Microsoft plans to offer hardware vendors significant price cuts on Windows XP licenses for low-cost computing products, but the deal will only be available for computers with low hardware specs. This tactic is part of Microsoft s strategy to stifle adoption of Linux by computer manufacturers that are targeting the budget market, where low cost and high flexibility give the open source operating system an edge.
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The popularity of the game-changing Asus Eee PC, which ships with a heavily-modified version of the Xandros Linux distribution, spawned a whole new class of inexpensive computers. Other vendors have entered the market with their own competing products, many of which also use the open source operating system. Windows is a poor fit for such computers, which are designed and priced like budget appliances. Vista requires too much hardware overhead, while Windows XP licenses add extra expense to the budget hardware that can be avoided by using Linux. So as products like the Eee bring Linux into homes and schools, Microsoft has struggled to squeeze into the growing budget hardware niche.

According to IDG, which obtained details about the price cuts from hardware vendors, Microsoft will offer Windows XP licenses for $26 for developing countries and $32 for the rest of the world. In order to qualify for these deep discounts, products will have to be limited to a maximum of 1GB of RAM, 10.2 inch screens, and single-core processors clocked no higher than 1GHz though there are apparently some exceptions . Products must also not have hard drives exceeding 80 GB in capacity and cannot have touch-screen technology.

How about just cut the price period? Up sales... increase $$$ flow!

Microsoft vies for budget laptop market with XP price cuts

The Ninth Circuit has (finally) handed down United States v. Arnold; the court ruled that there is no Fourth Amendment requirement of "reasonable suspicion" to search a laptop computer at the border.

This is extremely bad.

The Volokh Conspiracy - Ninth Circuit Allows Suspicionless Computer Searches at the Border:

k wrote:
I don't mean to sound like an asshole, but it seems to me that spending time working through the logistics of circumventing a bad piece of legislation that hasn't even passed yet to be a little like putting the cart before the horse.

This is still a political concern and the solution seems like it ought to be likewise. E.g. write your senator and congressperson, raise awareness (i recognize this is happening to some degree organically, since i just found out about it, but nonetheless), etc.

Have we become so cynical about the likelihood of being listened to that we assume bullshit laws will be passed and jump straight to figuring out how to get around them?

Apparently we ought to be. A version of this bill was rushed through the house Wednesday without following the usual processes. It presents a potentially unintended consequence that individual people who run wifi or other networks are now legally obligated to report child pornography. Because the definition of child pornography is so vauge you are better off reporting than not reporting if you see anything remotely suspicious.

Whats even more frustrating is that this bill seems to have apologists. George Ou says:

The bill in question... would enact huge fines for any... home users with open Access Points who fails to report child pornography users.

I must admit after reading that story I was pretty furious...

Then he turns around and says:

So as you can see, no one is going to be required to monitor their infrastructure.

You are right George. No one is required to monitor anything. However, if you have a wifi network at home and you have a bunch of friends over and you notice that one of them has hentai videos on their laptop, you could face hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines if you fail to report them to the police. Thats probably not what the people who crafted this bill intended, but thats the law they passed, because they aren't paying attention and they basically don't know what they are doing.

Child Pornography is a serious problem, but when Congress continually passes poorly crafted legislation with overbroad definitions and seeks to compell the entire country to enlist in a stazi like network they aren't taking the problem seriously. They are taking advantage of the problem to promote themselves, and they are doing violence to our Constitution in the process.

RE: Thought Crime

I went through about a year back in the early part of the decade trying to work with desktop linux on a laptop. It didn't work very well. Eventually I got a mac. The trouble with Apple is that about 30% of the hardware they produce has serious design flaws. After many years of dealing with them I'm tired of the high cost of their stuff and the annual week without a computer.

So I thought I'd give Ubunto a try. I'd been told by many people that it "just works." I installed it on a pretty run of the mill Dell laptop. It did not "just work." Within a few minutes I'm googling around for long winded explanations of how I have to configure this and compile that and download this other thing in order to get this OS working on this extremely ubiquitous hardware.

This HOWTO describes how to get Wifi working on your Dell Inspiron E1505/6400 laptop using Ndiswrapper.

Im sorry, but if in 2007 you STILL have to compile something in order to get a basic thing like wireless networking working on an extremely popular hardware platform, LINUX WILL NEVER BE SUCCESSFUL ON THE DESKTOP.

Ubuntu sucks, nothing has changed.

Saw this today on Ars. Not sure how great it would be as an office chair (at least if you attempt to use it with a desk). But as a gamer/laptop chair, looks fairly cool.

TreyChair.com - Multifunction task chairs for your desk, floor, home, or office.

Inventec [is] one of five companies based in Taiwan that together produce the vast majority of laptop and notebook computers sold under any brand anywhere in the world.

Everyone in America has heard of Dell, Sony, Compaq, HP, Lenovo-IBM ThinkPad, Apple, NEC, Gateway, Toshiba.

Almost no one has heard of Quanta, Compal, Inventec, Wistron, Asustek.

Yet nearly 90 percent of laptops and notebooks sold under the famous brand names are actually made by one of these five companies in their factories in mainland China.

I have seen a factory with three "competing" brand names coming off the same line.

See also a slideshow that accompanies the article.

(See also this thread, which links directly to the slide show.)

China Makes, The World Takes

Consider the implications of the fact that a suite full of inexpensive machines -- say between $5,000 and $25,000 in cost -- can be used to fabricate just about anything, given a little training on the machines and a good bit of ingenuity.

The author focuses on the power of his team getting a fablab. I would ask, consider the implications of a fablab-powered insurgency. Whereas Negroponte seeks one laptop per child in Africa, a wealthy extremist might establish a One FabLab Per Jihadist program throughout the Middle East. Maybe it would even be a BioFabLab.

Counterinsurgents Should Consider a 'Fabrication Cell'

China is seeking to unseat the United States as the dominant power in cyberspace, a U.S. Air Force general leading a new push in this area said Wednesday.

"They're the only nation that has been quite that blatant about saying, 'We're looking to do that,"' 8th Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. Robert Elder told reporters.

Elder is to head a new three-star cyber command being set up at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, already home to about 25,000 military personnel involved in everything from electronic warfare to network defense.

The command's focus is to control the cyber domain, critical to everything from communications to surveillance to infrastructure security.

"We have peer competitors right now in terms of doing computer network attack ... and I believe we're going to be able to ratchet up our capability," Elder said. "We're going to go way ahead."

The Defense Department said in its annual report on China's military power last month that China regarded computer network operations -- attacks, defense and exploitation -- as critical to achieving "electromagnetic dominance" early in a conflict.

China's People's Liberation Army has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks, the Pentagon said.

China also was investing in electronic countermeasures and defenses against electronic attack, including infrared decoys, angle reflectors and false-target generators, it said.

Elder described the bulk of current alleged Chinese cyber-operations as industrial espionage aimed at stealing trade secrets to save years of high-tech development.

He attributed the espionage to a mix of criminals, hackers and "nation-state" forces. Virtually all potential U.S. foes also were scanning U.S. networks for trade and defense secrets, he added.

"Everyone but North Korea," he said. "We've concluded that there must be only one laptop in all of North Korea -- and that guy's not allowed to scan overseas networks," Elder said.

In October, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff defined cyberspace as "characterized by the use of electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum to store, modify, and exchange data via networked systems and associated physical infrastructures."

General: China taking on U.S. in cyber arms race - CNN.com

Atlanta Seed-Stage Second Office

AS3O is an open coffee group for entrepreneurs, freelancers, renegade venture capitalists, creative types, developers, etc. – anyone who would like to get together outside of the office/house on a laptop – to work. We looked around Atlanta for a community of startups, artists, small businesses, etc., and not finding the exciting, entrepreneurial nexus of our dreams, we figured we’d start one of our own.

Show up, work among others.

Atlanta Seed-Stage Second Office

I just recorded a webcast about Jikto, including a demo. I had to fix a number of bugs in the original (and leaked) code. Jikto now properly audits POST requests and flags on XSS and SQL Injection vulns. I also revamped the web interface, and photoshopped the Nikto logo (property of http://cirt.net) into one for Jikto.

Here is a screen shot of Jikto.

Demo is rendering on my laptop now, and should be up on SPI's website sometime tomorrow