Official News - page 11

WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

Sadly, it was put forcefully put to me that some of my, how shall I put it, less enlightened readers 'don't do hex' and so wouldn't be able to read it.

There have been further happenings on my cheese on toast patent this week. Protesters have flown in from all over the world and camped on the grass verge outside my apartment. Apparently they are protesting about the 'carbon footprint' of the patent. I did try to explain to them that you only get a cheese on toast carbon footprint if you leave it in the toaster too long, but they didn't seem to want to know.

In the meantime, they have cut down all telephone poles in the area to keep a roaring fire going so people can dry their clothes (it's summer here, and thus continuous rain). I don't know what preservatives the telephone poles were treated with, but it creates a great deal of thick black smoke and the neighbourhood is starting to look a bit like the sort of burning fuel tanks you get in war movies.

Oh! I nearly forgot - here's this weeks news....

Story: SCO - this is not the end of the beginning, nor even the beginning of the end. It is the end of the end. (With apologies to Winston Churchill)

Since it's the first issue after the summer hols, where better to start than at the end of a story! The story in question is that of the Santa Cruz Organisation (SCO) taking IBM to court for allegedly breaching SCO's UNIX copyright by incorporating chunks of UNIX code into Linux.

I first covered this story in the 9 March 2003 edition and subsequently added new material as it came to light in over 50 editions of Winding Down, and now finally the story is at an end - it turns out that SCO don't own the copyright to UNIX!

The story is long and convoluted, and I'm not going to repeat a blow by blow account, but some of the highlights include: SCO's stock price rising to US$19.41 when it announced that it was suing IBM. Novell pointing out that it, Novell, owns the copyright to UNIX. Microsoft and Sun paying large sums of money to SCO for a UNIX license, money which helped fund SCO's case. (Speculation over whether Microsoft really needed a UNIX license, or whether the money was just to provide additional funds to keep the case going is left as an exercise to the reader.)

Other highlights included the failure of SCO to actually produce any information about what parts of the UNIX code had been added to Linux:

SCO: You have incorporated our UNIX code into your version of Linux
IBM: Which bits?
SCO: That's for you find out!
SCO: Your honour, IBM have failed to find any bits of infringing code. We demand you punish them for this failure.
Judge: Really?

While this was going on Novell, who it turns out own the code, pointed out that while they licensed the code to SCO to license onward to users, they (Novell) didn't sell or license the intellectual property involved.

Novell: Actually, the copyright belongs to us!
SCO: We bought it off you. It's ours.
Novell: Read the agreement - it doesn't include the intellectual property :)
SCO: Don't be ridiculous. No one in their right mind would pay for the code unless they also got the rights as well!
Novell: We rest our case...
Judge: Novell win, oh and by the way, SCO, did you pay Novell their cut of the money you got from Microsoft and Sun?

The judgement ran to 100 pages, but the crux of it was that Novell own the rights, Novell are entitled to tell SCO to drop their case against IBM, and Novell are entitled to part of the Microsoft/Sun money under the original agreement SCO signed with Novell.

SCO announced that 'The company is obviously disappointed'. They weren't the only ones. By Friday close of business SCO's shares had dropped from their all time high when the suit was filed - $19.41 - to a cringingly low 38 cents. That's a drop of just a smidgen over 98 per cent.

So is this the end of the line for SCO? I suspect that might be the case. Obviously the loonies on the SCO board will try to keep going, but I'm pretty sure the shareholders have had enough - you can't give away SCO shares at the moment. Expect an announcement of changes at the top (a strictly relative term given how far down SCO are) any day now.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/11/novell_gets_unix_from_sco/
http://ct.enews.deviceforge.com/rd/cts?d=207-245-2-28-255-21445-0-0-0-1
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/13/sco_responds_novell/

Shorts:

I see my old friends the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) are not quite so fast at paying out as they are at collecting money from alleged copyright violators. A month ago they lost a case against one Deborah Foster, who they unsuccessfully sued over copyright infringement. The RIAA was ordered to pay Ms Foster US$68,585.23 in attorney fees and costs. No money has yet been forthcoming, not even the 23 cents, and Ms Foster has now filed a motion of judgement against the RIAA in order to force them to pay up. I wonder what their excuse for not paying up yet will be? Answers on a postcard....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/15/riaa_doesnt_pay_legal_fees/

I don't know what it's like in the US, but over here in the UK our ISPs haven't yet figured out that their domestic customers take out subscriptions because they want bandwidth to download stuff. Currently the ISPs are up in arms because the BBC is in the process of launching its iPlayer, which will give users access to vast swathes of the BBC's archive material.

The deal the BBC is offering its customers is very attractive, and will undoubtedly add a massive amount of new traffic to the Internet. ISPs, having indulged in a semi-suicidal price cutting war for the past year or so, and failed to invest in upgrading their facilities, are panicking at the thought of all the customers out there with 'unlimited' bandwidth subscriptions who are paying peanuts. The ISPs even went so far as to suggest that the BBC should pay for the bandwidth the ISPs customers are using to download BBC material. The BBC just smiled politely.

This wasn't the only whingeing from the ISPs this week. Microsoft issued a bunch of heavy duty security patches for its major applications and Vista this week. (Vista is Microsoft's most secure operating system produced yet - but that doesn't say a lot.) All those machines out there with auto-updating enabled proceeded to download patches as fast as possible, overloading the inadequate infrastructure of a number of unprepared ISPs.

Fortunately, I wasn't affected, because I use Demon Internet, which for historical reasons has a very high percentage of techies amongst its customers. Techies always turn auto-updating off!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/13/bt_denies_iplayer_worries/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/14/bbc_iplayer_isp_analysis/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/13/isp_bbc_iplayer_neutrality/
http://www.physorg.com/news106324437.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/14/bbc_iplayer_isp_analysis/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/16/186k_microsoft_security_bandwidth/

Just when you thought it was safe to use your mobile phone again... (cue Jaws music) Nokia announce that it had reports of over 100 incidents in which its cell-phone batteries had 'overheated'. As a result it is issuing a recall of 46 million batteries for replacement. Frankly, getting a badly burned ear as a result of a defective battery sounds a much more likely scenario than going mad as a result of some sort of unspecified 'cell-phone radiation'. Fortunately, I don't have a Nokia cell-phone any more, having upgraded to the sexy Motorola Razr.

http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBBun0FypUC0FrK0FRsv0En
http://www.physorg.com/news106296423.html

Followers of the TJ Maxx security fiasco - 45 million credit and debit cards compromised - will be interested to know that the cost of the gaff is still rising. The company's accounts for the second quarter indicate that the cost of the breach is now running at US$135million. That's ten times as much as earlier estimates, and there will undoubtedly be further costs to add. Maybe the final scale of the legal liability will force companies to take looking after customer information seriously. One can but hope.

http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBBwz0HiOOq0G4W0FR3C0EC

I though it was a while since I'd heard anything about Diebold, purveyors of buggy voting machines for the enfranchised masses. The abysmal publicity surrounding Diebold's voting machines seems to have persuaded them to get out of the business, and they've been trying to sell their voting machine business unit. Only one problem - no one wants to buy it! The unit has been on the market since last January, but there are no takers. Diebold are therefore trying to distance themselves by spinning off the much maligned unit as a separate business.

Announcing this the President and CEO said, 'While we plan to fully support this business for the foreseeable future, we feel a more independent structure should allow it to operate more effectively.' The press release doesn't say whether he was holding a barge pole at the time...

http://www.physorg.com/news106489114.html

Skype users have had a bad week, with a major outage for the Voice over IP (VoIP) phone provider. The last report I saw on Friday said that some users - a minority - were able to reconnect. This is a particularly bad blow for those who bet their business's communications on the cheap to free service and have been left out of touch with their customers for several days.

The bigs boy in the major telephone companies are smirking, of course, and who can blame them. All along they've been saying that Skype didn't have the experience or infrastructure to be a reliable provider.

I think they should be careful though. VoIP technology is maturing and the time isn't that far distant when it will be able to provide the sort of service required. Whether Skype will be the beneficiary of that maturing is another matter. It really depends whether they can overcome the drop in trust this debacle has cost them.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/16/skype_down/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/17/skype_up_a_bit/

I see from news reports that Microsoft is starting work on a new version of Windows, known internally as Windows 7, due to be launched in 2010.

Perhaps they should start by stripping out all the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) crud that they added to Windows for Vista. Not only does the DRM slow copying files to a crawl, it also systematically degrades the quality of high definition video. Small wonder, then, that a lucrative niche business is growing up stripping Vista off new machines and replacing it with Windows XP.

Microsoft has already tried to force manufacturers not to make XP available on new machines, but the demand for XP rather than Vista is sufficiently great that companies like Dell are refusing to cooperate. And as for upgrades, forget it. Virtually no older machines are ever going to be able to run Vista. Suddenly, the Mac and Linux are starting to look really, really, attractive!

http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBBDV0HiOOq0G4S0FOwc0EI

And finally, some of you may have been among the 17,000 international passengers left stranded on their planes at Los Angeles last weekend. No doubt you will be please to know that the cause has been found - a defective network card in a single personal computer. The defective card overloaded the system and brought down the network. It took nine hours to restore the system on Saturday, only for there to be another outage, for a different reason (two power supply failures), late on Sunday.

For want of a card the network went down.
For want of a network the airport went down.
For want of an airport...

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2007/08/lax-outage-is-b.html

Scanner: Other stories

Microsoft sent FCC defective wireless prototype
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/13/microsoft_says_white_space_prototype_was_broken/

Germany enacts 'anti-hacker' law
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/13/german_anti-hacker_law/
http://www.beskerming.com/commentary/2007/08/12/249/German_Security_Professionals_in_the_Mist

US wiretap plan will leave door open for spooks and hackers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/14/landau_schneier_wiretap_vuln_condemnation/

Siemens bribery scandal: More than 1 billion euros embezzled
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBBsJ0FypUC0FrK0FRiw0E1

YouTube-Viacom trial turns comic
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/15/youtube_to_depose_stewart_and_colbert/

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, DJ andFi for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
19 August 2007

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html

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