Diebold is a large manufacturer of ATMs and other (supposedly) secure electronic equipment. In 2002, Diebold acquired a smaller company that manufactured computerized voting machines, and created the Diebold Election Systems subsidiary, which has been mired in scandal ever since. Some reasons include:
Bob Urosevich, the president of Diebold Election Systems, as well as Walden […]
It seems that Greg KH had gotten fed up with people (SGI, more SGI, IBM, OSDL Japan) trying to get their patches into the Linux kernel without understanding how the kernel is being developed or maintained. So he has decided to write a HOWTO for beginning kernel developers. He wants to eventually see the document […]
Interesting developments in the Gtk world. First, Federico Mena-Quintero, superhero programmer from Novell (formerly Ximian), had started to profile to profile the performance of common Gtk+ widgets back in July, presumably in response to the collective wailing of thousands of OSNews readers about glacial Gtk+ performance. Eventually, he decided to focus on the filechooser dialog, […]
I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop. I knew that the chipset and the motherboard were capable of supporting PC2 4200 (533 MHz DDR2) memory. Thus, I was quite shocked when I flipped over the stick of RAM that came with the laptop (it is installed sticker-side down) and read Hynix 512MB 2Rx16 PC2-3200S-333-12. Looks […]
For some time, I had noticed that after a few days on my laptop, the Xv extension would break. For those who don’t know: Xv lets Unix programs use hardware acceleration for displaying video. You can go without Xv — for instance, you could use Xshm to set up a shared-memory pixbuf between your X […]
In the past few days, stories about Sony’s unique DRM technology have been circulating on the old Intarweb. Basically, when you insert some Sony or BMG music CD’s into your Windows machine, a window with a EULA pops up. As soon as you click “accept”, you get a rootkit from the good folks at […]
Now that some massive homework sets are over with, can post again.
First, Firefox (at least versions 1.0x) has the unfortunate tendency to take up all the memory on one’s computer. I have seen instances of Firefox taking up more than 512M. Apparently, this is due to a memory leak in the Flash and Java plugins […]
Anandtech benchmarked Apache and MySQL performance on OSX (on a dual G5), Yellowdog (on a dual G5), and SUSE (on dual Opteron and dual Xeon). Results are quite interesting. First, gcc 4 apparently is able to output much better floating point code on the G5 than older versions of gcc; if one uses gcc 4, […]
There is a major vulnerability in the awstats log analyzer, versions 6.4 and lower. Basically, awstats passes a string from the log file straight to Perl’s eval() (which is truly an awful idea, from both security and performance standpoint). Naturally this leads to pwnage if you can get Apache to log a particularly misformed request.
And […]
Exams are over with; now, once again, I have some time to write.
First, A. Lebedev, greatest Russian web designer, author of the famous Ководство (translated into English as Mandership) has designed a keyboard. The ultimate keyboard. Optimus, the Ultimate Keyboard of Doom. I imagine writing a custom driver for the thing to use it with […]
A humorous but accurate (warning: pdf) explanation of why apache’s config files are not everyone’s cup of tea. (Not that I have a problem with them — but that is purely thanks to Gentoo and Debian providing sensible and self-documented default config files for their users to build on.)
One of deviantArt’s founders has been forced […]
It appears that IE7 will fix numerous bugs in CSS support. That did not seem particularly newsworthy — I had seen Zen Garden just like everyone else, but for my purposes IE displayed CSS well enough — until I read about two very interesting uses for CSS that are not supported by IE6. First, using […]
Why PHP sucks (and couple more articles on the same theme). I agree — PHP is the Visual Basic of the open source world. And yet, this blog runs on PHP… (Of course, Wordpress’s constant security issues — Gentoo had it masked as insecure for a few months this year — doesn’t help PHP’s cause […]
The US has decided to keep permanent control of the root DNS servers. Several years ago, it had announced that the root servers would be transferred to ICANN, the internet’s governing body; now, ICANN has been relegated to the role of a “technical manager”.
There are a number of aspects to this story. First, for […]
IBM has ported Linux to the Cell. The interface to the SPUs is implemented as a new filesystem — spufs. Directories in that filesystem correspond to virtual SPU contexts, which are scheduled by the kernel to run on your machine’s physical SPUs. To use an SPU, you create a directory in /spu (say /spu/my-spu-context), copy […]
Interesting, and long, explanation for how to make teenagers love Linux. I mostly agree with Cacophony: the desktop needs to be a bit more useable, and multimedia (including semi- or completely illegal use thereof) really needs to be easier to set up.
Iran is implementing its own version of the Great Firewall of China. The most […]
TipMonkies posted a “beginner’s gude to Linux distros”. Worthwhile reading, although it appears that the writer didn’t have in-depth experience with any of the distros he/she describes. That being said, here are some of my experiences. As a background: I started out using RedHat, first by failing to install version 6.something, and then by successfully […]
Yadistclean is a very useful tool for Gentoo-lovers. It looks through /usr/portage/distfiles, and deletes the sources that you don’t need. Runs pretty fast, and saves lots of disk space.
A good tutorial for cracking wireless networks. I was impressed by the TCP/IP-over-ping method…
Finally, will free online porn disappear, or will it simply move to Europe and […]
In 1998, Russia’s security services introduced SORM-2 (Система оперативно-розыскных мероприятий 2), which forced Russian ISP’s to purchase and install “black boxes” for comprehensive monitoring of internet communications. These regulations were roundly criticized, buth in Russia and by foreign governments and organizations; some went as far as to say that Russia was becoming a police state. […]
One of my housemates has an iBook with OSX 10.4.1; whenever she tries to access a Samba share on by Debian box, her Finder hangs. Turns out that starting with 10.4, Apple requires NTLMv2 encryption. I don’t understand why it would matter in my case (the shares are open to guest access, there are no […]