WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at the week's net and technology news and 
comment
by Alan Lenton
October 20, 2002

A relatively short Winding Down this week since I only got back from New 
York on Thursday night. My congratulations to the Federal Aviation Authority. 
Since they took over the handling of security at JFK the situation has 
improved massively. Gone were the long queues, and the staff were very 
professional. We got some real security. Of course, if you have meaningful 
security, as opposed to ass-covering tokenism, the cost goes up, and I hear 
on the grapevine that the airlines are dragging their heels over paying their 
share. Pretty cheeky for an industry that already gets enormous tax subsidies 
in the form of duty free aviation fuel.

Microsoft had a not too good week this week, but I've tried to avoid making 
the issue look like a 'slag off Microsoft' issue, and covered only the higher 
profile stories. There are some other stories in the scanner section. 

Next week everything will, I hope, be back to normal :)


Shorts:

Good news for Linux aficionados. The UK's West Yorkshire Police took 
delivery of its first Linux based desktop computers. This is a pilot project 
running prior to all its 3,500 desktop computers being switched to Linux. The 
deal is significant because although Linux has a big presence in the server 
market, so far it has not made much inroad into the desktop market. It will be 
interesting to watch how far this trend continues.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2123999,00.html

More good news from the UK - especially for the survivors from the dot com 
bust. E-commerce in the UK has grown by over 40 per cent in the last year. 
That breaks down as no less than 53 per cent to consumers and 36 per cent 
business to business. Considering the current economic climate this has to be 
a potential life saver for the embattled dot com industry.

(Computing, paper edition)

Bad news for Microsoft, who ran a high profile article on their web site 
featuring a former Mac user who switched to Windows. The story, entitled 
'Confessions of a Mac to PC Convert', purported to be the tale of a 'freelance 
writer' who had used a Mac for eight years, but had now switched to using 
Windows. Net sleuths asked themselves if this was likely and burrowed a little 
deeper... Well for a start it turned out that the picture illustrating the story was 
a stock image from the Getty photo library. Hmmmm. A little deeper digging 
went on and all was revealed - the person concerned was an employee of one 
of Microsoft's marketing companies, Wes Rataushk & Associates. A rather 
shame-faced Microsoft announced it 'regretted' its action and pulled the 
advert.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2329519.stm

The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) patent policy board has recently 
voted to recommend a royalty free patent policy. This is an important decision 
because only a year ago it suggested that W3C standards should be allowed 
to have chargeable patents in them. That suggestion, driven by the big 
companies who hold large numbers of software patents, would have 
effectively frozen out the free and open software movements. Such software 
is freely available (as is its source code) and the developers who wanted to 
implement the standards would have had to pay for the privilege. In addition it 
would have made it impossible for users to modify the software without also 
paying extra royalties. I'm sure that this will not be the end of attempts to 
embed chargeable patents in open standards. Watch this space for more. 

http://lwn.net/Articles/11957

Good news for Microsoft shareholders as the company reported impressive 
earnings for the last quarter - up 26 per cent in fact. The new software 
licensing plan, it seems, accounts for a large chunk of the jump, which leads 
to an interesting question. At the time of its introduction Microsoft denied that 
their plan would substantially increase costs to their customers. If that's the 
case, where did this extra money come from?

http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/biztech/10/18/microsoft.licensing/index.html

The other bit of major Microsoft news this week was not so happy. Microsoft 
warned that its next release of Windows, code named Longhorn, which was 
due to ship in late 2004 will be delayed to add extra functionality. The 
consensus seems to be that this could push the release back by anything up 
to two years! This is going to cause major unhappiness amongst those who 
forked out for the three year software licence, because Longhorn won't be 
released until after the three years. Since the fact that upgrades were free 
during the licence period was a major selling point, I'm sure that this news is 
going to result in a major re-appraisal on the part of those who did buy in, and 
this time they have three years to lay their plans for migrating away from 
Microsoft.

http://www.computing.co.uk/News/1135788

Probably the most bizarre story of the week is that of Russian programmer 
Dmitry Sklyarov. Remember Dmitry? He was arrested on charges of violating 
the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) while working in Russia 
where he lives. After being incarcerated for a month and then allowed out on 
bail for four months, he was allowed to return home his wife and children in 
Russia. Part of the deal in which he was allowed to go back to Russia was 
that he agreed to come back to the US and testify in a trial against the 
company he worked for - ElcomSoft. Guess what? Dmitry has now been 
refused a visa to enter the US to testify! Talk about the left hand not knowing 
what the right hand is up to.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27643.html


Scanner: Other stories

Unexplained Red Hat software patch
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27636.html

Microsoft may charge for security features
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2894735,00.html

New Xbox security broken
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/27671.html

More Americans go online
http://money.cnn.com/2002/10/16/news/internet_barometer/index.htm

Microsoft Beta Software Site Hacked (again)
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/19707.html

Have fun on the web!

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at 
http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


