Last Day in Ukraine

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 19 Jul 2001 12:00:00 GMT
From Scripting News:
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. -- Benjamin Franklin

Today is my last day in Ukraine. It always goes faster than I can believe. My wife woke me up with a telephone call shortly after midnight. It was nice to talk with her, but a bit late. Tomorrow morning we fly Lviv-Frankfurt-Boston-Albany, arriving in the afternoon EDT, in sha' allah.

I got an interesting email:

From: "Karl Rodman" <karl_2773@hotmail.com>
To: <bill@billstclair.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 9:01 AM
Subject: www.trafficethemovie.com

Hi this is GhostWerm, aka Plazma - the individual who hacked www.trafficthemovie.com.
i was searching for my name with copernic and came accross your site. I had a good laugh when i saw your post: http://www.billstclair.com/blog/010628.html it's good to see that someone actually noticed that defacement...hehe...anyway, i defaced that website in order to show people how vulnerable iis servers are that havn't been properly patched. after my defacement was up for a few days, another hacker came along behind me and fully patched the server from this particular exploit, and restored the site to its original condition. You can read more about the actual hack here: http://elitehackers.com/uub/Forum2/HTML/003993.html

anyway...take it easy, and have a good one.

Robert Lemos - Russian crypto expert arrested at Def Con - Crack an e-book, go to jail. The DMCA bears its teeth. Good commentary here from Damaged Justice, including the following: [cafe]

One of the worst parts of unjust laws is their tendency to encourage the very behavior they attempt to stamp out, and the childish mindset of "rebellion without thought" it seems to engender, especially in people who aren't used to thinking under normal circumstances. They may not care about not doing something until they're told that they can't do it, at which point they'll move heaven and earth to do it, just because someone told them not to. Statists (and a lot of psychologists call this behavior "obstinate", "defiant" or "oppositional". To which I say: If you treat adults like children, and children like adults, are you really surprised when they live up to your expectations?

Dave Winer's DaveNet - Microsoft blinks in antitrust case - According to this New York Times article BugMeNot, Microsoft is asking the court of appeals to reconsider the ruling that they illegally bundled IE with Windows. Dave still thinks that Microsoft should be split up and the browser put in a separate company. Get a clue, Dave. No company, Microsoft included, can maintain a monopoly on anything without assistance from government (or their own) guns. Bundling a browser with the OS is in no way illegal. The only reason the feds went after Microsoft is because they weren't greasing enough palms. Microsoft's new subscription software model is suicide for them. Linux will fill the void.

Nicholas Petreley at InfoWorld - Windows on the Qt - with KDE 2.2 for Linux, and a free Qt library for windows, Microsoft is doomed.

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