Mac mini's twin runs Windows: L'articolo parla di Pandora, un'imitazione Windows del Mac mini, ma contiene questo dato interessante: Windows preinstallato costa 70 dollari "millions of apparently sensible people actually want Windows machines and don't want Macs, often for the simple reason that Windows is what they are used to. If Aopen really can get the price as low as they claim (a very difficult task, when things like the $70 OEM price for MS Windows XP are factored in), this could be a hot seller come Xmas time."

Slashdot | Europe Home to Majority of Zombies: "According to a recent CipherTrust study, the majority of Zombie PCs reside not in the US or China, but in Europe. Of the European zombies, 2/3 were either in Germany, France, or Britain. The results were released with the announcement of CipherTrust's new ZombieMeter. As a response to previous reports of high zombie activity, the London Action Plan launched Operation Spam Zombies in cooperation with numerous governments around the world."

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Woodward tells Deep Throat story:

Altro che alta tecnologia....

"The two men agreed to the famed 'flower pot signal' which involved moving a flower pot on Woodward's apartment balcony if he urgently needed a meeting.

The signal would mean meeting the same night on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn, Washington DC - although Woodward says it was never clear to him how Mr Felt could have made the daily observation of his balcony.

'There was no fallback meeting place or time. If we both didn't show, there would be no meeting,' he says.

'Felt said if there was something important he could get to my New York Times - how, I never knew.

'Page 20 would be circled, and the hands of a clock in the lower part of the page would be drawn to indicate the time of the meeting that night, probably 0200, in the same Rosslyn parking garage."

Slashdot | The Other Side of BitTorrent: "one industry's threat is another's opportunity. There's an upside to allowing viewers to transfer copyright material content over BitTorrent. As noted by Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, fans of the Japanese anime series Naruto regularly post translated episodes of the show to BitTorrent, which attracts more fans to the series. The relatively obscure program has spawned a global following in online forums, internet relay chat channels and fan sites."

...The show airs in Japan on wednesday night at 7:28pm local time. Within 24 hours, a fansubbed version is released on the internet. The most recent version was released about 13 hours ago, and there are currently 15770 seeds and 13600 peers on this torrent. In 12 hours, 11.5 terabytes has been transferred, and just over 71,000 people have downloaded the episode.

... You need to take the logic one step further.

1) Series is not available outside of Japan.
2) Internet and fansubbing make series available outside of Japan.
3) Fansubs build series' popularity.
4) Publishers see demand and release series worldwide, seeing huge amounts of sale from fans they never would have had before.
5) Profit.

This works out extremely well for the developer, who doesn't need to spend money advertising, and gets a large amount of revenue they wouldn't have seen before.

On the flipside, maybe this is another reason the RIAA/MPAA are afraid of P2P and the internet in general - it allows content from other parts of the world (that they do not necessarily control) to come over here and become popular.

Slashdot | Korean MSN Site Hacked: "CNN is reporting that MSN's Korean website was hacked in order to allow usernames and passwords to be stolen. Microsoft is initially blaming unpatched, outsourced servers. Just another embarrassment to Microsoft's security push."

The Inquirer: "[Microsoft] has admitted that the hack took place, but remains clueless about how many of its customers have been compromised."

Ovviamente usano Internet Information Server. Chi è causa del suo mal...

BBC NEWS | Business | Microsoft meets Brussels deadline: "US software giant Microsoft has met a 1 June deadline for responding to a landmark European Union antitrust ruling against the company.

'We have submitted proposals and we are awaiting a response from the EU Commission,' a spokesman said.

In 2004, Brussels found Microsoft guilty of abusing its market dominance and fined it 497m euros ($655m; £340m).

If the Commission considers Microsoft's response to have fallen short, it could hit the firm with daily fines of $5m.

A spokesman said it could take 'a few weeks' to come to a decision."

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft adopts web file styles: "Attendees at the Tech-Ed 2005 conference will be the first to get more information... Some of Microsoft's competitors, such as Sun's StarOffice and the open source project OpenOffice, already support XML... when people use the 'Save As' option files in the XML format will have an 'x' added to the usual suffix. For instance Word documents saved in XML format will be labelled 'docx'."

Tempo fa scrissi un articolo sul PC più vecchio ancora attivo nel Regno Unito, che risultava essere un IBM XT5160 classe 1983, usato dalla Capital Transport Campaign. Pare che il record sia stato battuto: c'è infatti un Amstrad 1649 DD, tuttora usato come database dalla Herne Hill Harriers and Heath Technical Services, che risale al 1980.

Ho un po' di cose da raccontarvi, ma prima di tutto vorrei scusarmi con tutti coloro che da febbraio scorso hanno inviato donazioni a sostegno del mio sito e di questa newsletter: purtroppo sono mesi che vivo letteralmente con la valigia in mano e questo ha avuto un effetto disastroso sulla prontezza con la quale cito i donatori nei ringraziamenti della newsletter. Garantisco che smaltirò la coda e confermerò a tutti la ricezione non appena passa questo periodo impossibile di trasloco-lumaca.

E grazie a tutti anche per le info preziose sui siti per bambini che mi avete mandato.

Detto questo, se avete un sito Internet aziendale e vi capita di ricevere una lettera che vi chiede di correggere i vostri dati nel "Registro italiano in Internet", attenzione: non è affatto obbligatorio, anche se il marchio richiama molto quello di Telecom Italia. E' un giochino inventato da una ditta tedesca per indurvi a credere che si tratti di un modulo di rettifica ufficiale. Se lo firmate e rispedite, vi esponete al rischio di vedervi addebitare ben 858 euro.

Se vi interessano i dettagli su quella che purtroppo non posso chiamare truffa per ragioni legali, li trovate qui:

http://www.zeusnews.it/index.php3?ar=stampa&cod=4165&numero=999


Se invece vi capita di comperare la vostra serie TV preferita in DVD e avete l'impressione che sia diversa da come ve la ricordavate, potreste avere perfettamente ragione: i DVD originali di molte serie sono alterati a causa delle pastoie del diritto d'autore. I dettagli, con nomi e cognomi, sono qui:

http://www.zeusnews.it/index.php3?ar=stampa&cod=4164&numero=999


Guerre Stellari III è nei cinema, ed è anche scaricabile da Internet illegalmente: gli agenti federali USA lanciano un blitz contro chi lo distribuisce proprio mentre Bittorrent inaugura un motore di ricerca che aiuta a reperire i file legali e illegali diffusi con questo efficientissimo sistema:

http://www.zeusnews.it/index.php3?ar=stampa&cod=4163&numero=999


Ricordate il progetto Palladium di Microsoft? Mica morto. Intel annuncia nuovi chip che integrano funzioni di controllo dei diritti digitali (in pratica, permettono a terzi di decidere cosa far girare sul vostro computer): maggiori info in questo articolo di Michele Bottari per Zeus News:

http://www.zeusnews.it/index.php3?ar=stampa&cod=4161&numero=999


Se avete notato degli strani messaggi di spam che parlano latino o contengono citazioni letterarie ma nessun nome di prodotto da reclamizzare e vi state chiedendo che senso hanno e come fanno a eludere i filtri antispam, eccovi le info:

http://www.zeusnews.it/index.php3?ar=stampa&cod=4158&numero=999


Se siete arrivati a leggere fin qui, siete lettori davvero pronti a tutto: in tal caso, magari vi interessa una mia nuova apparizione mistica, che verrà trasmessa oggi (2 giugno) alle ore 12.30 sul canale satellitare in chiaro RaiEdu1, nel programma Explora - La TV delle scienze. Sarò in compagnia di Luciano Onder insieme con Stefano Chiccarelli (Consultant Engineer EMEA Fortinet Inc.), Massimo Melica (presidente Centro Studi Informatica Giuridica), e Gerardo Costabile (Gruppo Repressione frodi della Guardia di Finanza). Buona visione!

LWN: Unexpected features in Acrobat 7: "A company called Remote Approach is promising to alert PDF publishers as to the 'reach and use of their materials.' ... we created a test account and uploaded a PDF to be 'tagged' by Remote Approach, and then downloaded the modified document to see whether Remote Approach could log our use of the document.

Remote Approach's reporting did not work when we viewed the document with Kpdf, Xpdf and Adobe Reader 5.0.10. It also failed using Apple's 'Preview' application on Mac OS X. The document was still viewable with no apparent glitch in other PDF readers, but the reporting function did not work. However, when we opened the file using Adobe Acrobat Reader 7, Remote Approach started logging views from our IP address. After doing a little research, we found that Adobe's Reader was connecting to http://www.remoteapproach.com/remoteapproach/logging.asp each time we opened the document. The information is submitted over port 80 using HTTP, so it is unlikely that a home or office firewall would, in a normal configuration, block the activity, unless the firewall administrator is attempting to block Web browsing.

Apparently, Remote Approach's 'tag' to our document included the addition of JavaScript code causing Acrobat to report back to their server; the information reported includes the fact that the document had been read, our IP address, and which viewer it had been read in. (Interestingly, Remote Approach does not seem to recognize the Linux version of Acrobat Reader, as it left the 'User Agent' field blank in its reports.)

...By default, Adobe Reader 7 turns on JavaScript, so the 'tagged' document is able to 'phone home' without the user's awareness. Turning off JavaScript disables the document's code, and prevents Remote Approach (or any other entity) from tracking views of the document.

...The reader does not inform the user that information is being submitted, so users are likely to be oblivious to the fact that another party is aware of their PDF reading habits."