– by Tina Gasperson –
I found a UK site with some original tech reporting and a flair reminiscent of The Register. One of the current stories at The Inquirer, “Arrested Russian ‘Worked’ for FBI” reveals that imprisoned programmer Dmitry Sklyarov’s Russian employer has ties with the American law enforcement agency that snagged Sklyarov during DefCon.Prominently displayed on the front page is a “Capellas Countdown” ticker, a graphical representation of the time left before Compaq CEO Mike Capellas must fulfill a promise to “radically restructure” his company, according to a memo obtained by The Inquirer.

Other recent headlines include “Intel Blue Men to Die?”, “Users Outraged at Dell Memory Cost”, and “WinXP Has Fatal Design Flaw.” All of these were penned by one Mike Magee, who claims to be the editor. Looks like he’s chief cook and bottle washer as well, unless the rest of the staff is locked in the closet.

Magee has included a section on the site entitled “Gutter Watch,” which is a fun little collection of rumors and gossip about the tech industry. Some of these are gems worthy of much more recognition. Up until now they’ve passed by largely unnoticed (at least by me), but chatty little stories like “Intel CEO Pours Scorn on Press” are fun to read as well as informative.

Another story in the Gutter Watch hints at Magee’s background: “The big firms have realised that while the average person may still buy her or his PC from a
big shop or store, there is a huge bunch of people who aren’t afraid to build their own
systems and there’s now a vast audience of hardware sites to cater for them — many more
than there were when I first started my hardware roundup at The Register over three years
back.”

Some stories are just plain silly, such as the one entitled, “Magee Caught With Fan, Woman” which features a photo of Magee beside an unidentified woman with a black bar covering her face in order to hide her identify, and an electric fan.

Magee’s sardonic side is exposed with articles like “How Journalists Write IT News,” a mostly true look at the ways most tech sites gather their daily headlines:

"You put together a list of bookmarks of the main news
sites, look at them every morning, and copy them during the course of the day. To avoid treading on
the very sensitive corns of news editors, avoid using this "copy" word. Instead, apply the unguent
made up of the soothing phrases "follow a story up", or "add value to a story" or "spin a story". This
lazy way of writing what you choose to describe as news means, these days, an endless series of
different wires all seemingly copying, sorry following up, each others' stories. The lazy bones. It's
shameless, it's cheap, it's nasty. But it's modern IT journalism and not good for the reader."

Obviously, Magee hasn’t read NewsForge yet — but we can’t fault him for that, because up until now we hadn’t read The Inquirer either. We’re hooked now.

LogError writes: “Since there are too many reports out there we decided to make a special report dedicated to the worm. The report consists of alerts, news items, solutions and anti-virus vendors comments on the issue. It is updated as we get new information.”

“A fledgling effort to replicate Microsoft’s .Net architecture on Linux, called Mono, could quickly
become mired in intellectual property difficulties. Tony Goodhew, a program manager in Microsoft’s
developer products group, has warned that licensing problems might result if open source code is
mixed with Microsoft’s .Net software.” More at ZDNET.co.uk.

BBC: “The Chinese authorities have shut down almost 2,000
internet cafes and ordered another 6,000 to suspend
their operations because of concerns over the influence
of the internet on teenagers.”

Wired: “A large percentage of technologically adept humans are opting to have their bodies frozen after they die, according to research in a new book.”

BBC: “The original meaning of the word “hack” was born at
MIT, and originally meant an elegant, witty or inspired
way of doing almost anything.

Many early hacks took the form of elaborate practical
jokes. In 1994, MIT students put a convincing replica of
a campus police car on top of the Institute’s Great
Dome.

Now the meaning has changed to become something of
a portmanteau term associated with the breaking into or
harming of any kind of computer or telecommunications
system.

Purists claim that those who break into computer
systems should be properly called “crackers” and those
targeting phones should be known as “phreaks”.

“I hereby tender my resignation to the Usenix ALS committee. With the arrest of Dimitry Sklyarov it has become apparent that it is not
safe for non US software engineers to visit the United States. While he was
undoubtedly chosen for political reasons as a Russian is a good example for
the US public the risk extends arbitarily further.”

Resignation from ALS, Skylarov affair...
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 12:31:02 +0100 (BST)
From: Alan Cox 
To: alschair@usenix.org
Cc: editor@lwn.net,  editors@newsforge.com,  gnu@eff.org


I hereby tender my resignation to the Usenix ALS committee.

With the arrest of Dimitry Sklyarov it has become apparent that it is not
safe for non US software engineers to visit the United States. While he was
undoubtedly chosen for political reasons as a Russian is a good example for
the US public the risk extends arbitarily further.

Usenix by its choice of a US location is encouraging other programmers, many
from eastern european states hated by the US government to take the same
risks. That is something I cannot morally be part of. Who will be the next
conference speaker slammed into a US jail for years for committing no crime?
Are usenix prepared to take the chance it will be their speakers ?

Until the DMCA mess is resolved I would urge all non US citizens to boycott
conferences in the USA and all US conference bodies to hold their
conferences elsehere.

I appreciate that this problem is not of Usenix making, but it must be addressed

Alan Cox

Advogato: “A loose coalition of cypherpunks, cyberrights groups, Free Software activists, hacker organizations, and civil rights advocates have united under the umbrella of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) to protest the arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov on July 16th by the FBI in Las Vegas.”

2600: “Following a presentation at Defcon, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested by the FBI for violating the DMCA. He is currently being held incommunicado awaiting transfer from Las Vegas, Nevada to San Jose, California where he will stand trial and faces up to 5 years in prison. All for writing software that enables people to exercise fair use.”

LinuxSecurity: “This week, advisories were released for xinetd, xloadimage, util-linux, elm, tcpdump, docview, imp, openssl,
tripwire, squid, and tcltk. The vendors include Conectiva, Immunix, FreeBSD, Mandrake, Red Hat, and Trustix.”