alien writes, “Looks like Steve Gibson is concerned enough about raw sockets in WinXP to go to the trouble to prove his point. In Security geek developing WinXP raw socket exploit, The Register takes a critical look at Gibson’s panic at the motivatios behind his development of ‘Spoofarino,’ an application designed to exploit the vulnerability and test ‘irresponsibility’ of ISPs. It may also be the start of a war tool for the script kiddies.”

From Wired.com: “The world’s leading mobile phone makers and operators introduced an industry-wide initiative Wednesday
that they hope will bring true Internet functionality to next-generation cell phones and lay the ghost of past failures.

The Mobile Services Initiative, or M-Services, is designed to establish an open software and hardware standard that will
erase the bad memories caused by the first attempt at mobile Internet, wireless application protocol.”

From InternetWire: EMBLAZE Systems (LSE:
BLZ) today introduced the Emblaze[tm] I
next-generation carrier grade back-end
system for delivery of 3GPP
standards-based MPEG4 video over
wireless networks. In addition, the company announced that five leading European cellular operators
have signed paid trial agreements to test the new systems over GPRS networks over the next year.

“It is our firm belief that open-source and open-architectures are the key strategy for real growth
and bringing added value to our clients,” said Dror Ginsberg, EMBLAZE Systems CTO. “We will
make our APIs available to thousands of application developers that will create a world of experience
for users – all based on Emblaze technology.”

– By Joab Jackson –

Cyberpunk –

So, constant negation doesn’t make for a good long-term business model.
Tell me something I don’t know.

Suck, that once-legendary
online lode of cynical commentary, has gone on hiatus, and so has Feed, another e-zine under
the umbrella of the Automatic Media group, which has run out of money and ceased
operations. For the past six years, Suck had been serving up fresh
blasts of opinion five days a week while its staff looked for a way to
make a profit. The search was unsuccessful, and last week Automatic pulled
the plug. According to the site itself, the hiatus is temporary one, but don’t
hold your breath waiting for Suck’s return.

When I first wrote about Suck way back in the spring of 1996, the
site’s founders, Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman, had just sold it to Wired
Ventures, which provided sufficient scratch for a seven-member staff. I was
amazed at how quickly Anuff and Steadman had sold off their good thing. I mean,
geez, at least rock stars, cartoonists, filmmakers, and the like usually do a
little hand-wringing over “selling out” before rushing off to the limo
dealership to inquire about the hot tub package. It took less than a
year for these two Web wiseacres to start feeding from the hands they bit.

This eagerness to cash out seemed at odds with Suck’s core commodity:
genuine, almost nihilistic loathing, as served up via the then-menacing
medium of a freewheeling Web zine. Suck’s sharp daily jabs punctured
the overinflated Internet ballyhoo. What concerned me was that the trouble
with such raw vitriol is that they just don’t make for a sustainable revenue
stream. Artists who milk their outrage for the retirement benefits
either end up becoming toothless parodies of themselves (Alice Cooper, Hunter
S. Thompson, and Marilyn Manson spring to mind) or collapsing under the
weight of all the bad will they bring down on themselves (Creem
magazine, the Sex Pistols, Abbie Hoffman, Bill Hicks).

Certainly, Suck wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did without the kind
of financial backing Wired provided. But the question is, what did it gain
by sticking around? Anuff and Steadman might have been better remembered
if they had packed it in five years ago and left Suck’s mystique to do the
heavy lifting. Its reputation might have swelled to mythic proportions,
like that of Might, the small, mid-’90s San Francisco magazine
co-founded by future literary star Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of
Staggering Genius) that died after a handful of supposedly brilliant issues.
Arguably, the existence of Eggers’ book, if not its popularity, owes a
good bit to Might‘s glowing cultural reputation, a reputation fanned
by its very scarcity. Also arguably, McSweeney’s,
Eggers’ current periodical endeavor, does not glimmer with anything approaching
the angelic aura that surrounds the memory of Might. After all, it’s still
being published.

To be fair, in its last few months Suck was as good as it ever was.
Along with the justifiably talked-about musings on the pathetically lovelorn by
Polly Esther (aka Heather Havrilesky), a Suck writer would occasionally
cough up the most brilliant essay you’d read that week. Cartoonist
Peter Bagge’s illustrated story on the gentrification of Seattle’s waterside
watering holes (“Tavern
Turnover” was one of the funniest, most insightful things I’ve read
anywhere this year.

But as far as cultural legacy goes, Suck’s drawn-out existence left it
neither here nor there. It got too tamed to be considered a genuine
underground phenomenon on the order of, say, Seanbaby.com, MetaFilter, or Robot Frank. But I doubt
it will be given much more than bottom-rung status in the rundown of the
great failures of the Net’s first literary age, well below the nearly deadSalon, the
starting-to-wane Onion, and maybe even the read-it-while-you-still-can Ironminds.

The worst insult of all was how Suck died — or, more precisely, was put
to death. Suck always claimed to be above the industry hubbub it so
mocked, but to have its demise coolly executed as a business necessity
exposed that pretense for what it was. Whatever Suck set out to be, it ended up
as just another unprofitable venture.

One of the most heartless if amusing commentaries on Suck’s demise came
from the indie zine I contribute to: Pigdog
Journal. In “Don’t
Let the Cyberdoor Hit You in the Cyberass on the Way Out”, Pigdog
editor “Mr. Bad” asserts that Suck was never an honest-to-god free-for-all Web
zine at all, but a “little corporate loss-leader lapdog that continually bit
its owners and shat on the Chippendales. . . .

“It doesn’t matter how much you call yourself a ‘Web zine’ …
because when the market is down, Master is gonna put you in a Hefty bag and
throw you out by the side of some country road,” Mr. Bad continues,
stretching out the lapdog metaphor. “At night, when the feral curs come to chew
through the plastic, think they’re freeing you so you can be their little buddy and
join the gang? Think again, Alpo. I mean, FIFI.”

How’s that for rampant negativity?

An anonymous reader tells us about a story/press release at LinuxDevices.com. “Driven by the growth
of the Internet and the increasing ubiquity of embedded
computing systems, the embedded market is exploding in terms
of a proliferation of products requiring embedded technology
with new, increasingly complex applications for embedded
devices. A new market study by Venture Development
Corporation (VDC) forecasts a significant increase in
shipments for embedded GNU/Linux operating systems, software
development tools, and related services.”

DebianPlanet readers discuss the differences. Here’s part of the original post: “Is the difference really that big, or is it mostly a religious preference? I know that on
the backend they both work off a different database system, and the formats are
different, but how hard would it be to make a redhat system work via dpkg/apt? Could
it be done? On the flipside, could a debian system be made to work with rpms (I’m
talking natively, not via alien).”

From The Register: “The UK government e-Envoy, he of the Microsoft-only Government portal, seems
to have got religion after all. In what unkind individuals might term one of the great
u-turns of our time, an open source approach to PKI currently looks very close to
being adopted for the second round of PKI interoperability trials, to be conducted
by the UK Communications-Electronics Security Group [CESG] later this year.”

AboutLinux.com responds point by point to a recent column on ZDNet about why Linux is supposedly dead on the desktop. The writer says he was amused by the ZD article because “I can’t help but be amused by predictions of the demise of Linux on the
desktop when it is clearly in a ‘growth mode’. “

It’s posted at LWN.net. Linus Torvalds notes, “User-noticeable things: if you are tired of not being able to NFS-export
your reiserfs tree, this should make you happy.”

– By Dan Berkes–
Add another convert to the enterprise tote board; this time it’s White Cross Systems Ltd. The Web site data analysis and reporting provider is moving its massively parallel processing platform away from LynxOS and over to Linux.UK-based WhiteCross provides hosted site traffic and analysis reporting for corporations through a service it markets under the name WebAnalytics. Essentially, the service siphons raw Web log data from its clients, and combines it with that company’s customer data, which might include demographics, registration information, or purchasing history. The numbers are crunched according to the client’s need, and an easily-understandable report is then produced to make sense of it all.

Since introducing the service several years ago, WX/DES has chugged along satisfactorily on LynxOS. All that is about to change, however, as the company moves its services over to its very own custom Linux distribution.

While WhiteCross will likely save a few dollars with its new Linux systems, the move wasn’t prompted by any executive suite navel gazing.

“Our technical staff proposed the change for the sake of easier administration and customization,” says John Thompson, v.p. of global marketing for WhiteCross. “But we do expect to see some bit of performance improvement as a result.”

The brains behind WebAnalytics are the Data Exploration Server (WX/DES), described as a massively parallel processing platform. Through this system, WhiteCross can process — at minimum speed — more than 60 million page views per day. That means the company can churn out a report for one of its large clients like Sprint or British Airways in less than an hour.

Thompson describes the hardware end of the systems as traditional rack-mounted servers, powered by one or more AMD K6 processors — the exact configuration is left up to the needs and desires of client companies. Those dedicated servers are maintained at one of two data centers owned and operated by WhiteCross — one in San Francisco, the other in Bracknell, in the United Kingdom.

Because all the gory technical stuff is handled by the WhiteCross staff within its own data centers, most customers didn’t need to take notice of the change. Thompson said that the feedback he has received from customers regarding the Linux switchover has been positive.

If anything, WhiteCross’ new Open Source direction meshes well with the systems their customers already use: When asked if there was any one Web server in particular his clients preferred, Thompson replied: “Apache, definitely Apache.”