Category Archives: Technology Review

/. Using the Real ntfs.sys Driver Under Linux

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http://slashdot.org/articles/03/12/02/1536227.shtml?tid=106&tid=185&tid=190&tid=201

Using the Real ntfs.sys Driver Under Linux
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 02, @11:45AM
from the some-serious-duct-tape dept.
caseih writes “A very neat hack uses the real ntfs.sys driver (obtained from your own windows XP partition and used via a wine-like layer (borrowed from ReactOS) to mount an ntfs partion with full read/write access. While not an ideal solution and certainly not free as in speech, this is an ideal stop-gap measure for many people trying out linux. I think that we’ll probably see this in Knoppix pretty soon.”

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

/. FCC Forum Divided on Future VoIP Regulation

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http://slashdot.org/articles/03/12/02/1837223.shtml?tid=103&tid=126&tid=95&tid=99
FCC Forum Divided on Future VoIP Regulation

Posted by michael on Tuesday December 02, @02:45PM
from the not-a-question-of-if dept.
ElCheapo writes “As the great philosopher Eminem once said, ‘The FCC won’t let [VoIP”> be, or let [VoIP”> be free.’ In Washington today, the FCC held a public forum ‘to gather information concerning advancements, innovations, and regulatory issues related to VoIP services.’ Slashdot has seen numerous stories on VoIP regulation recently, but Tom Evslin, CEO of ITXC, brought up another point: If VoIP is over-regulated, it will not go away, it will just move to other countries and reach the point where regulation can no longer be enforced. With or without VoIP regulation, will a global P2P (PSTN-connected) voice network emerge? Will it start out as hobbyists setting up Asterisk Open Source PBX boxes connected to their home POTS line? Will some form of ENUM allow least cost routing to boxes sitting in basements and garages around the world? If an ITSP in Europe can setup an Asterisk box with PSTN access and start offering US phone numbers and vice-versa, will global number plans become obsolete? What effect will the ridiculously low barrier to entry for VoIP have on telecommunications?”
http://connect.voicepulse.com/

Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books

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WE HAVE THREE TYPES OF MEMORY. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However…..

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/665/bo3.htm

php implementation of a image-verification system by Chirag Mehta

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Block Spam Bots With Free CAPTCHA Service

Posted by timothy on Wednesday November 12, @12:55PM
from the screwtape-and-pals-shriek dept.

Chirag Mehta writes “I just released a freeware service called BotBlock (barebones demo) that lets site owners copy/paste a few lines of PHP code and insert a CAPTCHA image-verification system into any web form. The amount of form spamming by bots is on a rise. While remedies exist for MT blogs, a more efficient solution is to use image-verification or text-identification. Used for a while by sites like Yahoo! (scroll to bottom), Hotmail and patented in 2001 by AltaVista, CAPTCHAs are now being used more widely. PARC also came up with two algorithms Baffletext and Pessimal Print. The technology always existed, but until now required the site owners to install image libraries and understand how to generate images that cannot be OCR’ed. With BotBlock it is like inserting a page counter.”

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/12/1715232

NBD – Distributed Data Storage on a LAN?

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Re:NBD Does this (Score:5, Informative)
by dbarclay10 (70443) on Wednesday October 29, @04:37PM (#7341575)
(http://markybobdeb.sourceforge.net/)
Just to clarify what this guy is saying:

1) Make all your machines NBD servers. NBD for Linux [sourceforge.net”>, NBD for Windows [vanheusden.com”>. NBD stands for “network block device” and allows a client to use a server’s block device.
2) Set up a master client/server (using Linux or something else with a decent software RAID stack). This machine will be the only NBD *client*, and it will use all the NBD block devices exported by the rest of your network.
3) On the master set up in 2), create a Linux MD RAID array overtop all the NBD devices that are available.
4) Create a filesystem on the brand-spanking-new multi-machine RAID array.
5) Export it back to the other machines via Samba or NFS or AFS or what have you.

Why does only one machine (the “master server”) access the NBD devices, you ask? Because for a given block device, there can only be one client accessing it safely. Thus, if you want to make the RAID array available to anything other than the machine which is *running* the array off the NBD devices, you need to use something which allows concurrent access; something like NFS, Samba, or AFS.

Original /! thread:
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/03/10/29/205229.shtml?tid=126&tid=137&tid=198&tid=95

dump the name server cache to the file

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The ndc dumpdb command or the SIGINT signal causes named to dump the name
server cache to the file /var/tmp/named_dump.db. The following example
uses the signal:

# kill -INT ‘cat /etc/named.pid’
The process ID of named can be obtained from /etc/named.pid, as in the
example above, because named writes its process ID in that file during
startup.[152″>

[152″>On our Linux system the process ID is written to /var/run/named.pid.

Once named writes its cache to the file, we can examine the file to see if
the names and addresses servers are correct. The named_dump.db file is
composed of three sections: the zone table section, the Cache & Data
section, and the Hints section.

http://kore.hack.se/oreilly-networking/tcp/ch13_06.htm

Freedom of Speech in Software – Patents

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Freedom of Speech in Software
Posted by michael on Saturday August 30, @06:06AM http://www.slashdot.org/
from the if-only dept.

akpoff writes ” I’ve been struggling with the question ‘what’s wrong with software patents’ but haven’t been able to find the right words. I was over at John Gilmore’s website and found a link to John Salin’s ‘Freedom of Speech in Software’ letter to the USPTO back in 1991! This is one of the best explanations I’ve seen. He reminds us that computer programs are essentially like literature or music — they are expressions of ideas. Just because they run on a computer doesn’t make them uniquely different from other creative mediums. We should think player piano (patentable) vs the music (copyrightable but not patentable) it plays.

Europeans — put this letter into the hands of your MEPs!”

http://philsalin.com/patents.html

Akamai.com

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July 2, 2003 Dow Jones WebReprint Service®

Dot-Com Hope: Akamai, Others Discover New Life
By William M. Bulkeley

Cambridge, Mass. — IT IS THE BUSINESS equivalent of a medical miracle.

Less than a year ago, Akamai Technologies Inc. looked destined to become another bit of dot-com road kill. The provider of Internet speedup services was burning through cash, revenue was dropping and its stock was delisted by the Nasdaq Stock Market after it fell below $1.

But now, Akamai seems to be in the midst of a surprising comeback. Big customers such as the Sony Ericsson cellphone venture, the U.S. Army and BMW are buying more of its services, its executives are blithely predicting positive cash flow by year’s end, and its stock is above $4.

http://www.akamai.com/

Muscat

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http://www.aprsmartlogik.com/
http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/S2000/MUSCAT_note.pdf

http://xapian.org/

[snip start”>
Nearly related to probabilistic stuff is Xapian, a.k.a. Omseek, a.k.a.
Omsee, a.k.a. Open Muscat, an open-source project intended as a
probabilistic search-engine framework. Initially financed by Brightstation,
was some time ago left to its own. Now lives in Sourceforge.

More in the research field, there’s libbow/rainbow by Andrew McCallum et al.
from CMU, including bayesian classifiers, vector-space algorithms, and other
nice artifacts.

Here at gtd, we’re experimenting internally with some new vector-space based
search and classification algorithms. What we have does look quite
promising, but AFAIK it’s not to be open-sourced — by now.

—
Quim
_____________________________________________
htdig-dev mailing list
[snip end”>

http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/8825/2001/10/0/6847424/

Security Risks: A Look into the Future

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By xL
Fri Aug 8th, 2003 at 11:10:28 PM EST

Last month, a crazed call from a customer I was about to reel in with a hosting deal gave me another glance into the woeful state of internet security. A debian machine, acting as a proxy for some of his most important customer websites, had gone haywire. It refused to deliver mail and there was trouble getting in through ftp. A quick look over SSH confirmed a nasty suspicion: The machine had been compromised and run over by a rootkit. Although the break-in and installation of the rootkit had been done clumsily, the potential of deception that the software had, were it installed by an able person instead of a script kiddy, was chilling.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/8/8/83254/78171

Power from blood could lead to ‘human batteries’

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SMH August 04, 2003 A device that produces electricity from blood could be used to turn people into “human batteries”. Researchers in Japan are developing a method of drawing power from blood glucose, mimicking the way the body generates energy from food. The team at electronics giant Panasonic’s Nanotechnology Research Laboratory near Kyoto has so far only managed to produce very low power levels.

http://nanotech-now.com/current-months-news.htm