Anonymous Coward writes "There's open skepticism from researchers about the ability of DRM to solve Hollywood's copy protection problems. Read Edward Felten's review here... Papers from the workshop are available online as well."

jki writes "A historical moment for Openchallenge as a challenge has now went through the full circle. 18th August Mace Moneta submitted a challenge to develop open source Linux drivers for the Synaptics cPad (cPad is an LCD-equipped touchpad that provides notebook users with a secondary display as well as touch interface and navigation) integrated to Toshiba Satellite 5100-501 for example. Now, today Rob Miller submitted the solution implementing GPL'd Linux drivers. I am so thrilled to see Openchallenge really working -- I hope this opens the flood gates!"

sniesen writes "ISE finally released EiffelStudio 5.2 for Linux (and other UNIXes) today. There's free non-commercial editions available for both Windows and Linux. It's good to see that the best O-O language available still strives quite a bit."

nwetters writes "It seems to have slipped under everyone's radar, but today LACNIC, the fourth regional internet registry, will assume control of all IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean (mostly in the 200/8 network). I doubt whether many people will even realize it's haappened, and it's unlikely that arin will effectively lose control until they republish their database on 1 December."

cshoes writes "As of November 12th, the W3C has approved xforms. Xforms are a major step up from standard html forms, as they can be created in the developers medium of choice (xhtml, xml, svg...). This flexibility allows the forms not only to be displayed on web sites, but also handhelds, phones, and screenreaders. The W3C's page on xforms is here. Overall, very good news for developers everywhere."

Seems like something has horribly gone wrong at ASPFriends.com. The site is being closed as a result of a break down in negotiations with Microsoft over support for funding this developer community forum which has over 73000 members who post over 12 million messages a month regarding MS development. The primary reason for this break down seems to be do with the contract that had to be signed to receive funding. I'm no lawyer and I've not seen the entire contract but it seems like it contains clauses which basically state "at our discretion, with 30 days notice we can terminate this contract and take ownership of your site".

fieldmethods asks: "One area where Open Source and Free Software doesn't seem to have really taken off is Natural Language Processing (using computers to deal with human languages). There are a few projects that are open source, such as Festival (a speech synth system, now ported to Java), NLTK, a general-purpose NLP system in Python, and the Linguana project, a Perl implementation of a semantic network not unlike Wordnet (but better). Generally, though, there doesn't seem to be a lot of Open Source momentum behind the field as a whole. It's a challenging, difficult field that would benefit from collaboration, especially given the potential of replacing static corpora with on-the-fly corpora developed by search engines. Is anybody else interested in this?"

Eugenia writes "Mesa 5.0 has been released. It implements the OpenGL 1.4 specification." There's more information as to what's been fixed/added/changed on their SF.net project page.

taviso writes "Ever wondered what would happen if you could compile and run cygwin under wine ? What about compiling wine under cygwin ? well these guys have, and are planning to nest the two environments as many times as possible to see if wine can take the strain, and not without good reason: 'Having such virtualization environments run within each other is an important milestone in the lives of these projects, it is a remarkable technical feat that requires a great deal of maturity'. "

slackrootcyc writes "A post (and previous article) give a detailed examination of the reversing process, using a trojan found in the wild. Later on in the story it discusses some techniques for reversing Windows-native code entirely under Linux."

An anonymous reader asks: "I have some free time, and I've recently started looking into some open-source projects that I'd like to start working on. (I'm a great fan of open-source. A package that I wrote four years ago, and which shall remain un-named, is probably running on you Linux system). But I have a problem: I strongly suspect that my after-hours work might be 'frowned upon' by my employer, and although I have no contractual commitment to abstain from such work, and I will not use office-computers or anything, I realize that in these times it might get me into trouble. So I figured I'll use an assumed identity. However, in order to release copyleft software, you have to first claim copyright to it, and this is not likely to legaly hold for an assumed identity. I don't want to release to the public-domain either. So what can I do?"

openbear writes "From the w3c web site... W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 and Mobile SVG to Proposed Recommendations. Comments are welcome through 20 December. SVG delivers vector graphics, text, and images to the Web in XML. SVG 1.1 separates the SVG language into reusable building blocks. Mobile SVG re-combines them into two profiles optimized for cellphones and pocket computers."

ekr writes "The OpenSSL remote buffer overflows discovered at the end of July got a lot of press here on /. But how many people actually fixed their machines? I decided to study this question, and the results are kind of depressing. Two weeks after the release of the bug, over two thirds of the servers I sampled were still vulnerable. Even two weeks after the Slapper worm was announced, a third of the total servers were vulnerable. The paper can be found here in PDF or Postscript."

libertynews writes "Michael Bacarella has written an article on coding and security. He starts out by saying 'Increasingly incompetent developers are creeping their way into important projects. Considering that most good programmers are pretty bad at security, bad programmers with roles in important projects are guaranteed to doom the world to oblivion.' It is well worth the time to read it."

maiden_taiwan asks: "We're constructing a free groupware application by integrating well-known open source components: apache webserver, inn news server, ircd chat, scp for file transfer, etc. Unfortunately, each app has its own incompatible concept of a 'user identity.' Apache has the htpasswd module, IRC has nicknames, scp has public keys, NetNews has the poster's email address, and so forth. Has anyone managed to integrate a similar suite of apps using a single sign-on model, where a user has a single identity that is understood and carried through all these apps?"

Gregory Perry writes "A South Florida company just released GENRIP, an open source (as in GPL) project for Linux that turns low cost serial line devices (such as 900 Mhz radios) into IP addressable nodes; right now the technology is being used by various robotics groups to replace existing wired tethers on robots with wireless radio links, but the important thing to mention is the ability to use cheap radios to create wireless lan segments without the power and cost requirements associated with 802.11 WLANS."

An anonymous reader writes: "On December 4, John DeTreville from Microsoft Research will give a technical presentation about Palladium, Microsoft's Digital Rights Management effort. The talk is open to the public and is a good chance to ask questions."

smarks writes "Java Development with Ant effectively shows the reader how Ant can be used as the foundation for the most complex Java software configuration solutions. The book is divided into beginner, intermediate and advanced sections, which makes it appropriate for a variety of audiences. The book has a comprehensive survey of tools that can be used with Ant such as JUnit, CheckStyle, Middlegen and XDoclet Even the experienced Ant user will find these sections helpful. Overall, Java Development with Ant is an excellent resource." Read on for the rest of Spencer's review.

Joel Spolsky has a nice essay on the leaky abstractions which underlie all high-level programming. Good reading, even for non-programmers.

mattjarvis asks: "Does anyone out there know of a software solution for batch manipulating MPEG file headers, ie. stripping the header and replacing it with another header, or editing the existing header. I've searched the usual places, and have come up with a few libraries that look like they are capable of doing this but I don't seem to be able to find anything already written to do this. Basically I have a client using a hardware MPEG audio recorder, who wishes to change one of the bits in the header ( the original/home bit ) which is causing some problems with other software they are using. Surely this should be relatively simple to achieve and it's possible that I am missing the obvious but there doesn't seem to be anything available open source or not to easily edit the header without reconverting the actual audio stream."