PGP creator: Net is like 'downtown Bagdad'
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The internet depends on strong crypto, Zimmerman says Interview PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), the encryption software package created by privacy advocate Phil Zimmermann, celebrated its fifteenth birthday last week.â¦
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Israeli researchers have created a topographical map of the Internet by enlisting more than 5,600 volunteers across 97 countries who agreed to download a program that tracks how Internet nodes interact with each other.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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It's all about the Booleans for these hacker MCs: Sample some of the sickest flows to ever come out of the BBS ghetto. By Roger Thomasson from Wired magazine.
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A temporary Wi-Fi mesh netowrk is enabling pilgrims to Mecca to stay in touch.
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A new high-speed, IP-based network will connect more than 1,000 domestic locations and tens of thousand of users in the US and overseas.
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Matthew O'Phinney has a reminder for anyone in the Burlington, VT area tonight - there's a meeting of the Burlington PHP user group tonight at 5:30pm.   Bradley Holt will be giving a presentation on developing a web application using Zend Framework. Bradley Holt is founder and web developer for Found Line, a local design and development studio which has used Zend Framework in several recent projects.    You can get more information about the meetup from this event page on their Google Groups site (happening at the Brown & Jenkins Coffee Roasters).
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How a simple online game can balloon from being on a computer server of a local high school into one of the top 50 gaming sites online is proof, pure and clear, of a highly democratic Internet. -The Washington Post
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Yet another communications-infrastructure player reports promising results.
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OK, we had an extended breather from our last look at BIND's zone file pri.example.org. It's time to finish up and get a sense of what these records mean. To go off-topic a little, recently, I had the task of setting up two OpenLDAP servers and putting together a test environment for a project with several developers and several applications including some LAMP applications. Without a working knowledge of DNS, the project would have gone amuck.
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Interesting tidbit that was Slashdotted earlier - Netcraft has released an anti-phishing toolbar that leverages the enormous database of web sites the organization manages.
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City will build the world's largest mesh Wi-Fi network to spread Internet access.
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Alan Meckler is one of the pioneers of the Net. And he hasn't lost his uncanny sense of timing.
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A new version of the infamous Bagle worm series is spreading widely across the net.
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It seems  PubSub.com is offering a bounty  on an HTTP Delta implementation of RFC 3229.  This seems in response to the current meme  of RSS and Atom syndication bloat.   First off this is certainly *very* generous of them.  I'd like to see this happen more.  Good for you guys!  I myself  have thought that HTTP Deltas were a viable solution but I was wrong.  Of course most people aren't familiar with HTTP deltas.  Eseentially what an HTTP delta enables is a client/server differential protocol that can exchange a patch from the server to the client.  The client is then patched and it will then have the updated version without having to transfer the *entire* document again.  For example say you ...
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The millions of pilgrims in Mecca this week for the Hajj, an annual gathering of Muslims, can stay connected thanks to a temporary Wi-Fi mesh network covering a large part of the city.Hajjis, as the pilgrims are called, come to the city in Saudi Arabia from around the world for several days of religious rituals. More than 2 million gather each year. A network of about 70 meshed routers from Tropos Networks has been set up to provide free Internet connectivity, according to Denise Barton, director of marketing at Tropos. Users only have to register before using it. Barton believes it is the first public Wi-Fi network set up for the Hajj.Mesh networks are well-suited to temporary deployments because they need fewer fixed-line connections than do traditional Wi-Fi systems. Packets can hop from one router to another until they reach one that&#39;s connected to a landline. The technology has also been used for permanent municipal Wi-Fi networks, including the one Google had built with Tropos equipment in its hometown of Mountain View, California.Saudi Arabia&#39;s Communications and Information Technology Commission appointed an Internet service provider, Bayanat Al-Oula, to provide the temporary network. It was rolled out in less than 60 days with no help from Tropos personnel, Barton said. Aptilo Networks, a wireless-management software and services company based in Stockholm, is running the network as a managed service from its offices in Malaysia. This also helped Bayanat get the infrastructure up and running quickly, said Per Knutsson, Aptilo&#39;s co-founder and director of product development. Aptilo is handling user authentication, security, customer-support calls and other features, as well as setting up the portal visitors use to register for the network.Aptilo and Tropos are no strangers to temporary Wi-Fi networks. Aptilo has managed systems for large sporting events, and in 2004 Tropos built a network in downtown Redwood City, California, for a high-profile murder case. The trial of Scott Peterson, who was convicted of killing his wife and their unborn child, drew massive public and media attention. The county court where the trial took place set up a temporary network with five surveillance cameras and five meshed routers for its own security needs and for reporters who descended on the area for several months.The Mecca network is made up of Tropos 5210 mesh routers, which use IEEE 802.11a for mesh connections and can support users with 802.11a, b and g devices, Barton said. Such networks typically require between 20 and 40 routers per square mile, she said.
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A recently released tool that allegedly was designed to help al-Qaeda supporters encrypt their Internet-based communications is a well-written and easily portable piece of code.