Just give a look at how software patents make their way in.
Passing the software patents during a fisheries meeting
Maneuver fails thanks to Poland
Fisheries, take 2
European Parliament requests a restart of the procedure
European Commission rejects this request
Looks like the European Commission is working with Microsoft on this?
Is that democracy?
I read an interesting article about how phishers (that is, people trying to get personal informations about you, generally in order to empty your bank account) try more advanced techniques now. According to the articles, they feed various websites’ login forms and password remainder pages with various email addresses, hoping to get results that’ll tell them whether said email address is registered.
“This login does not exist”. “You can’t register as foo@bar.com, this login is already existing”. “Wrong password”. Such error messages disclose the fact that said login exists, reducing greatly an attacker’s field of investigation. Most security oriented people now since long that when the authentication fails, one should send back a non-indicative error. This way, it’s not possible to guess anything about the existence of an account. ssh, for example, does that:
$ ssh john@my.server.com
john@my.server.com's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
Now, how to know whether John has an account on my.server.com? No way. Some time ago, ssh’s response varied based on the existence of the account: if it existed, but the password was wrong, it returned ‘Permission denied’ after a timeout, whether if the account didn’t exist, it answered immediately. This has been fixed since long.
Paul released a new version again! This one fixes most of the problems that people were experiencing with aspell’s support. It should work reasonably correctly, although I’m sure someone could find glitches.
Too bad, a gcc 2.9x user tried to compile this version but not the previous 1.9.9, because I’ve put a declaration in the middle of a block a few weeks ago… Which breaks gcc-2.9x! Hence, people wanting to compile Claws with these compilers will need this patch to fix the compilation error.
Hope you’ll like it!
We released Sylpheed-Claws 1.9.9 last week. Looks like a good release, as it’s been quite silent on the mailing-list on the subject. Silence means good release, while endless threads means bugs (reality is sometimes harsh)…
One thing that kept coming again and again, however, is the status of the spelchekcer, which was badly broken on gtk2. I finally tried to fix these problems, which looked like trivial, but ended up with a long hacking session yesterday night, finishing at 2:52 AM. With some breaks and sleep in between, in the end I’ve spent about 2 hours on this.
In the end 1.9.9cvs10 seems stable wrt spell checking, so maybe we’ll get a new release soon: this bugs really annoys some users, especially users of some packaging system that doesn’t allow the maintainer to re-upload the gtk1 version after it’s been superceded by the gtk2 one. Version numbering problem, i guess!
Spam
Some asshole sent out a batch of spam using my address as From: address. It’s the second time already… I came back at the computer today and found 58 bounces in my mailbox. ISPs, maybe it’s time you start using SPF?
Copy-Control
Last time I bought an Asian Dub Foundation album, I found it to be copy-protected and had a hard time ripping it to mp3s, in order to listen to it on my mp3 player. I wrote about it there, explaining how it only annoys “honest comsumers” and not “pirates”. I also emailed Asian Dub to tell them about it. Yesterday I bought their last album, Tank, and noticed it’s not copy-protected. I don’t know if my email helped that, but it’s a smart move. I spoke about it with the Fnac vendor, who told me majors had a lots of returns due to these protection schemes. Nice to see things can move !
Ils font chier, tous, à rentrer du travail en bagnole
a) en même temps que moi
b) par le même chemin que moi
Bande d’emmerdeurs.
Colin,
soulagé