SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Security Jumpstart (2002, Sybex) by Matthew Strebe, is a largish trade-format sized book of 300 pages–rather thin for this size format. The cover is a glaring red and white separated by a bolt of black, with two jumper cables and a spark emitted in the gap between them. Frankly, the cover art seems a bit low-brow.

The choice of fonts in the book was courageous although perhaps misguided. One doesn’t often see sans seriff fonts used for the primary text of technical book. The font does convey a certain sense of whimsy, but it’s odd proportions and lack of seriffs can be straining on eyes more accustomed to Garamond or Times New Roman.

The format uses an inovated side-bar approach to define terms contained in the text in a way that is neither distracting nor inconvenient. These terms are in bold face in the text, which seems an appropriate way to indicate a digression, although underlining might become more popular as the web absorbs the bulk of our reading now.

The artwork throughout the book is typical fare for technical books, and each chapter is prefaced with a black and white lead page that repeats the cover art.

In summary, the book’s oddly tall size, thinness, and bold red cover art will make it standout on your shelf. Whether that’s good or bad is up to you.

Our grade: C+

Michael writes: As predicted earlier this week, Microsoft has announced that they will soon begin offering Linux versions of their most popular products. “We can no longer ignore the market penetration of Linux,” said CEO Steve Ballmer. “We hope this first step will show just how strongly we intend to support the Linux community.”

The first product for Linux will be a version of the popular Notepad text editor. “Linux users are constantly complaining about the lack of a good text editor,” said Ballmer. Microsoft’s next products for Linux will be versions of their most popular games: Minesweeper , Solitaire, and Blue Screen of Death.

Matthew writes: SlashNOT’s anti-hackneyed cliché guidelines were invoked today when SlashNOT staffer Matthew attempted to post a story about Ebay auctioning itself off to the highest corporate bidder in an apparent executive management exit strategy scenario.

SlashNOT staffer Michael explains: “We felt we had to draw the line. We felt we had to raise the bar. And, we felt we had to do something else to the box besides just think outside it. The clichés were like bees to honey in this post. Since we introduced the ranking system and [Matthew] realized that his every post wasn’t a ‘5′, he’s been like a man possessed to write the perfect satirical short.”

A chastened Matthew had this to say: “I’m just glad we have such a stringent peer review process. I mean, the castigation and chastisement of my coworkers was bad enough, but what if our readers had seen the piece? It would have been the Linux trademark fiasco all over again.”

Matthew writes: Teenagers who look to the Internet for health information are being blocked from many useful sites by porn filters that federal law requires on school and library computers, a new study has found.

Alan Firth, one of the seven teenagers in the U.S. who searched for health related information on the Internet last year, found that he could not reach numerous websites.

“I was searching for information on the health risks of having really big boobs, you know, like back aches and stuff, but I couldn’t get to some of the sites. My teacher suggested searching on “breast”, but that just took me to a bunch of cancer sites. Cancer sucks dude.”

“The filters were bad, but I found that not having a credit card was even worse. Some body should do a study of why all the good breast health information sites require a credit card.”

Charles Perkins writes: Jorgen Hansensensen, a prominent San Diego cryptographic researcher, has developed a new more reliable pet management methodology modeled on computer storage technology.

“Like many families, we have pets,” Jorgen tells the San Diego Mercurial News. “But it is always such a traumatic event when one dies or runs away. Just last week our cat ‘Bob’ ran away at the same time the hard drive of my Sparc Ultra bit the dust. I found myself wishing we had an emergency backup cat that I could swap in before Hans could notice and throw a fit, or before my wife could get on me again about my absent-minded and erratic cat-feeding habits.”

“Cats are expensive though,” Hans continues, “And easy to tell apart, kind of like big SCSI disks. What I needed was a cheaper animal that I could swap out more quickly. I was thinking about that and then my screen-saver kicked in and all of a sudden I had it! Fish! I am happy to say that our new aquarium is working out nicely.”

Matthew writes: Microsoft executives have announced that they are about three months away from realizing that they can market Digital Rights Management technology as a security tool for consumers. Currently, DRM has not gained acceptance because consumers have no reason to accept the ability to keep them from copying data. Publishers have failed to provide any reason why consumers should pay extra for DRM technology and hardware when it doesn’t benefit the consumer.

“In three months or so, some of our technology people are going to be brainstorming over subway at lunch about DRM—you know, the old “how we can convince people that DRM is good for them” problem, when one of our guys is going to have a major Epiphany.

We expect it to go something like this:—’wait a second! We can use DRM to protect secret documents from being opened by unintended recipients and copied off of servers! Imagine permissions that travel with the document, as an e-mail attachment, or on CD-ROM or tape backup! We can rebuild the permissions architecture of Longhorn [The next version of Windows] around DRM! This is how we can get people to accept Palladium! Man, we’ll be able to integrate DRM document protection into office, and that will get corporations buying Palladium in a big way. Wait a second, the open source guys can’t do DRM, so this is a way to add value that that damned Linux can’t match! Nice!’

Microsoft plans to kick off a huge “DRM as private security” initiative within days of the realization, as soon as idea gains traction and goes viral within the company.

Matthew writes: A perl programmer was recently hospitalized and held for psychiatric evaluation after he became hysterical while attempting to program in Perl using Microsoft’s speech recognition software.

According to his mother, Larry Wallton became increasingly frustrated with his inability to correctly enter a single line of perl code using voice recognition. “It was getting pretty scary. I just kept hearing him yell “correction! Left-bracket! Correction! Left brace! Period! Arrgh! Correction! Forward slash! Slash! Correction! Correction!”

“When I suggested that he just go back to using the keyboard, he pointed his hook at me and told me to stay out of his business. He said that keyboards were going to be obsolete soon and he wanted to be ahead of the competition in adopting voice recognition. He was like a crazy man.”

According to Mr. Wallton’s doctor, he should make a full recovery, but his psychiatrist has recommended switching to Pascal if he intends to use voice recognition software to program in the future.

Matthew writes: TiVo, the maker of popular video recorders, has announced a new line of enterprise ready network attached storage devices.

“We bringing a lot of value added to the enterprise market. As anyone can tell you, TiVos are by far the most reliable device containing a hard disk drive ever made. They run 24×7, they never crash–they’ve got 99.9999% uptime dialed. You can’t get those reliability numbers from traditional servers.”

“Plus, we’re bringing our pattern detection technology to the Enterprise as well. Just like the way a TiVo will recommend shows that fit your demographic, TiVo servers will recommend documents you’re going to want to read. If you’ve been reading a lot of gossip about Janice in HR in your e-mail, TiVo is going to recommend documents that contain Janice’s name on the hard disk.”

New Tivo Servers are expected to debut at $2999, with a $125/month fee for maintaining a directory of files on the device.

Matthew writes: Hormel foods has filed suit against the Spam Prevention Early Warning System for blocking the delivery of Spam to many of its customers.

“SPEWS and other spam blockers have been put on notice that Hormel will not tolerate Anti-spam activities. We’ve been very happy about the way that the Internet community has embraced spam. Our research shows that spam is by far the most talked about food product on the Internet. But we don’t want the words “spam” and “anti” ever being concatenated. People who attempt to concatenate spam or block the delivery of spam will see us in court.

Rather than subscribing to Spam blocking services, Hormel recommends forwarding unwanted Spam to the hungry.

Matthew writes: A new high velocity virus has emerged that targets non-Microsoft systems. Details are sketchy at this point, but the GnuPublic.license (or GPL for short) virus is apparently a Trojan horse–it masquerades as “free” software which users download and use, which then somehow infects the rest of the software they use.

This virus then apparently infects derivative software—software that has been written using the original GPL infected source code.

According to Microsoft, this virus is spreading so quickly that it threatens to undermine the Windows platform even though it doesn’t infect any Microsoft products. Apparently, the viral GPL software is so virulent that it can completely replace all Microsoft software on a computer. Microsoft has responded with an innoculating counter-measure called “shared source”, but will not release the antidote without a non-disclosure agreement.

UPDATE: Some recent posts indicate that this virus is the first transgenic virus to cross from computers to humans. Apparently, once a person’s computer becomes infected by the GPL, the idea of the GPL infects the user’s brain, causing them to prefer open-source software.