Tuesday Tech News

Quote

Incompatible licenses among different products prevent people from sharing code from different open-source projects. Having too many licenses complicates potential sales to corporate customers, which may have to do extensive legal reviews and manage multiple kinds of open-source contracts. "It's confusing as hell to explain to customers," said Michael Olson, CEO of open-source database company Sleepycat Software. "It's confusing…because we are just wrapping our heads around what (different licenses) mean to us as businesspeople."

Quote

Company CEO John Thompson, speaking at a keynote speech and roundtable at RSA Conference 2005 here, said that Symantec would rely on the capabilities of its products to fend off the challenge. He said he would not rely on antitrust regulators, who keep an eye on Microsoft and the products it bundles in with its operating system.

Quote

The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in American history.

Quote

A beta, or test, version of Internet Explorer 7 will debut this summer, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect said in a keynote address at the RSA Conference 2005 here. The company had said that it would not ship a new IE version before the next major update to Windows, code-named Longhorn, arrives next year. In announcing the plan, Gates acknowledged something that many outside the company had been arguing for some time--that the browser itself has become a security risk.

Quote

The initiative is part of Microsoft's efforts to strengthen security for home and business users of its Windows desktop software. Consumers are not always aware of the dangers of such threats as spyware, viruses and "phishing." A study published last October found that more than 80 percent of consumers had been infected by spyware.

Quote

Some 141 countries, accounting for 55% of greenhouse gas emissions, have ratified the treaty, which pledges to cut these emissions by 5.2% by 2012.

Quote

This attack builds on previous attacks on SHA-0 and SHA-1, and is a major, major cryptanalytic result. It pretty much puts a bullet into SHA-1 as a hash function for digital signatures (although it doesn't affect applications such as HMAC where collisions aren't important). The paper isn't generally available yet. At this point I can't tell if the attack is real, but the paper looks good and this is a reputable research team.

Quote

Observations by Spirit show the rock contains significant amounts of the minerals olivine, pyroxene and magnetite, all of which are common in some types of volcanic rock. The rock's texture appears to be sand-size grains coated with a material loosely binding the rock together.

Quote

While one in five people under the age of 30 have an iPod or other MP3 player, the number dropped to one in seven in the 30-to-39 and 40-to-48 age groups.