known and most popular Linux
distributions, they have been left out of this article to instead concentrate on
other lesser known distributions.
Knoppix
Knoppix is the Linux
distribution for those who want to give Linux a try but don't want to worry
about the hassle of installing Linux or messing with their current Windows
installation. Knoppix boots from a
single CD and loads a fully functional Linux desktop. Using Knoppix, Windows users can get
their feet wet and see what the Linux experience is all about. When you're done playing with Knoppix
simply eject the CD and reboot your machine to get back into
Windows.
·
Strengths - You can play
with Linux without having to deal with software installations or re-partitioning
your hard drive.
·
Weaknesses – You can't keep
any changes that you make. Once you
turn off your machine all of your settings have been
erased.
Desktop/LX
Lycoris has done a
remarkable job of taking Linux and giving it a comfortable interface for users
who are more familiar with Windows operating systems. At first glance you may think that
you're actually running a version of Windows, but underneath the polished GUI
you're definitely running Linux.
Screenshots are located at http://www.lycoris.com/products/desktoplx/desktop/.
·
Strengths – An extremely
user-friendly user interface makes learning Linux less difficult than most other
distributions. You can also
purchase very low-cost PC's pre-installed with Desktop/LX from Wal-Mart.com at
the following URL: http://www.walmart.com/catalog/catalog.gsp?cat=106562&path=0%3A3944%3A3951%3A41937%3A86796%3A106562
·
Weaknesses – Keep in mind
that this isn't Windows. While
Desktop/LX tries to emulate the look and feel of Windows you're not going to
find things in the same location and software will be
different.
Lindows
http://www.lindows.com/lindows_sales_intro.php
Lindows is selling itself as
the “new, affordable, fun, and exciting operating system”. Unlike most Linux distributions you
can't download a free version of Lindows, it must be purchased. However there are applications in
Lindows that you won't be able to find in any other Linux OS, such as its
Click-N-Run auto software installer.
·
Strengths – Makes using
Linux easy thanks to great tools like Click-N-Run that removes the sometimes
daunting task of software installation in Linux. You can also purchase very low-cost PC's
pre-installed with Lindows from Wal-Mart.com at the following URL: http://www.walmart.com/catalog/catalog.gsp?cat=106562&path=0%3A3944%3A3951%3A41937%3A86796%3A106562
·
Weaknesses – It's not free,
like most Linux distributions available.
There's no guarantee that other Linux software will run on Lindows
reliably due to its proprietary installation
software.
Ultimately, if you're
interested in trying Linux you're going to have to make a choice on a
distribution to use. Some vendors
are working on making the transition from Windows to Linux as easy as possible,
while others provide distributions that are aimed at advanced computer
users.
Currently the most popular
distributions in the US are Red Hat and Mandrake however; there are many
different versions of Linux that cater to a variety of users and uses. If you're interested in learning more
about the various Linux distributions available, take a look at www.distrowatch.com for more
information.
Ed
Engelking
This
article was written on OpenOffice Writer, a free word processing program for
Windows, Mac and Linux that is completely compatible with Microsoft Office. Try it today at http://www.openoffice.org/.
With the holiday shopping season in full swing, team member Micah Lackey put together a Power Point slideshow giving tips on how to protect yourself from identity theft. And it’s not all about your computer.
View his presentation at http://homepages.ius.edu/mdlackey/idenitytheftcomp_files/frame.htm
and take it to heart. Having
someone lift your identity can be an absolute
nightmare…
Editor’s Note: This presentation only works correctly
if you’re using Internet Explorer.
Since Power Point is a Microsoft product I can’t say I’m surprised, but
be warned that it won’t work correctly in Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror
etc…
Sarah Lane from the Screen Savers show on Tech TV mentioned a really cool little download last week that I thought I would pass along.
All versions of Windows
post-3.11 have a command line interface.
You click Start and Run and there it is, but in Windows you have to know
what to type in there, like msconfig, sfc, sysedit etc. SlickRun changes all that. It’s a floating toolbar that puts the
Run command line right on your desktop and you can customize it. For instance, you can create an alias
for Outlook Express and call it inbox.
Just type inbox into the
command line and voila, you’re in email!
You can read Sarah’s review
and get the free program at http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/downloadoftheday/story/0,24330,3581461,00.html.
Q: Yes, I would like to know if I need all
my extra players, RealPlayer G2, Windows Media Player, and Music Match Jukebox.
Can I delete two of them and keep one or the other?
A: Windows Media Player will
play almost every type of audio/video file except for Real Media files, which
must be played using Real Player. MM Jukebox is great if you have a large
collection of MP3 audio files, but unnecessary if you don't. Hope this
helps and thanks for listening.
Matthew
Dattilo
If you have
tech support questions or ideas and/or submissions for our newsletter please
email them to bob@iglou.com.
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reserved. Publication, rebroadcast
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Information
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Although the information provided is known to work on most systems, it
may not work on ALL systems. Make
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