If your service provider hasn’t yet upgraded its modem pool to the official ITU v.92 standard, don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen. So says Network World Fusion, reporting that the largest ISPs in the U.S., including C&W, Earthlink, and UUNet, have no plans to enhance their dial-up networks with v.92, mostly because of the financial situation at those companies. Users of Sprint, AT&T, and Genuity will eventually enjoy v.92, and NaviPath has the distinction of being the only large-scale provider in the U.S. that has upgraded its entire network to support the new standard.

Help Net Security: “Trend Micro Applet Trap is a product for blocking malicious Java applets, malicious
JavaScript and unsecured ActiveX controls at the gateway. The product includes an
option for URL filtering. AppletTrap includes some design and implementation flaws, which allow an attacker to
bypass restrictions set by the product administrator and introduce malicious code into
an organization.”

This morning in San Francisco, Intel will launch its new Pentium III-M (a.k.a. Tualatin) processor. Running at speeds of 866MHz, 933MHz, 1GHz, and 1.13GHz, the new chips are designed for notebook computers with smaller circuits made possible with a 0.13 micron manufacturing process. Current PIII chips are built on a 0.18-micron process. Full story at ZDNet News.

– by Robin “Roblimo” Miller –

I’ve tried all the commercial GNU/Linux distributions, and so far I rate Mandrake as the best one for non-technical users, with SuSE close behind. But what I’d really like is for the two companies to merge and combine their best features. What would we call their product? Susie Mandrake? It could have a hellaciously cute icon, that’s for sure. But more important, SuSE-Mandrake could give Windows XP serious competition on the user desktop.Mandrake has the easiest install routine of any Linux distribution, bar none, marred only by slightly obscure networking and printer setups. SuSE’s install routine is not quite as polished as Mandrake’s, but SuSE has the best collection of printer drivers I have ever seen in Linux, and has the only truly usable GUI “abort print” function I have ever used in any operating system.

SuSE’s software update system, tied to SuSE’s own servers, works flawlessly for me; it is at least as easy to use as Debian’s apt-get, and easier than Red Hat Network, which is apparently designed for large corporations rather than home or small office use anyway.

Mandrake’s software update system, which is dependent on random mirrors not owned or controlled by Mandrake, is a hit-or-miss thing — with a poor user interface, too.

(Back around version 7.1, Mandrake promised to make their update utility better, but they’ve been through 7.2 and 8.0 and it’s still lousy.)

Mandrake’s default menus for KDE are organized in a reasonably logical manner, while I find SuSE’s screwy. I also like Mandrake’s default hard drive partitioning scheme much better than I like SuSE’s. Both distributions are KDE-centric (with Gnome/ and other window managers as options). That’s fine; I like KDE. But Mandrake has a cute little “X-Kill” button that instantly whacks Netscape when it behaves badly, while SuSE doesn’t have it — not that it’s hard to grab that feature off a Mandrake CD and add it to a SuSE installation.

Mandrake automatically installs RealPlayer and a .pdf reader as Netscape plugins by default. SuSE doesn’t install RealPlayer, and neither distribution automatically installs Flash 5, which is sad; there is a lot of original Flash animation work being done these days, and I would like to look at some of it without having to go through an install from source, which is the only way to get Flash 5 from Macromedia.

SuSE has a larger collection of video drivers than Mandrake, but SuSE installs no laptop utilities by default. I am using a WaveLan wireless card right now with the driver Mandrake installed automatically after detecting the card, while SuSE didn’t detect either of the two popular wireless cards I tried. But SuSE’s latest network configuration utility is clear and easy to use, while the one in Mandrake 8.0 is a horror; it doesn’t even load properly for me most of the time.

Mandrake and SuSE have both lost (a nicer word than “fired”) CEOs within the last few months. Both have seriously curtailed U.S. operations and laid off significant numbers of employees. Mandrake is doing an interesting, rather small, IPO to raise operating funds. SuSE? We don’t know, but presumably they’re hunting cash one way or another.

Both companies have great people working for them, and have done excellent Linux development work. It would be a shame to lose either one of them.

Why SuSE-Mandrake would work

The United States has a well-deserved reputation in most of the world for cultural and economic imperialism. One of the most visible symbols of U.S. dominance is that little Windows “start” button in the lower left corner of a computer screen. An emotional appeal by a strong pan-European operating system vendor to anti-U.S. sentiments would be a powerful sales tool almost everywhere — except the United States. Advertise the lack of a U.S. connection, plus the fact that a “SuSE-Mandrake” boxed set priced at 1/2 the cost of Windows XP’s full version contains the equivalent of close to $1,000 (USD) worth of Windows-based commercial productivity software, and you’d have a sales pitch that would sweep the world.

Leave out the anti-U.S. rhetoric, and SuSE-Mandrake could become a bestseller in the United States, too.

Imagine SuSE and Mandrake developers working together to increase Linux usability instead of competing with each other. I suspect that, aided by both distributions’ many loyal users, within a few months a combined SuSE-Mandrake would have a “layered” install and update system that would satisfy everyone from the newest of newbies to the most hardened, console-loving, “I started with kernel 1.1” hacker. Imagine default menus with “new user,” “complete workstation,” and “uber-hacker” options…

Linux desktop nirvana!

This AP report at NJ.com discusses the uncharted legal territory of new high-tech survelliance techniques used by American law-enforcement agencies. An example discussed in this story is that of a Mafia boss awaiting trial in New Jersey. To gather evidence for the arrest, the FBI broke into his business, and installed a keystroke-monitoring program to capture the accused’s passwords and e-mail messages. The defense lawyer maintains that this was an illegal wiretap, and is now asking a federal court to suppress the evidence gathered from this technique, and to force the FBI to disclose how the bug worked.

From a press release at PR Newswire: “Designed to match the evolving platform preferences of workgroups,
FileMaker now adds Red Hat Linux support to FileMaker Server 5.5. Linux is
growing rapidly as a server platform, especially for workgroup deployments.
FileMaker Server 5.5 will also run on Windows 2000 (now logo-certified),
Windows NT, Mac OS X (native, user interface developed based on Cocoa, the
advanced object-oriented technology from Apple Computer) and Mac OS 8.6 and
later.”

“SANavigator Inc., a leader in
powerful, heterogeneous SAN management software, and TrelliSoft Inc., an
innovative provider of multi-platform storage resource management (SRM)
software, today announced that they have signed a strategic partnership,
mutual reseller and integration agreement. The alliance
will deliver storage management software for Windows, Unix and Linux.” Full press release at PR Newswire.

SecurityFocus: “Law enforcement’s response to the 1999 Melissa virus represented the pinnacle of cybercrime fighting: brilliant sleuthing, a quick arrest and a full confession by the culprit. Two years later, David L. Smith’s date with justice is far more elusive.”

BBC: “Governments are moving too slowly to tackle the rising
tide of cyber crime, according to lobby groups and
industry bodies at the G8 conference on computer
criminals.

High-tech companies say governments will need their
help to beat fraudsters, virus writers, malicious hackers
and perpetrators of other cyber crimes. But the firms are
resisting attempts to turn them into surrogate police
forces and say governments need to do more by
themselves.”

Wired: “See job posting, e-mail resume, get job. Sounds simple enough. But lately scores of Silicon Valley-ites are lamenting that online job searches are not generating much of a response.”