– by Tina Gasperson –
Brian Croll, the v.p. of marketing for Eazel, is going to be making his own coffee for the time being. He was pretty much the only marketing person standing after Tuesday’s carnage, which left the company “in startup mode.”
“We have a couple of people who can fill in and help out” with marketing and sales duties. Croll said remaining staff members will be performing above and beyond their normal responsibilities while the company puts itself back together and goes forward.

Croll says that, contrary to rumors, the company will continue development of new products. “One of the things we did is that we kept the key development teams,” so that Eazel could continue innovation.

He added that his job will not change much, even without the thirty odd former colleagues. “As we bring out new things we’ll still have to talk to the press, for example.”

Croll comes from a 14-year-long background in marketing at Sun Microsystems, where, he says, he pushed for projects to come out as Open Source — though he adds that his stint with Eazel has constituted his entire involvement with Open Source. Croll says he is a happy Red Hat user — but of course.

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

–
By Tony Smith –
– The Register –
Coder Charles M Hannum has created the smallest program capable of decoding a
Content Scrambling System (CSS) DVD file, beating last week’s seven-line Perl
shell script 442 bytes to 472 (excluding newline bytes). Hannum’s C program, called efdtt, is no slouch, either. The programmer claims it
can “descramble in excess of 21.5MBps” – faster than the DVD spec. allows for.
The speed comes “without even particularly trying to optimise the I/O. This makes it
pretty insignificant compared to the rest of the decoding process” = in other words,
it’s quick enough not to impede the MPEG 2 decode operation which turns the data
into a moving image.

Apparently, the latter may be a problem with qrpff, the Perl CSS descrambler written
by Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz, and posted on Carnegie Mellon University
professor David Touretzky’s DSS Descrambler Gallery Web site. Winstein and
Horowitz’ code was capable of supporting realtime decode and playback, but we’re
told the output was occasionally jerky.

Hannum’s code should allow smooth playback.

Both scripts do what the controversial DVD-on-Linux utility DeCSS does – and
demonstrate how simple CSS, the DVD standard’s copyright protection mechanism,
is to decode. The Motion Picture Association of America has been pretty
successful in repressing the distribution of DeCSS, viewing it as a threat to movie
industry copyright – and movie industry profits.

“So what’s the MPAA gonna do now?” Touretzky asks. “This code is small enough
to put on a cocktail napkin. Commit to memory. Knit into a scarf. Whatever. It cannot
be suppressed.”

All Content copyright 2001 The Register

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

ZDNet has few more details on the story that broke last night. The company’s hoping to secure additional funding.

At LWN.net: “0.7.1 Released: If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you’ll want to … To clarify a few of the goals for this release: we found that
trying to push in all the new features we are working on currently,
as well as some of the major bug fixes, it was more difficult to
backport changes to the stable tree, so we did some more testing on
0.7.1 and are trying to focus on that for the time being. The ‘easy
installer’, which we desperately need, is not slated until a later
0.7 release (late April?).”

Fortune.com looks at the winners and losers in the Nasdaq since it dropped from a high of over 5,000 March 10, 2000. “Meanwhile, let me introduce you to the 90% Club. It’s the list of Nasdaq stocks that have fallen more
than 90% since the March peak. Sadly, it is not an elite fraternity. There are 4,231 companies in the
Nasdaq composite. Exactly 421 (10%) are down 90%. Wow! Names? You know ’em, you love ’em:
eToys (-99%), Teligent (-98%), Scient, DrKoop, Priceline, Webvan, and AskJeeves (all down 97%),
CMGI and Netzero (-96%). Then there’s Theglobe.com and NBCi (-95%), iVillage (-94%), Akamai
and VA Linux (-93%), Inktomi and Chinadotcom (-92%), RealNetworks (-91%), and Red Hat,
BroadVision, and Peapod (-90%). And, yes, hundreds more. Simply amazing. It’s just unbelievable that
so many enterprises were created, hyped up, and then whacked like first-season characters on The
Sopranos.” (VA Linux owns NewsForge.)

InfoWorld reports that the worldwide server market was strong in the fourth quarter of 2000, with revenue around $16.7 billion. Linux-based server revenue grew 79 percent in the fourth quarter, generating $1.7 billion in revenue.

Rauch Medien (www.rauchmedien.com) is proud to announce the release of its RM LB Server product. The RM LB Server is a load-balancing system based on Linux that gives you the ability to make a collection of servers appear as one, and distribute the workload across these systems.

How it works
The RM LB attaches to your network and to a private network where the collection of servers is attached. When incoming requests come in, the RM LB distributes the requests over the private network to the servers. The server than answer the requests and the RM LB hands them back on to your network. If a server where to go down the RM LB would mark it as failed and hand the request to any of the other live servers, keeping your services running smoothly. In addition, large amounts of server requests can be handled at once resulting in higher quality high performance service. The RM LB is based on Linux, but the servers themselves do not require to be running Linux. They can be mixed with various OSs like Unix, Solaris, Windows NT, FreeBSD, and Linux.

Features
The RM LB features easy setup and management. It simply plugs in and features an easy to use web interface to setup it up. In addition, administration can be performed remotely with its built-in web-based control panel. Tasks such as setting up new servers, and services can all be performed via this web-based control.

Availability
The RM LB Server is available now, and can be ordered on our web-site at http://www.rauchmedien.com. It comes in a 1U-rack mount chassis and priced at $1,100 (USD).

About Rauch Medien
Rauch Medien is based out of New York, USA, and produces various business and consumer hardware and software. Rauch Medien also maintains a computer tech site called OSFAQ.com (http://www.osfaq.com).

News Release
For Immediate Release
For More Info Contact
Cory R. Rauch
Sales & Marketing
Rauch Medien
sales@rauchmedien.com
“

A post at LWN.net announces the first alpha release of Jython 2.1.

“Jython is a Java implementation of the Python programming
language. It allows users to compile Python source code to
Java byte codes, and run the resulting bytecodes on any Java
Virtual Machine. It is a very seamless and smooth
integration with Java: from Python you have complete access
to all Java libraries, can build applets, can integrate with
Java beans, and can subclass Java classes in Python and vice
versa. Like Python, and unlike Java, Jython can also be
used interactively: just type some Jython code at the
prompt and see the results immediately.”

We found this quick and dirty survey; take it and get a chance to win a DVD player from Ximian. (Hint: don’t forget you’re a NewsForge reader.)

At Help Net Security: “A buffer overflow exists in the sudo program which could be used by an attacker
to obtain higher privileges. sudo is a program used to delegate superuser
privileges to ordinary users and only for specific commands.”