Snibor Eoj writes: "In his latest column, Robert Cringely takes a look at Microsoft's motivation for disabling Netscape API plug-ins in IE. As always with Cringely, it's an interesting take on things. We'll see how this one turns out..." Among other things, this will disable Quicktime plugins.

chill writes: "Princeton scientist Dr. Edward Felten and his colleagues presented their paper entitled 'Reading Between the Lines: Lessons From an SDMI Challenge' at the Usenix Security Symposium. CNN has an article. This is the paper that the RIAA threatened legal action (DMCA) over in the past, if he made his findings public. They have since backed off their threats." Newsforge is carrying a piece on the same thing that goes into a bit more depth, and links to coverage of yesterday's press conference, and the Standard has a decent piece on it as well.

I know a bit about geeky 15-year-olds; I've written a book and a number of articles about them. I get a couple of hundred e-mails from them daily. They have time, energy and particular physical and mental skills for gaming, developing software and navigating the Net. They are smart, creative, and know the inner workings of the the Net and the Web better than any other sub-set of the species. They do, in fact, have access to unprecedented amounts of information. Few parents, teachers, pols or reporters have any clear idea what these kids are doing online, or just how significant cultures like gaming and coding have become. Note: second in a series -- you can also read the first .

max2010 writes: "Netscape Browser Version 6.1 is released. Give it a try, grab the 25MByte junk of code for MAC, Unix and Windows at ftp.netscape.com." MSNBC has a brief story about the release.

With Open Source software projects, understanding why certain features are developed while others aren't, or even why entire projects split apart into contending factions, is often as simple as reading mailing list archives and web sites where the involved parties hash out (or at least air) their differences. Within a large corporation, it's a lot harder. Slashdot reader (and "former Microsoftie") Adam Barr contributes this review of Breaking Windows, which he describes as an imperfect but revealing look into the internal politics of Microsoft, and how clashing groups within the company have struggled to get their vision of Windows on the desktop -- sometimes a messy process.

nexex writes: "Shamelessly ripped from Mozilla.org, "Talkback data shows that recent 0.9.2 branch builds are more stable than Netscape 4.78 and we expect even better results for 0.9.3. Now is the time to try Mozilla again if you've been waiting for stability to improve." Translation: Mozilla is better than ever. Get your copy here."

Last week, you asked Shawn Gordon questions about his venture TheKompany, an outfit which has been (fairly) quietly working on a small flotilla of software for GNU/Linux systems, and some cross-platform applications as well. His responses are below; you might be surprised at a few of them. (And some lucky Debian hacker might even pick up a job.)

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The U.S. District Court ruled on Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp., 00 Civ. 4871, saying that a license that users don't even have to see before downloading online free software isn't binding. Calling these "browse-warp" licenses (as opposed to click-wrap), the court found that since usersdidn't have to look at them, users didn't assent to the terms. Netscape's use of SmartDownload, practice of harvesting information through SmartDownload with out an effective license is now suspect as since there is no license, and no assent, there is no agreement. See a report of the case at Law.com Or try to find the rulings at Find Law."

Microsoft's new crusade against licenses that enforce source-code sharing has reached the EULA of their Mobile Internet Toolkit. It even disallows the use of any "Publicly Available Software" tool in the production of software using this SDK. This seems to be a very wide ranging restriction applying to compilers (gcc), editors (vim, staroffice), filesystems (backup on linux server), web-browsers (mozilla logging into some online tool provider), Java (sun's virtual machine). The licenses covered include: the GPL and LGPL, the Artistic License (e.g., PERL), the Mozilla Public License, the Netscape Public License, the Sun Community Source License (SCSL), and the Sun Industry Standards License (SISL). Is this legal? Thanks to Jonathan for the link. Update: 06/26 05:42 PM by S : Here's a legal opinion on the matter.

Andrew writes "An initial news story tweaked me to the fact that, "Thomson Multimedia and the Fraunhofer Institute, the two creators of the MP3 format, released a coder and decoder (codec) for the MP3pro format Thursday on the RCA.com Web site". It apparently achieves parity with the MS version 8 player. Their download on their web site is here (Windows only)." *yawn*

Brian asks: "It appears that Citrix Metaframe 1.8 does not support third party voice accessibility programs, like JAWS. Has anyone successfully implemented federal accessibility guidlines for software that is running through Citrix or other tools like pcAnywhere? I have been on several projects now where Citrix is being used to 'web enable' a client/server application, only now to realize we can't meet federal accessibility requirements this way. Any thoughts?"

tjansen asks: "In 1998 Open Group released X11R6.4, which introduced two nifty features called LBX (Low Bandwidth X) and RX (Remote Execution). LBX reduced the bandwidth needed by the X protocol, and RX made it possible to embed a remote X11 application securely into a Netscape plugin. Since version 4.0 both are also included in XFree86. Together they look like a nice and platform-independent solution for Application Service Providers (there are Windows clients, of course) and I wonder why I have never seen anybody using this."

languageLost asks: "I'm working on developing a multi-lingual web site, and I've come across a major problem. It looks like when web browsers submit a form, they don't include the character encoding they used in the headers anywhere. This means I have no way to distinguish between ISO-Latin-1, Shift-JIS, or GBK, for example. Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer and Mozilla all have this problem. The browsers do send a header called "Accept-charset", but that's not what I'm looking for (and this header typically lies, in any case). I need to know what encoding was used for the text in the form fields. Does anyone know how to do this without using "detection" heuristics? Why don't the browsers just say what encoding they're using?"

An anonymous reader says "The Open Directory Project is owned by AOL/Netscape and the status of the copyright and amount of corporate interest has always been a question. In light of a coming copyright revision, the staff was urged to give something back to assure that the volunteers contributing to the directory would not be taken advantage of, as they were with CDDB/Gracenote. The Debian social contract was brought up and was met with surprising support from Netscape. Here is the ODP's social contract. It's seen as a great triumph for the volunteer community that has worked so hard on the largest human edited directory on the web." I was always skeptical of dmoz, but I'm pleased to see this step taken. Now if only Gracenote would be good enough to do the same. Oh wait, that would imply that they had souls.

gutier writes: "It seems that Netscape has recognized that it has lost the browser battle, and has decided to restructure itself into an "Internet Media Hub". Information here." The article does not say that Netscape will stop making browsers in favor of various media-integration tools and business offerings, but it does hint that strongly. I don't think this is the first time that an analyst has said "It's not going to be Netscape, but rather Netscape.com," either.

rtos asks: "Here is simple question for the Slashdot crew: What is the easiest way to begin encrypting all of my email communications? It's not that I send anything even remotely interesting or secretive... I'm simply tired of government snoops reading my stuff. So it doesn't have to be the worlds best encryption (although ROT-13 might be a little light)... just something to stall prying eyes and foil automatic keyword checking. But for that to work, I would need an system that everyone will use. And even I stopped using PGP because most other people aren't using it. Chicken. Egg. Repeat." If we want encryption to become a part of our everyday lives, encryption systems should be as easy to use as breathing. Once everyone is using it, we can hope to get those silly US encryption restrictions overturned.

Quite a while back we asked Dan Ravicher, a young attorney who is personally interested in Open Source and Free Software licensing issues, a bunch of questions on the subject. We waited and waited for his answers, and the wait turned out to be worthwhile because Dan ended up writing what amounts to a legal FAQ for Open Source and Free Software developers. This is important reading for anyone involved in any way with Open Source or Free Software development.

andres32a writes: "AOL-Time Warner and Microsoft talks over including AOL in the upcoming Windows XP have broke down. Get the scoop here." There's also a similar BBC article - this is a follow-up to this previous slashdot story, which reported that AOL and Microsoft had reached a deal. My guess: they're still going to reach a deal. AOL has too much to lose if their software isn't pre-installed, it was their key to success in the first place. And Microsoft has too much to lose if AOL moves over to a Netscape-based client.

davidebsmith writes: "In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that Linux and the open source movement is "good competition" because it will "force [Microsoft] to be innovative," but calls Linux "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." He also says that the inclusion of IE in Windows has been "great ... for innovation in the software industry" (except for Netscape) and that MS's new copy protections are just "bumps in the road" to "help customers understand when they are crossing the line . . . so they can't do the wrong thing." And he says a few more amusing things, also."

pipeb0mb asks: "The company I work for is looking to update our mail server. Currently, the hardware is a Sun Enterprise 450. It was to be used with iPlanet 5.01 (the bastard child of iPlanet, Sun 'SIMS' and Netscape Messaging Server). Unfortunately, iPlanet just will not run...to be more precise, it won't even INSTALL! iPlanet support is less than stellar. In the wake of this discovery, the mail service being utilized is SIMS 3.5 on a 250. However, it is old, and we are beyond capacity on users (we're up to 8000). To make it even more complicated, we need some additional features for our server?" The additional feature list isn't all that long, and it's fairly reasonble. Hit the link to check it out and feel free to offer suggestions, as always.