News from PANUG/BizNix - December 18, 2002 http://panug.org - http://biznix.org RSVP PANUG and BizNix are having a Holiday party tomorrow night, Thursday, December 19 at 6:30 pm. Please RSVP if you will attend by replying to this message. ELCOMSOFT ACQUITTED by Ed Sawicki - Accelerated Learning Center / Tailored Computers The jury in the ElcomSoft case returned a Not Guilty verdict! This is a victory for everyone opposed to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). You may recall that Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, a programmer at Elcomsoft, was arrested at the 2001 DefCon conference in Las Vegas for violations of the DMCA. His arrest was the result of a complaint from Adobe. Dmitry's lecture at the conference revealed the simple (simple to the point of being silly) encryption technique used by Adobe in one of their eBook products. Sklyarov's arrest has had unanticipated consequenes. Popular Open Source/Free software is written by programmers throughout the world. Many of these programmers now refuse to travel to the United States to speak at conferences for fear of being arrested. I never thought I'd see the day when there were travel advisories about the United States, but it's happened. Adobe should be ashamed of themselves and should pay Sklyarov for his time spent in jail. I, for one, will never buy an Adobe product ever again. I'll support any effort to replace Adobe products with free softare. I wonder if saying this violates the DMCA. Little would surprise me these days. LINUX VS. WINDOZE TCO by Ken Barber Regarding the discussion last week regarding the article and study that concluded that Windoze has a lower TCO: Such "studies" are becoming a more regular occurrence, and I just found out why. Here's an excerpt from an article I just read: "Redmond now exploits any opportunity to disparage Linux, calling it everything from cancerous to un-American. Within Microsoft, however, there has been a recent admission that the anti-Linux message is backfiring, as customers view Microsoft's venom as a backhanded way of acknowledging that Linux is a formidable threat. That's why Microsoft has switched to a kinder, gentler message: total cost of ownership." from: http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,45956,00.html I've never understood how an objective study could come up with a lower TCO for Windoze over Linux. Now I get it: these are the same kind of "studies" that tobacco company "scientists" used to do, with the same predictability of results. Expect to see a lot more of them. It's apparently Microsoft's new strategy. By the way, the "Group Urges Limits on Open Source" article to which Patrick Corrigan sent a link is part of the same animal: the group in question is funded by Microsoft. I think we're also going to see a lot more propaganda coming from supposedly "independent" groups that aren't as "independent" as they would like us to believe. I hope the industry's journalists and pundits stay on their toes. WIRELESS SECURITY by Ed Sawicki - Accelerated Learning Center / Tailored Computers On Monday and Tuesday, I visited a government research lab to do some work. One condition of my entry to the facility was that I not bring any wireless device onto the site. Wireless Ethernet is not allowed anywhere on site. Clearly, the lab is concerned that sensitive data can "leak" out of the facility via radio. Additionally, in the area where I had to use my notebook computer, a technician disconnected that network segment from the rest of the site's network while I was connected. Only "trusted" computers may be connected to the site's network. I also found it interesting that, in this security-conscious environment, there's quite a bit of Macintosh OS X being used. Apparently, the technical people at the lab consider OS X to be more secure than Windows and the non-technical users find it easier to use.