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By Anton Piatek, on March 30th, 2008% Linux.com :: Software patents underlie a novel open source business model (video)
“Software patents are evil.” Ask almost any free or open source software advocate, and they’ll tell you that software patents kill creativity and keep computer science from advancing as rapidly as it would if everyone shared their basic work with everyone else, unencumbered by patents or other restrictions. But computer science professor Fred Popowich of Simon Fraser University says this is not necessarily true. So does attorney Larry Rosen, who spent many years as legal counsel for the Open Source Initiative starting (literally) before it had a name.
They have basically started a company that produces OpenSource software, and patents parts of it. They say their motto is “Free for Open Source, everyone else pays”. Not a particularly new idea, but I think it is the first time it is actually being attempted commercially
By Anton Piatek, on March 30th, 2008% Google has released a new version of Picasa for linux – It’s been a long time in the making, as the linux version has been behind the Windows one for ages
By Anton Piatek, on March 30th, 2008% Andy Piper write about Remote PC support for family members a while ago, and I remember playing with the single click reverse vnc, based on ultravnc. However I dont run windows often, so the idea died.
Today I played with getting it working under linux. The single click reverse vncserver part is still the same, but for the client I had three choices – Run a native vncviewer, which wouldnt support encryption, run the java ultravnc client which also does not support encryption, or get the ultravnc viewer working under Wine.
The third option was most enticing, as I want encryption working. Wine launches it fine, but getting the encryption to work was harder – fist make sure you have the version 1.16 of the MSR4C plugin, as the single click ultravnc builder uses that version. Then copy your encryption key and the plugin file to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program_Files/ultravnc/ so that when wine runs th program it finds them all in the right places. I then launch the viewer with wine (from within that dir to be sure everything finds the right files) as follows: wine vncviewer.exe -dsmplugin MSRC4Plugin.dsm -listen
Then all you have to do is set up your firewall, and of course customise your single click help executable
By Anton Piatek, on March 29th, 2008% So Adobe has released their web based photoshop. Its not a full photoshop (unsurprisingly) but it is free and available anywhere you have a browser.
I tried it out – First I was annoyed by the “US only” thing at registration, so I said I was in the US. then I was frustrated by how long the flash login box took to load up and then I found that I cannot import a single photo as it thinks they are all corrupted… I suspect it is because I am running Linux.
There is a brief review on Photojojo too, though they seemed to like it.
If you are looking for an online photo editor, its worth trying picnik too
By Anton Piatek, on March 28th, 2008% I noticed that Yahoo recently started offering OpenID authentication as part of a Yahoo account, this means you can now use your Yahoo Id or Flickr account to authenticate for comments on this blog. Of course I had to install the wordpress openid plugin to make that work.
If you don’t know much about OpenId’s, you may want to read more about them on OpenID.net. A quick summary is that an OpenID allows you to log in to sites that support OpenID but having one username and password on a OpenID server. You just put the address of your OpenID (which can be your own website) and the other website asks your OpenID server whether you have logged in.
If you don’t want to use Yahoo’s OpenID, you can use any OpenID provider (which is the point of OpenID) such as Blogger,Wordpress or even build your own OpenID provider just for you.
I decided to build my own, mostly for curiousity. I used phpMyId, which is about the simplest php script to install. Drop the 2 files in the right place, edit the files to create the username/password (you may need access to a command line linux box for this) and then you can log in. If you want to make your website be the address for an OpenID, you need to add some html to the header of the index page (called delegating your OpenID) but this is included in the instructions for phpMyId.
Once you have an OpenId, you will probably want to test it.
By Anton Piatek, on March 27th, 2008% Security Fix has an interesting article on the owner of the domain donotreply.com
When businesses want to communicate with their customers via e-mail, many send messages with a bogus return address, e.g. “somethinghere@donotreply.com.” The practice is meant to communicate to recipients that any replies will go unread.But when those messages are sent to an inactive e-mail address or the recipient ignores the instruction and replies anyway, the missives don’t just disappear into the digital ether.
Instead, they land in Chet Faliszek’s e-mail box.
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