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Bruno, long time ago

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Sat, 21 Jun 2003 LZW/GIF patent expired today in USA

Unisys's US patent 4,558,302 expired today. This was the LZW compression algorithm, which is used (among others) by the GIF format, created by Compuserve in 1987.

For some others countries, the LZW patent will expire later:

Europe: June 18th, 2004
Canada: June 6th, 2004
Japan: June 20th, 2004

More information about this subject on kuro5hin.

The question is: What will happen to the PNG format now?

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Sun, 18 May 2003 Mozilla Firebird 0.6 released

Mozilla Firebird 0.6 has been released a few days ago. Firebird is the new name for the phoenix project, but, as next versions of Mozilla will be based on this branch, it is likely that Firebird will soon be renamed again (probably -and simply!- Mozilla Browser).

Firebird is certainly the best browser available today!

The standalone equivalent mail application, thunderbird, can also be downloaded, but I will wait a little before using it (I need at least GnuPG support, which is not yet included). Thunderbird will be the official mail application for Mozilla too, and will probably be renamed too (Mozilla Mail?)

[/news/net] | permanent link | Google this

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 Browsers are 10 years old

Ten years ago, in April 1993, the first release of Mosaic was released. It was developed at the NCSA, at the University of Illinois.
All current browsers take their roots in Mosaic. Even IE has licensed code from this university!

If you consider that NCSA also created a web server (curiously called NCSA!), which was used as a starting point to create the Apache server, and that Netscape was created by some developers coming from the NCSA team, we can surely credit this university for the current development of the WWW.

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Fri, 28 Feb 2003 W2K uptime vs SQL slammer

Netcraft announced in January that they found a Windows 2000 server up and running for more than two years on the internet.
First, this information was funny itself: One unique server worldwide with a good uptime seems worth a notice when it is Windows :-)

The hilarous part of this story is that this nice uptime went to a tragic end just a few days after this announce. As a coincidence, this was exactly when the SQL Slammer worm came to life, end of January.

See you again in two years? LOL ;-)

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Sun, 02 Feb 2003 Bellaminettes!!

bellaminette - © Bruno Bellamy For those who don't know yet, have a look on Bellaminettes!!. They are sexy, and I guess you will have the same pleasure as me looking at them.


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Wed, 29 Jan 2003 SQL Slammer... Even M$ got it!!

The IT news information site, News.com, wrote in this article today:
Microsoft's policy of relying on software patches to fix major security flaws was questioned Monday after a series of internal e-mails revealed that the software giant's own network wasn't immune from a worm that struck the Internet last weekend.

Eehh!!! So do you still believe the "users not installing patches are the main problem" statement? Does it look serious to you?

If even M$ does not [install patches], who should? Maybe there could be a deeper problem?

By the way, even if they will never announce it clearly, their internal network got infected.

It appears to me that this news.com article could say the truth:
"Seems like every time I install a system patch, something else goes wrong with my system," said Frank Beier, president of Web design firm Dynamic Webs. The designer said many system administrators won't patch for many months, because they don't trust Microsoft to fix the problem without breaking some other function of the software. "In most cases, I'm better off just playing Russian roulette with the hackers until our servers are broken into."

[/news/net] | permanent link | Google this

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 SQL Slammer

On Jan 23, 2003, Bill Gates promised better security:
"Microsoft has a responsibility to help its customers address these concerns, so they no longer have to choose between security and usability."

On Jan 25, 2003, two days later, a massive DDOS attack was launched on the Internet, using Microsoft SQL Server flaw, by the SQL Slammer worm.

Up to 20% of the internet traffic was lost in transit, South Korea whole internet services were off, Bank of America teller machines stopped working, etc...

My network received 1200 attacks so far.

Whose fault?

Of course, M$ is not responsible for damages coming from a flaw for which a patch exists for 6 months. Not directly at least. The mistake comes from lazy & ignorant people who manage these systems.
As said in another page of this site, putting a Windows CD into a PC does not make anybody an administrator. Nor getting these funny 5 days MSCE certifications ;-)
This is where M$ is wrong and has responsability, as they go on arguing that "Windows administration is easy, anybody could do it!"

Waooo... At least this was a funny week-end ;-)

[/news/net] | permanent link | Google this

Thu, 23 Jan 2003 Netcraft survey

Netcraft Survey gives monthly statistics on web servers in the world.
This January, the number of active sites running apache server has 66.42% market share, with a total of 11,178,715 sites (my server counts for one!!).
The second one, Microsoft IIS, has 4,172,101 sites (24.79%).

[/news/net] | permanent link | Google this

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 Wikipedia reaches 100,000 articles!!

According to slashdot, the english edition of wikipedia, a community-built multilingual encyclopedia, has now more than 100,000 articles online, after just two years of work!

Wikipedia is a website where anyone can edit any article at any time, and where anyone could use the content as they wish, if they follow the GNU Free Documentation License. Generally speaking, to re-use the content, you only need to give the same rights to your own copy, and you must credit wikipedia as the original source. That's it!

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