There is a new search engine in town folks, it has a name that is likely to get Google’s attention sometime soon, and it has one thing that makes it different to all the other search engines. It can read the results back to you audibly.

The engine is called Speegle, and it can be found here: http://www.speegle.co.uk/ If you do a search for “statistical hit counter” you will find us as the primary result. (as with most engines.) It’s fun to hear your site read out by a search engine, give it a try. I imagine this will be quiet popular with the geeks among us, but I don’t know how useful it will be to the vision impaired as they already have screen readers. Fun though.

Speakeasy, a national US ISP based in Seattle has put a customized version of Firefox onto their new user CD’s. The founder and chairman of Speakeasy, Mike Apgar was quoted as saying: “We’re thrilled to be the first broadband service provider to adopt Firefox, taking our customers’ browsing experience to the next level. This special edition is just the first step in making browsing the Web better for our customers. We plan to continually enhance the browser with features that will benefit Speakeasy’s home, business and gaming subscribers.” A Mozilla spokesman said that this would be the first of many such roll-outs. You can get a copy of the Speakeasy Firefox release here, and you can read the full article here. I’m actually surprised that this hasn’t happened sooner. ISP’s are often the ones who pay when their users all have viruses and spyware infested systems, because it’s the ISP’s IP address that gets blacklisted if an infected PC is used as a spam relay, and also because 10,000 infected Windows machines chew up a great deal of bandwidth.

So folks, we have government security organizations, independent security companies, dozens of magazine reviews and now Internet Service Providers all giving Firefox the thumbs up and recommending it to their users. If your not using Firefox to read this, perhaps it is time you gave it a shot and find out what all the fuss is about.

Microsoft was found guilty by both the US DOJ, and the EU European Commission, this is a fact. The US basically slapped Microsoft on the wrist for it, and the remedies imposed for being found guilty of monopolistic activities made no significant difference to Microsoft at all. The EU however, imposed a record fine of around half a billion dollars, as well as making them release a version of Windows without “Windows Media Player” and also stated that they should share information on about Microsoft protocols with it’s competition to improve interoperability with competitors’ products. Microsoft has just released a statement to the effect that they do not plan to object to the court decision requiring it to comply immediately with the EU sanctions.

The current problem however, is that the way Microsoft is complying with the later sanction, is incompatible with it’s biggest competitors. Linux and Open Source software like Samba, are governed by the GPL license. The GPL basically says that if you distribute a GPL licensed product, you must include the source code, so that others can benefit and improve on the code and make it available to the community as well. However Microsoft’s protocol license specifically says that no MCPP licensee is permitted to release their software source code. So in one fell swoop, Microsoft made sure that their biggest competitors cannot benefit from the anti-trust remedy. It isn’t just Linux that is affected here. Most commercial UNIX’s also use Samba to provide SMB (CIFS) file sharing services to Windows clients, and Samba is a GPL Open Source program.

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If you are using the Movable Type blog, now is a good time to patch it to avoid your blog being used to send millions of spam e-mails. If you are using PHPBB, and you haven’t updated it in the last month or two, then its probably already too late. Patch it anyway to avoid a server compromise from a bug that allows MySQL injection or running system commands as the web server user. When you are using applications such as those listed above, it is a very good idea to subscribe to their security mailing lists so you are aware when there is a danger to your system involved. Many hosts do not look lightly on compromises caused by out of date buggy software.

It is very unusual to see main steam IT press do really insightful reports on Open Source success stories, however this article from Wired has me thinking that perhaps that situation is changing. In the story, they detail some of the reasons why people are swapping to Firefox, the people that had the idea for Firefox, the thoughts behind the decision to create it, and the astounding success that Firefox is having in changing the course of the Internet at large. (Mostly because now that Microsoft has serious competition in the browser market, it will not be able to disregard the W3c standards in favour of their own proprietary versions due to be included in their Longhorn release in 2006/2007.)

It’s a fascinating read, full of interesting details. Did you know for example, that one of Firefox’s top programmers now works at Apple working on their Safari web browser? And a more recent hiring has seen another of their top programmers now working for Google (paid to spend half his time working on Firefox). With Firefox 1.0 downloads now exceeding 20 million in less then 80 days since it’s release, it’s good to get an idea of the people behind Firefox, including the couple of dozen programmers paid for by IBM and Sun. The thing that stands out to me most from reading this, is that having a university degree will eventually get you a good job, but showing you have talent and vision when working on a well known OSS application will apparently bring you to the attention of those employers more quickly. Besides, getting a degree in computer science only proves that you know the rules, it doesn’t prove you have either vision or talent. The Firefox explosion.

This is an interesting article, not because of the main content, but because of the fact it cites: webmail accounts for 80 percent of all email. Now that gets me to thinking, if 80 percent of the mail on the web is via web mail and 70 percent or more of email is spam (I read that figure somewhere the other day), what would happen if we eliminated webmail and only allowed people to use their isp generated email? I wonder if spam wouldn’t dry up. What do you think? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Vienna’s Municipal Authority has joined Munich in its plans to swap to Open Source software. Vienna plans to offer 7,500 staff the option of swapping to a version of Debian Linux called Wienux on their workstations. In early 2003, Munich announced a plan to swap 14,000 of their desktop and notebook machines to Linux. These two are just the tip of the iceberg, pretty much every government in the EU (as well as countries including but not limited to China, Japan, the USA, Australia and India) are all either running Linux in parts of their infrastructure, or they are evaluating it for that purpose. Linux is not a geek only operating system any more.

The reasons for the change is not as simple as you’d think. It isn’t just for pricing, and it isn’t just for the extra security. Those two are probably additional benefits, but most of the reason seems to be to avoid being locked into a single provider (usually Microsoft) with their data. The idea of open standards and interoperability haven’t really been well accepted at Redmond, so they have made no efforts to help OSS like Linux and their own software to work together unless ordered to do so. That is going to hurt them in the long run. A few of the Municipalities that have made significant moves to OSS software include: Bergen (Norway’s second-largest city), the German Federal Finance Office, the French Ministry of Equipment (1500 Windows servers swapped to Linux), Paris city authority (17,000 desktops), Rome City Council (filesharing, email and web portal servers) , The German Federal Finance Office (replacing old servers with Linux mainframe) in fact the German Federal government have given Linux and open source it’s approval and backing, so OSS usage should spread much faster over there now.

There are a ton of big business’s also swapping to, or already running Linux, a few of the bigger ones include DaimlerChrysler, Autozone, the Allied Irish Banks. Linux now runs on a huge array of devices, some of which you may already have, devices including TIVO’s, Linksys and Netgear routers, Motorola, NEC and Panasonic mobile phones, car computers (both engine and entertainment), cash registers, PDA’s and more. If you have one of these items, and you didn’t know it was running Linux, then it was obviously doing it’s job pretty well. Also, Linux appears to be the choice of operating systems for super computers, apparently over half of the world’s top 500 supercomputers run the upstart OS (in fact 4 of the top 5 super computers in the world are running Linux). Viva the revolution! 🙂