Met ingang van vandaag moeten in de US een aantal wetten in werking treden die de exportrestricties op sterke encryptie verminderen. Helaas alleen voor produkten op medisch gebied, maar misschien dat we ook hier binnen afzienbare tijd gebruik kunnen maken van browsers met 128-bit sleutels.

"The new rules virtually eliminate restrictions on selling powerful computer data scrambling products to subsidiaries of U.S. corporations. The rules relax controls for encryption products to health and medical organizations in 46 countries by almost all foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies and non-U.S. companies. "

Lees het volledige bericht hier

Op Slashdot op het eerste gezicht een sterk verhaal over gratis domeinnamen die zouden worden uitgegeven. Helaas is de genoemde URL niet bereikbaar.

"Christmas Island (..cx) is offering free (for now) domains for the taking. Get the good ones while they're around, all the naughty ones are going fast... " I

[toevoeging]
Maar in een reaktie op het originele bericht komt een addertje onder het gras tevoorschijn.

In de voorwaarden op de (onbereikbare) site staat:

"You may currently register any domain for no charge as long as it is not taken or barred. However, at some stage in the near future a charge will be made for all domains which have been registered. "

Toch een goede reclametruuk.

We hadden al Freshmeat, maar binnenkort komt Tucows ook met een Linux versie . Kijk hier voor een preview van wat je te wachten staat.

BeCQ, de ICQ client voor is nu ook geport naar Rel.4, het is dezelfde versie als voor Rel.3, dus beta 3...
Je kunt het verhaal lezen op BeNews & BeOSCentral

WebTools heeft een verhaaltje over Gecko
lees het verhaalhier

After years of tweaking the code that rendered Web pages in its browser, after getting "more useful miles out of those vehicles than anyone rightly expected," according to a key Netscape developer, Netscape has decided to scrap the code in its browser engine and start from scratch. The result: a browser that promises to be 100 percent compliant with Web standards, and is smaller and much less painful to download. Netscape's decision to start from scratch stemmed from the increasingly painful dance Web-page designers must do to make their sites look good on all browsers and all platforms. The transition from the 3.0 browsers to 4.0 browsers has been a "nightmare," said one Web developer, and no one could fault users for being unmotivated to download 12-megabyte and larger files that only seem to increase the number of times a day the browser crashes. Until this fall, it seemed the open source Mozilla browser would deliver more of the same. Netscape was planning on releasing that browser as Communicator 5.0, but with its acquisition by America Online, who knows? While Netscape was winning points for converting to an open source model (in which the source code is published freely and worked on by groups of internal and external developers), the likelihood that the new browser would ship with the same old, standards-flouting layout engine caused developers to cry into their mouse pads. Now everything has changed.

De kerstman heeft ook zo z'n zegje over afstappen van de oude standaarden, en radicaal overstappen.

Toss Out Legacy Code Am I crazy, or is backwards compatibility leaving Microsoft in a morass of legacy code? Wouldn't it be wiser for Microsoft to say that come the end of x86 architecture chips, the ISA bus, serial ports, etc., Windows will no longer be backwards compatible with prior Windows software. This would cut out untold of lines of code, get rid of bugs that its programmers are afraid to touch, and free up an immense amount of resources and performance. "But what about all the apps that our IT has invested in already?" some might say. Well as far as I can remember, most transitions from 3.11 to 95/NT were accompanied by transitions to new apps that would only work on that OS (Office 95/97). And of course the new OS and its apps could easily be fitted with filters to import files from those previous apps. What would be lost? A few apps that people cling on to maybe. In this case, they could probably get by with an old machine that is dedicated to that task similar to the way many offices set aside a machine solely for DOS apps. Or perhaps with the speed of today's computers, a virtual machine for running older apps might be feasible. Brian Wilcox -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 12.23.98 17:21 The Saint Responds: Microsoft doesn't want to free up resources, or performance, or dramatically reduce the complexity of programming to its OS. That would be equivalent to hitting the reset button on its market share, developer community, application base, and years of field tested code. If you think Windows is buggy now, imagine what it would be like if Microsoft tried to reconstruct it again from scratch. Imagine further what all the drivers and applications would look like if all the developers out there had to redevelop them under a new paradigm and re-test everything. The closest Microsoft can come to doing that is Windows CE, which it couldn't sell to anybody for the 100 dollars a pop it gets for a giant, bloated OS. A virtual machine can't solve a large body of problems associated with timing and hardware synchronization. Basically starting fresh isn't in Microsoft's best interests as the people there see it, and it's a very difficult transition to pull off.