Wired: “The instant messaging wars are heating up, with AOL claiming this and MSN claiming that. And the open source people want everything to be free. It’s all about interoperability.”

“Web users want assurances that their communications or e-commerce will
remain private without having to worry that their ideas, or even their
identities, are stolen and every detail of their lives will be laid bare
while others profit from personal data collection.”

Tuesday 24 April 2001: Marconi Forum on Internet Privacy
From: secretary@lxny.org
To: editors@newsforge.com
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 04:09:57 -0400


This meeting starts at 4:00 pm on the Columbia campus.

This meeting is free and open to the public.

This meeting is important.

Official notice below.

Jay Sulzberger 
Corresponding Secretary LXNY
LXNY is New York's Free Computing Organization.
http://www.lxny.org




> Date: 4 Apr 2001 13:33:27 -0400
> Organization: Columbia University Department of Computer Science
> Message-ID: 
> Reply-To: theory-group-request@cs.columbia.edu


2001 Marconi Forum on Internet Privacy
Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science

Privacy Under Assault: Can Encryption Safeguard the Internet?

Tuesday, April 24, 2001
International Marconi Day
4-6 p.m.
Reception to follow
Davis Auditorium of the Schapiro Center
for Engineering and Physcical Science Research
Columbia University
New York, N.Y.

Web users want assurances that their communications or e-commerce will
remain private without having to worry that their ideas, or even their
identities, are stolen and every detail of their lives will be laid bare
while others profit from personal data collection.

Digital threats arise from all quarters, including corporations and
marketing firms, potential employers and credit agencies, health and
government establishments, as well as outright snoopers and
opportunists. Can improved technologies protect privacy on the Internet or
is privacy a casualty of the digital age?

The Marconi Forum brings together leading figures from technology,
government, journalism, business and law to examine how-- or whether-- our
right to privacy can be secured from digital incursions.

Participants are :

Zvi Galil, Moderator
Dean, Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science
expert on encryption

Whitfield Diffie
Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems
co-inventor, public key cryptography
2000 Marconi Fellow

Michael Rabin
Professor of Computer Science
Harvard University
developed code based on "vanishing" key

John Podesta
White House Chief of Staff
Clinton Administration
Visiting Professor of Law, Georgetown University
Law Center

Steven Levy
Author, Crypto, Spring 2001
Senior Editor, Technology, Newsweek

Shari Steele
Excutive Director
Electronic Privacy Association
advocate for civil liberties in online world

Eli Noam
Professor, Columbia Business School
Director, Columbia Institute for
for Tele-information
authority on telecommunications strategy
and policy

Sponsored by the Marconi Foundation, The Fu Foundation
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Columbia University

in collaboration with
The Center for New Media, Columbia Graduate School
of Journalism

Columbia Institute for Tele-Information,
Columbia Business School

LinuxSecurity: “This week, our newsletter is composed of many interesting articles. It is good to see that better quality papers are now being
published. Although some of the topics are trivial to seasoned security experts, the topics are still important and should be
addressed. Some of the best articles included, “Securing Your Apache Server,” “Iptables Basics NHF,” and “Firewall Design
White Paper.” Also this week, if you are an EnGarde user, you will probably want to take a look at our Tripwire and vsFTP
HOWTOs.”

LinuxSecurity: “In the last few articles, we’ve spent a fair bit of time examining IP packets and
TCP/IP connections. In the next few articles, I’d like to demonstrate putting some
of this knowledge together in order to increase the security of your FreeBSD
system.”

Infoworld: “Bill Gates is no longer the
world’s richest man, according to a survey released over the weekend by The
Sunday Times newspaper in London.

Amid the high-tech retreat of the past year, Gates’ fortune has slumped, shrinking
from 53.1 billion pounds to just 37.5 billion pounds ($76.6 billion to $54.1 billion).
American retail magnate Sam Walton, who runs the Wal-Mart Stores international
retail chain, jumped into the top spot in the 2001 survey with 45.3 billion pounds.”

MSNBC: “The market for new PCs may have slowed down a
bit, but the race to build faster processors keeps zooming along.
With the announcement today of the 1.7GHz Pentium 4
processors, Intel has extended its lead – at least in terms of raw
clock speed – over rival AMD (the Athlon chip currently tops
out at 1.33GHz).”

CNET: “IBM always has been
aggressive in its attempt to
wrestle back some of Sun’s
market share, but dwindling
spending on servers has
spurred even more
discounting off list prices,
Sun executives said
Thursday to explain
shrinking profit margins.”

KDE 2.2alpha1 (initial CVS work mentioned before on Newsforge) has been released to testers. Complete changes from the stable branch are listed on the posting at KDE.news.

The NetBSD project’s Alpha is now functioning in multiuser mode (as reported by Slashdot). This is the first open BSD, outside of FreeBSD, to have SMP support — and is the first non-x86 BSD to have SMP support. Similar efforts on the part of OpenBSD may also benefit from the code involved, since it’s architecturally close to NetBSD.

– By Grant Gross
–

It was a week of new beginnings in the Open Source community. Red Hat and Mandrake, two of the top Linux distributions, released new versions, both with the 2.4 Linux kernel.

Red Hat’s announcement of its 7.1 version came Monday and included promises of “improved SMP support for superior performance” on Intel multi-processor platforms, and new configuration tools that “enable users to effortlessly set up and administer DNS, Web and print servers.”

MozillaQuest.com also noted that the new Red Hat comes with KDE 2.1, but shipped with Netscape 4.76, not the 6.0 version of the browser. Red Hat spokespeople responded by saying that Netscape 6.0 was too cumbersome, and that they’d stick to 4.7X for now, thank you. Elsewhere, a ZDNet UK headline writer was apparently a bit confused when penning a headline saying “Red Hat to ship Linux 7.1.” There are some in the Open Source community who believe Red Hat wants people to think the company is Linux, but that’s not the situation just yet.

Mandrake, for one, might raise an objection. Copies of the French Linux distro began hitting the download sites mid-week. ZDNet UK recovered from its Red Hat headline enough to say that the new Mandrake was packed with goodies. PCTalk.org said Mandrake has outdone itself with an easy-to-use and -install distribution.

The Phoenix metaphor, recurring

Two NewsForge stories this week made reference to the old Phoenix legend, perhaps appropriately. After the Indrema gaming console project folded up shop last week, a group of developers vowed to continue the work. The TuxBox project founders are confident a community model of development can succeed where Indrema failed, though some doubters surfaced when the story was posted at other sites.

Also, the founder of the Independence Linux distribution has recently resurrected the project. Independence Linux vows to make Linux easier to use than the “out of touch” developers from other distros.

No need for the Phoenix metaphor

Loki Entertainment Software went on the offensive this week after recent rumors that it is headed toward demise. Company President Scott Draeker gave interviews to LWN.net and ITWorld, essentially saying the same thing both times: We’re not making money yet, but we’re not going away. In fact, Loki just began a marketing campaign that offers volume discounts to Linux user groups.

Linuxgruven update: Founder arrested

Y’all remember the , the St. Louis training company that laid off a bunch of staff and left students wondering if they would be refunded? Well, founder James Hibbits was arrested on a two-year-old fraud charge this week.

New in NewsForge

Stories you could find only in NewsForge this week:

An IBM official is telling readers of a linux-thinkpad mailing list that it will offer DVD playback on a new laptop, news editor Dan Berkes reported.

Freelance writer Eric Ries offered a legal way to beat AOL’s third-party instant message blocking. Ries says it’s important to protest against companies fighting open standards.

News editor Tina Gasperson reviewed the StarOffice portal and found it a bit clunky, just like the product it’s promoting.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted
on our discussion
page.