Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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| Questions and Answers, Part 23 Q: A couple of years ago you
wrote an article about distributed computing. I’ve been running the seti@home
project on my machines in the office when the computers are not in use (I’m
the system administrator). I’ve been told that this is illegal and that
someone in the US has been charged. Do
you know the story behind this? A: Yup.
A system administrator working for the DeKalb Technical College in
Georgia has been charged with violating that state’s hacking laws.
The admin, David McOwen, downloaded distributed computing software from
www.distributed.net onto the College’s PCs and let them run when the PCs were
not in use. The state’s law
prohibits “altering or interfering with computer data with knowledge that such
use is without authority”. McOwen’s lawyer argues that since he’s the
administrator for the systems, he had the authority to load the software and let
it run. While the use of the PCs
may or may not have been a violation of the College’s computer use policy
(assuming they even had one, which most places do not), the use of the software
is not against the intent of the hacker law according to the lawyer.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco has said the
case may have disturbing implications for future software use.
The result of the case won’t be known for a while.
In general, hacking laws in both the US and Canada are intended to
prevent someone loading software onto your machine without your knowledge,
whether the intent was malicious or not. The
result of the case will be interesting, and may affect the way we use computers
in the future. Q: I heard someone talking about
“Lindows”. Did they mean
Windows? If not, what is Lindows? A: Lindows is an operating system
and GUI that is intended to compete against (you guessed it) Microsoft Windows.
The company has come under file because Microsoft has sued them, claiming
Lindows infringes on the Windows name. The people at Lindows (www.lindows.com)
claim there won’t be any confusion in people’s minds (which sounds pretty
far-fetched to me). Q: Microsoft has released an
update to its Office XP package that it claims is much faster. It’s a huge download.
Is it worth the effort? A: Office XP SP1 (Service Pack 1)
is primarily a bug fix. Practically
every application in the Office XP suite has had its major (and many minor) bugs
fixed. I’m not sure where they
get off telling you it’s faster, because it isn’t.
Office XP SP1 ran every benchmark I have at precisely the same speed as
the unfixed release. Maybe they
mean that without some of the bugs crashing to the desktop, it runs faster.
The download is 18MB and the download can be handled by automatic upgrade
through Office, if you want. Q: I recently tried an automatic
upgrade process for my Windows XP machines.
At least three quarters of them hung up and has to be reinstalled from
scratch. Is this an upgrade process
problem or are my machines to blame? A: Blame Microsoft (every else
does, for everything that goes wrong!). In
this case, though, they are really to blame.
The culprits seem to be the plethora of security updates that have been
issued to Windows XP, almost on a daily basis. Some of those updates are known
to cause driver problems and cause devices to become unstable, potentially
crashing the machine. The best
advice is to turn off automatic updates and do everything manually, only
upgrading those patches you need (instead of every one, whether it affects you
or not). Q: We’re a big Solaris user, on
both Intel and SPARC machines. I
heard Solaris 9 would not be released for both platforms.
Is this true? A: Sun Microsystems has announced
officially that Solaris 9 will be available only for the SPARC platform, and not
for the Intel platform. Intel’s
machines are frozen at Solaris 8, which Sun says it will support for the next
eight years only. This all seems to be because of the growing animosity between
Sun and Intel. For whatever it’s
worth, Solaris 9 wouldn’t have made that much improvement over Solaris 8.
There’s better process control, better scalability, and a new Sun
Management Center that lets you manage all systems in a network, but that’s
about all that’s important in Solaris 9. Q: We use Executive Software’s
Diskeeper utility to defrag our systems, but it crashes under Windows XP.
Is this a known problem? A: Executive Software has released an updated version of Diskeeper, version 7.0, that supports XP. Version 7.0 adds remote administration of the defrag utility allowing a system administrator to initiate defrags on all machines on a network when their load is minimized (such as at night). |
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