News from PANUG/BizNix - April 15, 2003 http://panug.org - http://biznix.org PANUG MEETING This Thursday is PANUG's April meeting. The main presentation will be given by Rick Lindahl. Rick's company specializes in fixed wireless networking. He'll discuss security, interoperability, distances, speeds, and many other areas of interest. There will also be two factory reps from Alvarion and RAD Data Comm. who will speak about their equipment lines and perspectives in this area as well. COMMUNITY OUTREACH There's still a lot of people out there who don't understand the basics and benefits of Open Source/Free Software. To solve this problem, BizNix is getting more aggressive in its community outreach. BizNix and PANUG have tried to educate the computer-using public about Open Source/Free Software via the Linux Live sessions. Unfortunately, Linux Live didn't go far enough in simplifying the subject for non-technical people. We're working on a presentation that's entirely focused on a non-technical, business-oriented audience. To ensure that we succeed, we'd like to learn about the mysterious and elusive (to us) world of IT decision making. We want to assemble a group of non-technical decision makers and learn what factors are important to them when they choose software. If someone you know is a good candidate (your manager perhaps), please contact info@biznix.org. XML AND MICROSOFT There's a lot of interest in Microsoft's plans for XML support in upcoming versions of Microsoft Office. One reason for the interest is the assumption that documents saved in an XML format would not be vendor-proprietary - that XML documents could be read by any other program capable of dealing with XML documents. The assumption is that XML would free us from the risk of our data being accessible to us only by using a certain vendor's software. But would it? David May, a BizNix member, programmer, and XML enthusiast raises these issues: XML tools use Document Type Definitions (DTDs) to validate a document's comformance to structure. These DTDs declare the elements and element relationships that are allowed in a particular XML document. Could DTDs could be copyrighted and protected by laws such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. Perhaps every validation would have to hit on Microsoft servers. You could cache copies of the DTDs but would that violate copyright? Here are a few articles to get you up to speed on some of the XML/Office issues. http://panug.org/1 xml.com article http://panug.org/2 Infoworld article http://panug.org/3 Microsoft article Note: URLs to articles are frequently very long and often wrap to the next line - forcing you to manually glue them back together before using them. We have solved the problem with HTTP redirects. The links above will take you to articles that have much longer URLs. Please let us know if these redirects don't work for you and which Web browser you're using. MISCELLANEOUS submitted by Ed Sawicki: The recently-released RFC3514 describes "The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header" that promises to greatly simplify detection of IPv4-borne attacks: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt submitted by Ken barber: Former Iraq Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahhaf has been hired by Microsoft. His first act was to issue this statement regarding security holes in XP: "Windows XP is a blessing upon the face of the world. The Linux infidels lie like dogs in a Persian bathhouse when they tell you that Windows XP (R) has security holes. The holes are in their dead, rotting corpses. Windows XP has no faults as befits this blessing from the hands of the most high. I know because I tell the truth" DISCLAIMER PANUG and BizNix welcome contributions from all members. Member contributions do not necessarily represent the official positions of PANUG or BizNix. If you don't contribute, the views of members that contribute frequently may appear to be the official position of the group(s).