Paul O'Flaherty

Danish Company Gives Porn To Workers..

Okay for those of you that speak Danish read this..

And for those of you that don’t.. Danish company LL Media are offering their employees free access to erotic films, pictures and chat online form their work computers for the sum of 30dkr a week (about 3 euros). This “service” is offered to employees after work hours, an will hopefully stop users accessing porn during work time.

Okay, I find this both funny and sensible. It should have the desired effect, especially if they introduce heavy penalties for accessing “adult” content during work hours. Possibly monitoring at the desktop level?

But what about all those wives (husbands?) who are wondering why their partner is regularly late home from work? Is it the secretary, a colleague? Are they trying to sleep they’re way into promotion? Or is the PC more alluring?

HP Expands Open Source Support To MySQL & JBoss

Good to see that Hewlett Packard are continuing to make strides into the Open Source world. MySQL and JBoss have partnered up with HP to work on jointly on testing and engineering support. Hp will certify and support MySQL and JBoss on it’s servers.

This is a good move for HP, who recently teamed up with Novell to provide Linux on it’s desktop PC’s. It has also promoted Linux on it’s Intel based servers and was one of the first companies to indemnify Linux customers against legal actions by the SCO group.

HP has shown significant interest in open-source software since its merger with Compaq Computer, but is still lagging behind IBM in the Linux market. This move can only be seen as positive for all involved. HP extends it’s reach in the Linux market. MySQL (the leading opensource database program) extend their customer base, and JBoss (Java based application server) will have it’s status as one of the leading choices for running Java-based Web applications secured.

And of course, the open source community benefits as well… A merger made in heaven then.

Frac.dk Cut Off.

I’m not quite sure how to react to this one. For the last couple of months I’ve happily had my website hosted with the free webhost Frac.dk. Now, I chose Frac.dk for good reason, they are fast, reliable, had very little downtime (some but less than most free service), did SQL and PHP, were a Danish company and I’d heard good things.

Now they’re gone. Visit my site and you’ll see what I mean.

Don’t get me wrong, I know I don’t have much right to complain as they were a free service, but I have to. They gave us no warning. None… I was on my site this morning. Only 10 minutes before they vanished in fact. I had no warning. Nothing, not a single email saying that we are going to terminate our services. Bad form guys.

As I said, I’m well aware that they can do what they want as it’s a free service, however, when they do come back I WILL NOT be with them. Why? Courtesy. Plain old customer service. What would it have taken to send a notification email… Would it really have been that hard to tell people last week so that they could find new hosts for their sites? This simple act would probably have kept me with a temporary host while I was waiting for them to come back, and I’d have happily paid for the service. Hell, I’d have paid for the service I was getting up until now if they wanted. But no… no notification, no chance to move, no nothing…

It’s not so bad for me. I have all my stuff backed up on my server at home, but what about Joe Public, just doing his personal site from day to day, with no backups, and most of (if not all of) his content on the server. Well, more fool him eh? Frac.dk say that if you keep an eye on the site detail will be posted for retrieval of your files.. but no mention of when.

Bad customer service lads, and certainly not the way to impress people so they’ll join your paid service when you come back.

Lindows Beats Microsoft In Netherlands Courts

Microsoft previously sued Operating System provider Lindows over the use of its name, saying that the term “Lindows” as it’s OS name was an infringement of the Microsoft trademark “Windows” and won. This forced Lindows to change the name of it’s OS to Linspire.

Microsoft again returned to the Amsterdam courts to sue Lindows in order to get them to change their company name. this times things didn’t go so good for the Redmond software giant. In fact, they lost. “Not every use of the business name Lindows infringes on the Windows trademark,” Judge Sj. A. Rullmann says in her ruling.

Not good news for Microsoft. This is just one part of the battle between Microsoft and Lindows, which is being fought in both the European and American courts. A battle which Microsoft aren’t having much success with in the US.

Microsoft are now being sued by Lindows, who claim that the term “Windows” cannot be a Microsoft trademark as it was in general use prior to 1985. If they win it could spell disaster for Microsoft.

Can you remember using the term Windows in computer related terms before 1985. I was only about 7 then, but I do seem to remember a graphics cartridge for the Commodore 64 (remember them) that used a “windowing environment”.. the name eludes me however. Let me know if you can remember any…

New Version Of Netscape For Summer

On Thursday America Online (AOL) announced that it planes to release a new version of the Mozilla based browser Netscape this summer.

It was commonly believed that Netscape was “no more” after AOL fired about 500 developers last year, most of whom were working on the browser. However this “probably” doesn’t mark AOL’s return as a browser developer. They still have Internet Explorer contracted for use in the AOL service for another 6 (or is it 5? I’m not sure) years, and this seems just to be an attempt to squeeze some revenue out of Netscape.After all, it did cost them 9 billion dollars to acquire.

Netscape 7.2 is not supposed to be a major upgrade. In fact it has been described by AOL spokes people as minor & “not a huge step forward”. Way to play down the release guys.

I’ll let you know more as I hear it, but I don’t think I’m going to be getting excited about this one.

ICANN Did NOT Violate Federal Antitrust Laws

U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz dismissed allegations that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers had violated federal antitrust laws in its attempts to bar VeriSign from adding services like Site Finder, which effectively took control of all unassigned .com and .net domain names and redirected them to the company’s Web site.

as reported by News.com

This is a major setback for Verisign in their attempt to sue ICANN and remove their ability to act as an Internet regulator. This all follows on the heals of VeriSigns attempt to hijack the internet last year to hijack the internet by having their Sitefinder service direct all unassigned .com and .net addresses to their website.

But why are they doing this in the first place? Market dominance in signing up companies/individuals to unassigned domain names. If ICANN weren’t able to regulate them, stunts like the Sitefinder incident last autumn would work, and would make it very hard for their competition to compete.

European Parliament Approves Changes To Proposed Software Patents.

As reported by News.com the EU has allowed changes to the wording of the proposed directive on software patents.

These changes are going to cause absolute anarchy in the European software industry, with major players engaging in patent wars over software, exactly like in the US at the moment.

Also, software patenting destroys the industry as it removes innovation and the ability to progress. Smaller developers can no longer mimic techniques used in software that is patented (even if the code is original), they can’t even improve on it because e they may not be able to afford to license the technology in the first place. This is a terrible situation which will lead to a stagnant industry as developers become “afraid” to produce anything in case it infringes on someone’s patent and they get sued.

Well done to Germany for coming out and stating that they will “not” support software patenting.

Google May Be Sued For Name

Okay… This just smells of money grabbing to me. First read the story here as reported by The Inquirer.

How long has Google been around? How long have they been using the name “Google” and exactly how close is the word “google” to the world “googol”. You see, it’s not the same word… I would even pronounce them different… So why sue Google?

Because they’ve become an IPO that’s why! And that means money, loads of it!

I hate these stories! Well done to the deceased professor for coming up the the word “googol”.. but bad form from his relatives for money grabbing.

Transmeta to support the new “NX” technology in it’s processors..

Microprocessor manufacturer Transmeta Corp, have announced that their future microprocessors will support the new “NX” or “No Execute” technology in their new processors.
“NX” stands for the Execution Protection technology that Microsoft has developed and is implementing in WinXP SP2. This technology prevents buffer over flow attacks which are a very common form of attack on software.

Transmeta is following in the footsteps of major players like Intel & AMD in integrating this technology into their processors, leaving only VIA to announce it will adopt it.

It’s good to see the adoption of this kind of protection at the hardware level and anything that reduces the number of vulnerabilities on out computers makes the internet a potentially safer place for all users. However, I don’t want to see too much protection transferred to the hardware level. I’m specifically talking about DRM, which I went into a yesterday.

DRM and the future..

DRM (Digital Rights Management) is the buzz word of the entertainment and software industry at the moment. The attempt to control copyrighted material and when/where it can be used.

Now, I’m sure most of you are aware, it really doesn’t matter what software solution they use to control material someone (or a group of someones) will either crack it, disable, find away around it, or just come up with another way to distribute it in a different format altogether.

So where does that leave the companies who wish to sell their material (music for example) but don’t want it illegally distributed? What option do they have?

The most apparent one to me is to integrated DRM into hardware at a fundamental level. Sound cards, graphics cards, mother boards (do people still call them that or is it just me? Most people seem to used the term “main board” these days!) CPU’s all hardwired to prevent you copying that CD.

Now the problem I have with this is that, that may work in the States, where you don’t have the same laws on “fair use” as we do over here in Europe… But can you really see the hardware manufacturers producing two versions of everything.. one for the US and one for us Europeans.. (not to mention the rest of the world!).

So, where will this lead, how far can they control what you do with what you buy, in your own home?

Dutch courts clear MP3 search engine of copyright violation

A Court in Harleem has cleared Techno Design, the owners of search portal zoekmp3.nl of copyright violation after finding that while distributing copyrighted content is illegal, providing links to an MP3 files is not. Basically, Techno Design is not itself, distributing illegal content just providing links to it, and that in itself is not in violation of Dutch copyright law.

The decision means that the portal will not be shut down, and can continue to be used by users to search for music on the internet.

You can find more on this story here.. as reported by DMeurope.com

What are the consequences of this ruling? Well, as I see it, a whole new set of search engines will start to appear hosted on Dutch websites pointing to copyrighted material. After all, linking to it is not illegal. However, we could see the Dutch coming under pressure to change this law… but for now it’s happy days for all those who download music off the net instead of buying it…