I can't believe I actually read a laugh-out-loud funny profile of the
*FCC Commissioner* fer crissakes! So the following article comes
recommended, a fine explanation of Michael Powell's extraordinary
equivocation.
On the other hand, I can also agree with Werbach's Werblog entry... Rohit
> A Trip to F.C.C. World
>
> Nicholas Lemann has a piece in the New Yorker this week about FCC
> Chairman Michael Powell.  It's one of the first articles I've seen that
> captures some of Powell's real personality, and the way he's viewed in
> Washington.  Unfortunately, Lemann ends by endorsing conventional
> political wisdom.  After describing how Powell isn't really a
> fire-breathing ideological conservative, he concludes that, in essence,
> Powell favors the inumbent local Bell telephone companies, while a
> Democratic FCC would favor new entrants.  I know that's not how Powell
> sees the world, and though I disagree with him on many issues, I think
> he's right to resist the old dichotomy.
>
> The telecom collapse should be a humbling experience for anyone who
> went through it.  The disaster wasn't the regulators' fault, as some
> conservatives argue.  But something clearly went horribly wrong, and
> policy-makers should learn from that experience.  Contrary to Lemann's
> speculation, the upstart carriers won't be successful in a Gore
> administration, because it's too late.  Virtually all of them are dead,
> and Wall Street has turned off the capital tap for the foreseeable
> future.  Some may survive, but as small players rather than
> world-dominators.
>
> The battle between CLECs and RBOCs that Lemann so astutely parodies is
> old news.  The next important battle in telecom will be between those
> who want to stay within the traditional boxes, and those who use
> different models entirely.  That's why open broadband networks and open
> spectrum are so important.  Whatever the regulatory environment, there
> is going to be consolidation in telecom.  Those left out in that
> consolidation will face increasing pressure to create new pipes into
> the home, or slowly die. The victors in the consolidation game will cut
> back on innovation and raise prices, which will create further pressure
> for alternatives.
>
> Lemann is right that policy-making looks much drier and more ambiguous
> on the ground than through the lens of history.  But he's wrong in
> thinking that telecom's future will be something like its past.
>
> Friday, October 04, 2002
> 11:17:11 AM  comments {0}
==============================================================

THE CHAIRMAN
by NICHOLAS LEMANN
He's the other Powell, and no one is sure what he's up to.
New Yorker, October 8, 2002
Last year, my middle son, in eighth grade and encountering his first
fairly serious American-history course, indignantly reported that the
whole subject was incomprehensible. I was shocked. What about Gettysburg
and the Declaration of Independence and the Selma-to-Montgomery march?
Just look at my textbook, he said, and when I did I saw his point. His
class had got up to the eighteen-forties. What I expected was a big
beefing up of the roles of Sacagawea and Crispus Attucks, and, in-deed,
there was some of that. But the main difference between my son's text
and that of my own childhood was that somebody had made the disastrous
decision to devote most of it to what had actually happened in American
history. There were pages and pages on tariffs and bank charters and
reciprocal trade agreements. I skipped ahead, past the Civil War, hoping
for easier going, only to encounter currency floats and the regulation
of freight rates. Only a few decades into the twentieth century did it
become possible to see the federal government's main function as
responding to dramatic crises and launching crusades for social justice,
instead of attempting to referee competing claims from economic
interests.
Even now, if one were to reveal what really goes on behind the pretty
speeches and the sanctimonious hearings in Washington, what you'd find
is thousands of lawyers and lobbyists madly vying for advantage, not so
much over the public as over each other: agribusiness versus real
estate, banks versus insurance companies, and so on. The arena in which
this competition mainly takes place is regulatory agencies and
commissions and the congressional committees that supervise them. It's
an insider's game, less because the players are secretive than because
the public and the press—encouraged by the players, who speak in jargon—
can't get themselves interested.
One corner of Washington might be called F.C.C. World, for the Federal
Communications Commission. F.C.C. World has perhaps five thousand
denizens. They work at the commission itself, at the House and Senate
commerce committees, and at the Washington offices of the companies that
the commission regulates. They read Communications Daily (subscription
price: $3,695 a year), and every year around Christmastime they
grumblingly attend the Chairman's Dinner, at a Washington hotel, where
the high point of the evening is a scripted, supposedly self-deprecating
comedy routine by the commission's chairman.
Of all the federal agencies and commissions, the F.C.C. is the one that
Americans ought to be most interested in; after all, it is involved with
a business sector that accounts for about fifteen per cent of the
American economy, as well as important aspects of daily life—telephone
and television and radio and newspapers and the Internet. And right now
F.C.C. World is in, if not a crisis, at least a very soapy lather,
because a good portion of what the angry public thinks of as the
"corporate scandals" concerns the economic collapse of companies
regulated by the F.C.C. Qwest, WorldCom, Adelphia, and Global Crossing,
among others, are (or were) part of F.C.C. World. AOL Time Warner is
part of F.C.C. World. Jack Grubman, the former Salomon Smith Barney
analyst who seems to have succeeded Kenneth Lay, of Enron, as the
embodiment of the corporate scandals, is part of F.C.C. World. In the
past two years, companies belonging to F.C.C. World have lost trillions
of dollars in stock-market valuation, and have collectively served as a
dead weight pulling down the entire stock market.
This year, an alarmed and acerbic anonymous memorandum about the state
of the F.C.C. has been circulating widely within F.C.C. World. It evokes
F.C.C. World's feverish mood ("The F.C.C. is fiddling while Rome burns")
and suggests why nobody besides residents of F.C.C. World has thought of
the commission in connection with the corporate scandals. The sentence I
just quoted is followed by this explanation: "The ILECs appear likely to
enter all l.d. markets within twelve months, while losing virtually no
residential customers to attackers since 1996, and suffering about 10%
market share loss in business lines to CLECs." It's a lot easier to
think about evil C.E.O.s than to decipher that.
Even in good times, F.C.C. World pays obsessive attention to the
commission's chairman. In bad times, the attention becomes especially
intense; and when the chairman is a celebrity F.C.C. World devotes
itself to full-time chairman-watching. The current chairman, Michael
Powell, is a celebrity, at least by government-official standards,
because he is the only son of Colin Powell, the Secretary of State.
Unlike his father, he has a kind of mesmerizing ambiguity, which
generates enormous, and at times apoplectically toned, speculation about
who he really is and what he's really up to. Powell is young to be the
head of a federal agency—he is thirty-nine—and genially charming.
Everybody likes him. Before becoming chairman, he was for three years
one of the F.C.C.'s five commissioners; not only is he fluent in the
F.C.C.'s incomprehensible patois, he has a Clintonesque love of the
arcane details of communications policy. He's always saying that he's an
"avid moderate." And yet he has a rage-inciting quality. One of his
predecessors as chairman, Reed Hundt, quoted in Forbes, compared Powell
to Herbert Hoover. Mark Cooper, of the Consumer Federation of America,
calls him "radical and extreme." Just as often as he's accused of being
a right-wing ideologue, Powell gets accused of being paralytically
cautious. "It ain't about singing 'Kum-Ba-Yah' around the campfire,"
another former chairman, William Kennard, says. "You have to have an
answer." One day last spring, Powell, testifying before a Senate
subcommittee, delivered an anodyne opening statement, and the
subcommittee's chairman, Ernest Hollings, of South Carolina, berated
him. "You don't care about these regulations," Hollings said. "You don't
care about the law or what Congress sets down. . . . That's the
fundamental. That's the misgiving I have of your administration over
there. It just is amazing to me. You just pell-mell down the road and
seem to not care at all. I think you'd be a wonderful executive
vice-president of a chamber of commerce, but not a chairman of a
regulatory commission at the government level. Are you happy in your
job?"
"Extremely," Powell said, with an amiable smile.
One cannot understand Powell's maddening effect, at least on Democrats
and liberal activists, without understanding not just the stated purpose
of the commission he chairs but also its real purpose. The F.C.C. was
created by Congress in 1934, but it existed in prototype well before the
New Deal, because it performs a function that is one of the classic easy
cases for government intervention in the private economy: making sure
that broadcasters stick to their assigned spots on the airwaves. Its
other original function was preventing American Telephone & Telegraph,
the national monopoly phone company, from treating its customers
unfairly. Over the decades, as F.C.C. World grew up into a comfortable,
well-established place, the F.C.C. segued into the role of industrial
supervision—its real purpose. It was supposed to manage the competition
among communications companies so that it didn't become too bloody, by
artfully deciding who would be allowed to enter what line of business.
In addition to looking out for the public's interest, the commission
more specifically protected the interests of members of Congress, many
of whom regard the media companies in their districts as the single most
terrifying category of interest group—you can cross the local bank
president and live to tell the tale, but not the local broadcaster.
According to an oft-told F.C.C. World anecdote, President Clinton once
blocked an attempt to allow television stations to buy daily newspapers
in the same city because, he said, if the so-and-so who owned the
anti-Clinton Little Rock Democrat-Gazette had owned the leading TV
station in Little Rock, too, Clinton would never have become President.
F.C.C. World may have been con tentious, but it was settled, too,
because all the reasonably powerful players had created secure economic
niches for themselves. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, the successful
breakup of A.T. & T.—by far the biggest and most important company the
commission regulated—deposited a thick additional sediment of
self-confidence onto the consciousness of F.C.C. World. A generation
ago, for most Americans, there was one local phone company, one
long-distance company, and one company that manufactured telephones,
which customers were not permitted to own—and they were all the same
company. It was illegal to plug any device into a phone line. By the
mid-nineteen-nineties, there were a dozen economically viable local
phone companies, a handful of national long-distance companies competing
to offer customers the lowest price and best service, and stores
everywhere selling telephone equipment from many manufacturers—and
millions of Americans had a fax machine and a modem operating over the
telephone lines. A.T. & T. had argued for years that it was a "natural
monopoly," requiring protection from economic competition and total
control over its lines. So much for that argument. Over the same period,
the F.C.C. had assisted in the birth of cable television and cell phones
and the Internet. It was the dream of federal-agency success come true:
consumers vastly better served, and the industry much bigger and more
prosperous, too.
The next big step was supposed to be the Telecommunications Act of 1996,
one of those massive, endlessly lobbied-over pieces of legislation which
most people outside F.C.C. World probably felt it was safe to ignore.
Although the Telecom Act sailed under the rhetorical banner of
modernization and deregulation, its essence was a grand interest-group
bargain, in which the local phone companies, known to headline writers
as "baby Bells" and to F.C.C. World as "arbocks" (the pronounced version
of RBOCs, or regional Bell operating companies), would be permitted to
offer long-distance service in exchange for letting the long-distance
companies and smaller new phone companies use their lines to compete for
customers. Consumers would win, because for the first time they would
get the benefits of competition in local service while getting even more
competition than they already had in long distance. But the politics and
economics of the Telecom Act (which was shepherded through Congress by
Vice-President Gore) were just as important. Democrats saw the act as
helping to reposition them as the technology party—the party that
brought the Internet into every home, created hundreds of thousands of
jobs in new companies, and, not least, set off an investment boom whose
beneficiaries might become the party's new contributor base. Clinton's
slogans about the "information superhighway" and "building a bridge to
the twenty-first century," which, like all Clinton slogans, artfully
sent different messages to different constituencies, were the rhetorical
correlates of the Telecom Act, and Gore's cruise to the Presidency was
supposed to be powered substantially by the act's success.
The F.C.C. had a crucial role in all this. The arbocks are rich,
aggressive, politically powerful, and generally Republican (though like
all important interest groups they work with both parties); they
immediately filed lawsuits, which wound up tying the hands of their new
competitors in the local phone market for more than three years. Through
rule-making, enforcement, and litigation, the F.C.C., then headed by
Reed Hundt, who was Gore's classmate at St. Albans, was supposed to keep
the arbocks in their cages, so that not only long-distance companies
like A.T. & T. and MCI WorldCom but also a whole category of new
companies, "see-lecks" (the pronounced version of CLECs, or competitive
local exchange carriers), could emerge. This entailed the regulatory
equivalent of hand-to-hand combat: the see-leck is supposed to have
access to the arbock's switching equipment, the arbock won't give the
seeleck a key to the room where it's kept, so the see-leck asks the
F.C.C. to rule that the arbock has to give it the key.
Partly because Hundt assured the see-lecks and other new companies that
he would protect them, and partly because of the generally booming
condition of the economy then, investment capital flooded into the
see-lecks—companies with names like Winstar, Covad, and Teligent—and
into other telecommunications companies. Even not obviously related
technology companies like Cisco Systems benefitted from the telecom
boom: demand for their products was supposed to come from the see-lecks
and other new players. There would be no conflict between the interests
of the new telecom companies and those of consumers; as one of Hundt's
former lieutenants told me, "Reed used to joke that my job was to make
sure that all prices went down and all stocks went up."
The years following the passage of the Telecom Act were the peak of the
boom. Wall Street had its blood up, and that meant not just more
startups but also more mergers of existing communications companies:
Time Warner and AOL decided to throw in together, and A.T. & T. and
Comcast, and so on. (Surely, WorldCom and the other telecom bad guys
believed that their self-dealing, stock-overselling, and creative
accounting would go unnoticed because the market was so
undiscriminating.)
By the time the outcome of the 2000 Presidential election had been
determined, the telecom crash was well under way. Nonetheless, the
chairmanship of the F.C.C. remained one of the best jobs, in terms of
influence and visibility, available to a career government regulator.
Three Republicans emerged as candidates: Powell, who was a commissioner;
Harold Furchtgott-Roth, the farthest-to-the-right commissioner; and
Patrick Wood, the head of the Texas Public Utility Commission and, as
such, a George W. Bush guy. In Texas, however, Wood had crossed the most
powerful person in the arbock camp, Edward Whitacre, the C.E.O. of
S.B.C. Communications, which is headquartered in San Antonio. This meant
that the arbocks didn't want Wood as head of the F.C.C., because he
might be too pro-see-leck. (Wood is now the head of the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission.) Michael Powell had to signal the arbocks that he
wasn't as threatening as Wood, while also signalling the conservative
movement that he was only negligibly farther to the left than
Furchtgott-Roth.
Powell did this deftly. For example, in December of 2000 he appeared
before a conservative group called the Progress & Freedom Foundation and
gave a very Michael Powell speech—whimsical, intellectual, and
free-associative (Biblical history, Joseph Schumpeter, Moore's Law)—that
began by making fun of the idea that the F.C.C. should try to keep new
telecom companies alive. "In the wake of the 1996 Act, the F.C.C. is
often cast as the Grinch who stole Christmas," Powell said. "Like the
Whos, down in Who-ville, who feast on Who-pudding and rare Who-roast
beast, the communications industry was preparing to feast on the
deregulatory fruits it believed would inevitably sprout from the Act's
fertile soil. But this feast the F.C.C. Grinch did not like in the
least, so it is thought." Thus Powell was indicating that if he became
chairman he didn't expect to administer first aid to the see-lecks as
part of the job. He was appointed to the chairmanship on the first day
of the Bush Administration.
Twenty months into the Administration, nearly all the see-lecks are dead
or dying; nearly all long-distance companies, not just WorldCom, are in
serious trouble; cable companies have lost half their value; satellite
companies are staggering. The crash has had an automatically
concentrating effect, because as new companies die the existing
companies' market share increases, and, if the existing companies are in
good shape financially, they have the opportunity to pick up damaged
companies at bargain prices. During the Bush Administration, as the
financial carnage in communications has worsened, the communications
industry has moved in the direction of more concentration. If the Bells
wind up protecting their regional monopolies in local phone service, and
if they also merge, the country will be on its way to having a national
duopoly in local service: Verizon, in the East, and S.B.C., in the West.
And these companies could dominate long distance as well, because of the
poor health of the long-distance companies.
The cable business also seems close to having two dominant national
companies, AOL Time Warner and Comcast. Unlike the phone companies, they
don't have to share their wiring with other companies and so can more
fully control what material they allow to enter people's homes. As part
of the complicated bargaining with interest groups that led to the 1996
Telecom Act, the limits on concentration in the radio industry were
significantly loosened, and in the past six years the number of
radio-station owners in the United States has been cut by twenty-five
per cent; today, a large portion of local and national radio news
programming is supplied by a single company, Westwood One, a subsidiary
of Viacom.
In this situation, many Democrats and liberals think, the F.C.C. should
be hyperactive—the superhero of government regulation, springing to the
rescue of both consumers and the communications industry. It should try
to breathe life into the see-lecks and other new companies. It should
disallow mergers, maintain ownership limits, and otherwise restrain the
forces of concentration. It should use the government's money and muscle
to get new technology—especially fast Internet connections—into the
homes of people who can't afford it at current market prices. (An
analogy that a lot of people in F.C.C. World make is between telecom and
the Middle East: the Clinton people blame the bloodshed on the Bush
people, because they disengaged when they came into office, and the Bush
people blame it on the Clinton people, because they raised too many
expectations and stirred too many passions.)
But Michael Powell's F.C.C. has not been hyperactive. Powell has been
conducting internal policy reviews and reforming the management of the
F.C.C. and waiting for the federal courts and the Congress to send him
signals. (In mid-September, Powell finally initiated a formal review of
the F.C.C.'s limits on media concentration.) This doesn't mean he has
been inactive; rather, he has been active in a way that further
infuriates his critics—in a manner that smoothly blends the genial and
the provocative, he muses about whether the fundamental premises of
F.C.C. World really make sense, while giving the impression that he's
having the time of his life as chairman. At his first press conference,
when he was asked what he was going to do about the "digital
divide"—that is, economic inequality in access to the Internet—he said,
"You know, I think there is a Mercedes divide. I'd like to have one and
I can't afford one." At the National Cable & Telecommunications
Association convention, in Chicago, Powell, following a troupe of
tumblers to the stage, interrupted his walk to the podium to perform a
somersault.
Not long ago, I went to see Powell in his office at the F.C.C. Until
1998, when the commission moved to a new building in Southwest
Washington, near the city's open-air fish market, F.C.C. World was at
the western edge of downtown, where everybody would encounter everybody
else at a few familiar restaurants and bars. Today, the F.C.C. building
looks like the office of a mortgage company in a suburban office park.
Even the chairman's suite, though large, is beige, carpeted, and
fluorescent. Powell is a bulky man who wears gold-rimmed glasses and
walks with a pronounced limp, the result of injuries he suffered in a
jeep accident in Germany, in 1987, when he was an Army officer. Because
of the accident, he left the Army and went to law school, where he
became entranced with conservative ideas about regulation, particularly
the idea that the government, rather than trying to correct the flaws of
the market before the fact—"prophylactically," as he likes to say—should
wait till the flaws manifest themselves and then use antitrust
litigation to fix them. He worked briefly at a corporate law firm, and
then became a protégé of Joel Klein, the head of the antitrust division
of the Clinton Justice Department and the man who led the government's
legal case against Microsoft. (He was recently appointed chancellor of
the New York public-school system.) It testifies to Powell's political
skill that he is probably the only high official in the Bush
Administration who not only served in the Clinton Administration but
also maintains close ties to Bush's nemesis Senator John McCain, of
Arizona. One of the things about Powell that annoy people is his
enduring love of law school—"It's sort of like a law-school study
session over there," one Democratic former commissioner said. As if to
confirm the charge, Powell, when I arrived, introduced me to four law
students, summer interns at the commission, whom he'd invited to sit in.
I began by asking Powell whether he agreed with the founding assumptions
of the F.C.C. For example, could private companies have apportioned the
airwaves among themselves without the government being involved?
"I think we'll never know," Powell said. "I don't think it's an
automatically bad idea, the way some people will argue. Land is probably
the best analogue. We don't seize all the land in the United States and
say, 'The government will issue licenses to use land.' If my neighbor
puts a fence one foot onto my property line, there's a whole body of law
about what I can do about that, including whether I can tear it down. If
a wireless company was interfering with another wireless company, it's a
similar proposition. There are scholars who argue—indeed, the famous
Ronald Coase treatise that won the Nobel Prize was about this—that
spectrum policy is lunacy. The market could work this out, in the kinds
of ways that we're accustomed to."
Talking to Powell was fun. Unlike most high government officials, he
doesn't seem to be invested in appearing dignified or commanding. He
slumps in his chair and fiddles with his tie and riffs. He speaks in
ironic air quotes. He's like your libertarian friend in college who
enjoyed staying up all night asking impertinent rhetorical questions
about aspects of life that everybody else takes for granted but that he
sees as sentimental or illogical. After a while, I asked him whether he
thought his predecessors' excitement about the 1996 Telecommunications
Act had been excessive.
"I would start with a caveat," Powell said. "Look, I can't fault those
judgments in and of themselves, given the time and what people thought.
They were not the only ones who were hysterical about the opportunities.
But, frankly, I've always been a little bit critical. First of all,
anybody who works with the act knows that it doesn't come anywhere close
to matching the hyperbole that was associated with it, by the President
on down, about the kinds of things it's going to open up. I mean, I
don't know what provisions are the information-superhighway provisions,
or what provisions are so digitally oriented, or some of the things that
were a big part of the theatre of its introduction. When one starts
reading the details, one searches, often in vain, for these provisions.
But, nonetheless, there was a rising dot-com excitement, and an Internet
excitement, and people thought this was historic legislation, and it
certainly was.
"But. We were sucking helium out of balloons, with the kinds of
expectations that were being bandied around, and this is before the
economy or the market even gets in trouble. It was a dramatically
exaggerated expectation—by the leadership of the commission, by
politicians, by the market itself, by companies themselves. It was a
gold rush, and led to some very detrimental business decisions, ones
that government encouraged by its policies, frankly. Everybody wanted to
see numbers go up on the board."
Powell began imitating an imagined true believer in the Telecom Act. "
'I want to see ten competitors. Twenty competitors! I want to see
thirty-per-cent market share. Fifty-per-cent market share! I want the
Bells to bleed! Then we'll know we've succeeded.' " Now Powell returned
to being Powell. "I think that expectation was astonishingly
unrealistic, in the short term. They wanted to see it while they're
there. We were starting to get drunk on the juice we were drinking. And
the market was getting drunk on the juice we were drinking. There's no
question, we went too soon too fast. Too many companies took on too much
debt too fast before the market really had a product, or a business
model."
How could the Telecom Act have been handled better? "We could have
chosen policies that were less hellbent on a single objective, and were
slightly more balanced and put more economic discipline in the system,"
Powell said. "Money chased what seemed like government-promised
opportunity. The problem with that is there's a morning after, and we're
in it. And the problem is there is no short fix for this problem. This
debt is going to take years to bring down to a realistic level. In some
ways, for short-term gain, we paid a price in long-term stability."
Powell went on to say that it might have turned out differently if there
had been a more "reasonable" level of investment. "No, we wouldn't have
every home in America with competitive choice yet—but we don't anyway. I
don't think it's the remonopolization of telephone service. I don't buy
that. The Bells will prosper, but did anybody believe they wouldn't? The
part of the story that didn't materialize was that people thought so
would MCI WorldCom and Sprint."
Other local phone companies, he added, hadn't materialized as viable
businesses, either, and they never might. "Everybody's always saying,
'The regulators did this and this and this.' But, candidly, the story's
quite the opposite. I think the regulators bent over backward for six
years to give them a chance. Conditions don't get that good except once
every thirty years, and it didn't happen. So, whatever the reason, we're
looking at a WorldCom that's teetering. We're looking at a long-distance
business that has had a rapid decline in its revenue base. A.T. & T. is
breaking itself up. Sprint has struggled."
Could the F.C.C. have done anything to make the long-distance companies
stronger? "At the F.C.C.? I think I'll just be blunt. My political
answer? Yes, there's all kinds of things we can do at the margin to try
to help. But I can't find thirty billion dollars for WorldCom somewhere.
I can't mitigate the impacts of an accounting scandal and an S.E.C.
investigation. Were I king, it would be wonderful, but I don't have
those kinds of levers. I don't know whether anybody does. At some point,
companies are expected to run themselves in a way that keeps them from
dying." Powell couldn't have made it much clearer that he doesn't think
it's his responsibility to do anything about the telecom crash. He has
demonstrated his sure political touch by making accommodationist
gestures—in August, for example, five months after disbanding the
F.C.C.'s Accounting Safeguards Division, Powell announced that he was
appointing a committee to study accounting standards in the
communications industry. But that shows that Powell is better at riding
out the storm than, say, Harvey Pitt, his counterpart at the Securities
and Exchange Commission, and does not mean that he plans to try to shore
up the telecom industry.
I asked Powell if it would bother him if, for most people, only one
company provided cable television and only one provided local phone
service. "Yes," he said. "It concerns us that there's one of each of
those things, but let's not diminish the importance of there being one
of each of those things. That still is a nice suite of communications
capabilities, even if they aren't direct analogues of each other."
Anyway, Powell said, before long the phone companies will be able to
provide video service over their lines, and the cable companies will
provide data service over their lines, so there will be more choice.
"So, yeah, we have this anxiety: we have one of everything. The question
is, Does it stay that way?"
The concentration of ownership and the concentrated control of
information did not appear to trouble Powell, either. He said that
people confuse bigness, which brings many benefits, with concentration,
which distorts markets. "If this were just economics, it's easy. If you
were to say to me, 'Mike, just worry about economic concentration,' we
know how to do that—the econometrics of antitrust. I can tell you when a
market's too concentrated and prices are going to rise. The problem is
other dimensions, like political, ideological, sometimes emotional. Take
the question of, if everybody's controlling what you see, the assumption
there is that somehow there'll be this viewpoint, a monolithic
viewpoint, pushed on you by your media and you won't get diversity. I
think that's a possibility. I don't think it's nearly the possibility
that's ascribed to it sometimes."
Powell explained, "Sometimes when we see very pointed political or
parochial programming, it gets attacked as unfair. I see some of the
same people who claim they want diversity go crazy when Rush Limbaugh
exists. They love diversity, but somehow we should run Howard Stern off
the planet. If it has a point of view, then it becomes accused of bias,
and then we have policies like"—here his tone went from ironic to
sarcastic—"the fairness doctrine, which seems to me like the antithesis
of what I thought those people cared about. So when somebody is pointed
and opinionated, we do all this stuff in the name of journalistic
fairness and integrity or whatever, to make them balance it out."
F.C.C. World abounds in theories about Michael Powell. One is that he
can't make up his mind about how to address the crisis in the industries
he regulates—so he talks (and talks and talks) flamboyantly about the
market, in order to buy himself time. Another is that he's carrying
water for the arbocks and the big cable companies. Another is that he is
planning to run for the Senate from Virginia (or to be appointed
Attorney General in a second Bush term), and doesn't want to do anything
at the F.C.C. that would diminish his chances. Another is that he's
waiting to move until there is more consensus on some course of action,
so that he doesn't wind up going first and getting caught in the
crossfire between the arbocks and the cable companies and the television
networks. (In F.C.C. World, this is known as the Powell Doctrine of
Telecom, after Colin Powell's idea that the United States should never
commit itself militarily without a clear objective, overwhelming force,
and an exit strategy.) And another is that he actually believes what he
says, and thinks the telecommunications crash is natural, healthy, and
irreversible, and more concentration would be just fine.
"This is why elections matter," Reed Hundt, who isn't happy about what
has become of his Telecom Act, told me. It's true that the F.C.C.—much
more than, say, the war in Afghanistan—is a case in which a Gore
Administration would be acting quite differently from the Bush
Administration. Consumers might have noticed the difference by now, but
there's no question whether communications companies have noticed. The
arbocks are doing better against their internal rivals than they would
have done if Gore had won. Next election, they'll help the party that
helped them. If the Republicans win, policy will tilt further in the
arbocks' favor. If they lose, perhaps the arbocks' rivals—the
long-distance companies and the telecommunications upstarts—with their
friends now in power, will stage a comeback. America's present is not
unrecognizably different from America's past.


Broadband's killer application  the one activity that dwarfs all others
is online gaming, which 80 percent of South Koreans under 25 play, according
to one recent study. Critics say the burgeoning industry is creating
millions of zombified addicts who are turning on and tuning into computer
games, and dropping out of school and traditional group activities, becoming
uncommunicative and even violent because of the electronic games they play.
"Game players don't have normal social relationships anymore," said Kim Hyun
Soo, a 36-year-old psychiatrist who is chairman of the Net Addiction
Treatment Center, one of many groups that have sprung up to cope with
Internet game addiction. "Young people are losing the ability to relate to
others, except through games. People who become addicted are prone to
violence, even when they are not playing.
- Jim


At 12:05 PM 10/4/28 -0400, Stephen D. Williams wrote:
>Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2028 12:05:01 -0400
>
>I actually thought of this kind of active chat at AOL (in 1996 I think),
>bringing up ads based on what was being discussed and other features.  For
>a while, the VP of dev. (now still CTO I think) was really hot on the idea
>and they discussed patenting it.  Then they lost interest.  Probably a
>good thing.
[note date: header]
Can I borrow your time machine, pretty please?
Udhay
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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))


Hi All,
Anyone ever try connecting at 1200bps in Linux? I've got a USR 56K
Faxmodem which is meant to connect to another (same) modem and I have to
connect at this speed due to the (NT) port settings on the remote side,
but the modem handshake always fails at this speed.
The modem handshake works at slightly higher speeds (4800bps to
~57600bps) but that is no good for tx/rx'ing data to the remote server
as it insists at talking at the speed of treacle/1200bps.
Note Minicom fails to handshake at 1200bps, but HyperTerm in Windows
worked first time(!?), any ideas?
Baud 1200 7 data bits Even Parity
I am doing a ATZ3 to reset the modem then I send this init string:
AT&F1E1V1Q0X4Y0S32=232&A1&B0&C1&D2&H0&I0&K1&M4&N0&P0&R1&S0&U0&Y1
... which is most of the defaults.
USR said to set S15=128 (disables v.42))
& set S32=98 (disable v.92 & X2)
But the S15=128 just makes the handshake lockup instead of just giving
up.
btw this is a bank's system I am connecting to so reconfiguring their
modems may be difficult.
Colin.
--
Colin Nevin,
Software Engineer,
Merit Solutions Ltd. (Dublin),
5 Goatstown Cross,
Dublin 14.
------------------------------------------
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zzzz@example.com (Justin Mason) writes:
> /dev/fd/0 is STDIN -- filedescriptor 0.  Looks like the PS file wants
> to know its filename, but it's being read from STDIN, that's my
> guess.
I don't think so: it should be getting a stream of PS from stdin,
but it's not. The printing/spooling system is executing gs but
somehow failing to provide it with input.
> Try tweaking the scripts to run "gs" with the ps file on
> the command line instead of as "-".
That might clarify that the later part of the system works, but I
suspect the problem is earlier.
B
--
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Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-390476;  Room F2-025 x 3147
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I have translated the article in full - see
end of post (I think that I've done a far
better job than the Google translation - at
least it's readable now - any corrections
appreciated).
Stuff in {}'s is my (and others) additions
to the debate.
My apologies if I've paraphrased anybody
incorrectly, I will be glad to retract if
anyone is miffed.
The article makes four main points.
1) Absence of critical clauses.
In this case, the idea is that the licence
is invalid because it doesn't specify
under what country's law the GPL is governed.
2) Specification in English only.
That for the end user (as opposed to businesses),
the GPL doesn't apply because it's not written
in French.
3) Arbitary licence change.
The point here is that (under French law) the
author can change the terms of the licence
arbitarily. This is because any granting of
rights by an author must be clearly delimited
in terms of how long, where, to whom, dates and
times. In the absence of such limitations, the
original author has the right to change his
software back to closed on a whim.
{
David Neary makes the point that the copyright
holder automatically retains the right to change
the licence.
Scott replies it simply requires authorisation from
all *copyright holders*
That's not my understanding. French law allows a
GPL type licence *_on condition_* that the
specific conditions of the granting of such
rights are clear - if they are not, there is
nothing to stop the original author taking
back "his work". The lawyers see this
(correctly IMHO) as a weakness in the GPL).
}
4) Hidden defects.
Roughly, this clause means that the author(s)
is/are liable for any defects if the consumer
is not an IT engineer, so if Linux blows up
and data is lost, then the authors are liable.
{
Ciaran Johnson says that M$oft and others have
similar clauses - the point here is that they
are *_all_* invalid - just that this one
affects the GPL also.
Niall O'Broinn makes the point that it is not
a sale, but rather a service/leasing arrangement
and that's why it doesn't come under this point.
I would suggest that the whole thrust of this
article has been to see software "sales" (even
if no money changes hands) as governed very
much by consumer law (in France anyway).
Rick Moen makes the point that it is not
a sale but rather a granting of rights which
are not default.
See the bit about even the granting of
rights by an author having to be
explicitly specified - under French law.
The fact that two IP lawyers in France think that
the GPL is covered as a sale make me feel that
there is a de facto sale and a de facto contract.
}
5) Roughly.
There may be other reasons under French
law why the  GPL may be invalid.
-----  Whole Article. -----------
Freedom(a) is worth more than these
imperfect licences.
Specialised lawyers look at the GPL.
Lawyer Cyril Rojinsky (duly appointed to
the court) and the jurist Vincent Grynbaum, both
specialised in the area of intellectual property
examine the "free" licences and in particular the
GPL. They have published their study
in the review "Proprietes intellectuelles
(Intellectual property)[1]" and their
conclusion is grim.
Their approach is interesting. The problem for
them is not to know whether freedom is valid under
French law (for them the question is a moot point)
but rather they asked themselves about the form
and the content of the text of free licences, and
in particular the GPL. The problem is not free
programmes, but rather the licence contracts of
free programmes.
Absence of critical clauses.
The authors tell us that first of all, the
reference to "copyright" is not legally
sufficient in the framework of international
contracts  (which is the case of licence
contracts for programmes developed and spread
via the Internet). The idea of copyright can
basically include differences from one country
to another. This is why, under international
contracts, it is necessary to specify to which
laws one is referring (French law, American &c.).
The authors only found three public licences
which were correctly formulated on this point:
QPL, IBM Public Licence and the Mozilla Public
Licence).
Specification in the English language.
Next, the authors remind us that (at least in
France), no clause in a contract may be contrary
to French law [2]. However, it turns out that a
licence such as the GPL is contrary to French law
in several respects. Firstly, it is written in
English and the FSF doesn't officially approve
translations.
The "Toubon law" obliges this sort
of contract to be written in French, including for
businesses since the notion of "user" applies not
only to consumers, but also to businesses,
professionals &c.
Contacted by the editors of LinuxFrench,
lawyer Cyril Rojinsky declared that, as
far as business is concerned, the "Toubon
law" is probably doomed to change since
it is in contradiction of European directives
on the subject, but whatever about that, the
problem is still valid for individuals, and
while waiting for it (French law) to change,
French companies have to deal with it, since
it is the law of the land.
A programme under the GPL can suddenly
change licence.
Another problem, much more serious, is
that according to French law, the author of
a free programme can, at any time, invoke
the invalidity of the licence for this
software by simply changing the licence.
In effect, the law of intellectual
property stipulates that the granting of
rights by the author is subordinate to
the condition that each of these granted
rights be the object of a distinct clause
in the granting act (i.e. the licence) and
that the granting of any such rights be
delimited with respect to its scope and its
grantees, and also with respect to its
location (i.e. where such rights may be
excersised)  and duration of any such grants.
[3] This is not the case of the GPL nor of
other free licences. Briefly, this means
that in France, or elsewhere if the author
is French, that which is under the GPL could
revert to proprietary from one day to the next.
The problem of the guarantee "hidden defects".
An other very serious flaw is that of the
guarantee. The GPL licences and others show
that the software is delivered "without
guarantee". You are going to immediately
reply that commercical programmes carry the
same clause in their licence contracts,
and this is correct. However, whatever is
written in a licence contract, one cannot
free oneself from the "guarantee from
hidden defects", since it is imposed in the
Civil Code. This concept is poorly understood
by the layman, it protects the buyer
(whoever it may be, individual or business,
since it specifies the Civil Code and not
consumer protection law) against hidden
defects, deliberate or made in good faith by
the seller.
For example, if one buys a pair of socks
in a sale, and the shop has a notice
specifying that "Sale items are neither
refunded nor exchanged", and on arriving
home you notice that one of the socks has
a hole in it, several scenarios are possible.
You could have checked the socks before
purchase: the flaw is deemed "obvious" and
you can sing for your money.
You couldn't check the socks (they were
packaged for example), and in this case,
despite the notice "neither refund nor
exchange", you may invoke "hidden defect"
and have them changed or obtain a refund,
it's up to you.
Personally, I have already invoked in shops
the "hidden defect" clause and it always
worked well (shopkeepers are always very
cooperative if you quote a couple of words
of the Civil Code).
The concept of hidden defect is rather
wide, it is necessary that you hadn't
the possibility of discovering the defect
before buying the product and then
(according to the Civil Code) that you
wouldn't have bought it at that price if
you had known about the
defect.
The third case which is much rarer , is
if you are able to show that the vendor had
knowledge of the defect (hidden), but didn't
inform you. In this case, not only does he
have to reimburse the product, but all
expenses incurred by the sale (metro
tickets to go to the shop, the fuse
which blew when you plugged it in &c.)
This idea of "hidden defect" applies to
all products, including programmes. This
was made abundantly clear by the
authorities (and the courts) surrounding
Y2K.
This is particularly inconvenient for
free programmes, since a site which
offers a Linux distro for download is
supposed to provide a guarantee against
hidden flaws.
LinuxFrench asked Cyril ROJINSKY if
in the case of a free programme,
one could speak about a "hidden" defect
since the source code was available,
he replied "Actually, concerning the
guarantee, the question of obvious
defect will arise. This analyis will
be different depending on whether the
person who downloads the distribution
is an IT professional or not".
OpenSource has this advantage over
the proprietary programme: it protects
the distributor against a guarantee of
hidden defect insofar as the buy is an
IT person. But, for distribution to the
public at large, the problem remains
the same.
Roughly Speaking.
Lawyer Cyril ROJINSKY said it himself,
this study is far from being exhaustive
and many other areas could be explored.
During this interview, we asked ourselves,
for example, about the fragility of the
GPL clause which forbids linking source
code under the GPL with proprietary code.
In effect, the laws of intellectual
property give the right to the user
to modify a programme with the
intention of permitting interoperability
with another programme. If for that,
I need to link with a proprietary library
(communication protocol, device driver)
I may consider as "null and void" this
clause of the GPL.
The conclusion of this study is a wake
up call for the community. "Freedom"
merits more than these shoddy licences,
which should be modified before court
cases over them proliferate and put at
risk the undeniable originality of
this effort.
---------------------------
[1] Une publication de l'Institut
de recherche en propriété
intellectuelle, No4 Juillet 2002
[2] Une telle clause de contrat
qui est opposée à ce que dit la Loi
française est qualifiée en terme
juridique de « clause réputée
non-écrite », c'est-à-dire
qu'on fait comme si cette clause
n'était pas écrite dans le contrat.
C'est pour cela par exemple que vous
pouvez signer un bail pour un
appartement qui stipule que
les enfants sont interdits dans
l'immeuble, et envisager sans
inquiétude d'avoir quand même
un enfant, en effet le code civil
stipule que le devoir d'un locataire
d'un appartement doit se comporter
en « bon père de famille »
[3] Article L131-3
___________________________________________________________
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Quoting Breathnach, Proinnsias (Dublin) (breatpro@exchange.ie.ml.com):
> Is there any reliable way to calculate your connection speed if you don't
> trust what the modem reports?
Do a wget of a file of known length, in a script that runs "date" before
and after (or equivalent).
Be aware that speed between you and your upstream link is one thing;
speed through countless congested routers to a faraway location may be
quite another.  Remember that hardware-level compression is a factor.
(The file you wget will probably be precompressed.)
In the area of the slightly more exotic, be aware that different traffic
may have higher priority and thus more available bandwidth at various
points in the transit to/from you -- and that some traffic may go via
different paths coming vs. going.
Be aware that raw bulk transfer speed may not be the only thing that
matters:  Depending on what you're doing, the modem's connection latency
might matter, and this differs widely between modems.  (It matters more
for interactive sessions, e.g., ssh remote logins, where each keystroke
is echoed from remote.)
--
Cheers,                    "Send a policeman, and have it arrested."
Rick Moen                     -- Otto von Bismarck, when asked what he
rick@linuxmafia.com               would do if the British Army landed.
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On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, John Moylan wrote:
> Hmm, speaking of cheap machines etc, has anyone tried this sort of
> thing:  ? or more importantly
> has anyone had any positive/negative experiences with the Via mini-itx
> boards/via c3 processors.
My laptop has a Via C3 processor. I use Debian with a self-compiled
2.4.19 kernel, and have had absolutely no problems with the chip at all
(quite the opposite, in fact).
I had to compile for "686" in order for 3D acceleration to work (the
kernel has an option specifically for the Via C3), but I assume that was
a kernel problem rather than a hardware problem.
Trevor Johnston
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Quoting Paul Linehan (plinehan@yahoo.com):
> The point here is that (under French law) the author can change the
> terms of the licence arbitarily. This is because any granting of
> rights by an author must be clearly delimited in terms of how long,
> where, to whom, dates and times.
The GPL and similar licences are explicitly permanent grants of rights
attached to an instance of his work.  (The other stuff mentioned
concerns contract law, e.g., the required element of privity, etc.)
> In the absence of such limitations, the original author has the right
> to change his software back to closed on a whim.
No, the author has the right to issue _additional_ instances under a
different licence, such as a proprietary ("closed" [sic]) licence.
> Rick Moen makes the point that it is not a sale but rather a granting
> of rights which are not default.
>
> See the bit about even the granting of rights by an author having to
> be explicitly specified - under French law.
The analysis, here and elsewhere, concerns contract law.  This isn't
contract law.
This isn't the first time copyright attorneys have stumbled on this
subject.  I'm sure it won't be the last.
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Rick Moen            viruses is a continually evolving computer operating
rick@linuxmafia.com  system that attracts the efforts of eager software
developers."  -- Bill Gates
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Hi everybody!
I'm writing a web application in java (tomcat + jsp/servlets + database
access with postgreSQL).
This will be released under the GPL and will eventually be useful as a
framework for other web applications.
The application main focus is e-commerce, but not limited to that.
I would like to use some form of cryptography to protect data on the
database, but I have some problem figuring out the right approach.
Above all, how to store passwords and keys in a shared web server.
A problem that I was unable to solve is how to store keys for
encryption/decryption. The api that I'm using is the jca (jdk1.4.x),
and the methods of saving generated keys in keystores fails always.
I can serialize the object, and store in the database, but this is not
the most secure approach: this key is needed to decrypt data in the
database, but the database is accessible from the web application.
Assuming that I can find a good and secure place where to store the
database password, I can use a different database with different
user... Argh... to complex and doesn't really solve the problem.
Where I can found good documentation about this topic?
There is another approach that I would share with the list, something I
thought that can be of bit interest, but probabily wrong and insecure.
After all, I'm a real beginner in secure programming, and I'm here to
learn methods and technics.
First of all, I need a secure way to keep database passwords secure, so
I have to keep them separate from the main server. The right approach
could be using a small java bean application that run as normal user
(not tomcat, so it is not shared with other web services or, worst, the
nobody user), that has no shell login, but has a default home directory
or a place where it can hold passwords and keys.
The web application could then open an ssl connection (could be done in
the init method at server startup) to get database passwords. The small
bean could check via code signature/rmi/whatever else that the source
is the right one, and handle all the database connections, or give the
db connection/password to the main web application.
In this way, we solve the problem of keeping the keys and passwords in
shared directories, and also, an attacker should get root/bean user
account to read data. This is not perfect, and works only if your
provider gives the opportunity to configure a separated java
application (that means, really, another server running in the
background).
Any suggestions?
Thank you,
Mario Torre
--
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See


Matthias Haase wrote:
> The bytecode-interpreter *is* disabled on RH8, defined at line 3 in
> the Specfile of the SRPM.
Right you are.  The SRPM includes a patch to enable it, but then the
specfile defaults to not applying that patch.  I saw the former but
missed the later.  Egad, what a convoluted maze.
Sorry for the misinformation!
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Any one out their have any RPMs for the new KVim that was just released
that'd be suitable for RH7.3?
The website (  ) mentions some
experimental RPMs for Suse/COnnectiva/Slackware but none for Mandrake...
-- \m/ --
...in 29 days - The Odyssey begins...
www.symphonyx.com
mark@talios.com - ICQ: 1934853 JID: talios@myjabber.net
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Laurent Papier wrote:
>On Tue, 8 Oct 2002 16:24:06 +0200
>Matthias Saou
wrote:
>
>
>
>>Once upon a time, Roi wrote :
>>
>>
>>
>>>mplayer works with dga (if i am root) and works with x11
>>>and always worked with sdl (but not now with redhat 8)
>>>now it gives black screen window and play the music of the movie.
>>>
>>>
>>Strange, because as I said in an earlier post, it works for me. Maybe
>>you're missing the SDL_image or something? :-/
>>
>>
>
>It also works nicely for me.
>
>Laurent
>
>
[roi@roi roi]$ rpm -qa | grep -i sdl
SDL_image-devel-1.2.2-3
xmame-SDL-0.60.1-fr2
SDL_mixer-1.2.4-5
SDL-1.2.4-5
SDL-devel-1.2.4-5
SDL_mixer-devel-1.2.4-5
SDL_net-1.2.4-3
SDL_net-devel-1.2.4-3
SDL_image-1.2.2-3
Seems I got all packages I need.
It worked on redhat 7.3 I did upgrade not reinstall so packages
shouldn't make a problem.
Roi
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On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 04:36:13PM +0200, Matthias Saou wrote:
> Two new things today :
>
> 1) I've had to install a Red Hat Linux 6.2 server because of an old
> proprietary IVR software that doesn't work on newer releases :-( So
> I've recompiled both the latest apt and openssh packages for it, and
> they are now available with a complete "os, updates & freshrpms" apt
> repository at apt.freshrpms.net, for those who might be interested.
Oh, neat.
I have similiar thing in my hands, though it might be migratable if I
had the time to try. I've been using another 6.x repository though.

Anyone tried (dist-)upgrade from 6.x to 7? Theoretically it should drop
in some -compat's (notably libc) and upgrade the rest and after a reboot
and maybe a new kernel (and grub, but I have long before put those to
v6's :) run just fine. Haven't had a spare machine to try it on myself,
though.
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Matthias Haase wrote:
> The recompile of the SPRM failed for me with:
> #----
> RPM build errors:
>     File not found by glob:
> /var/tmp/freetype-2.1.2-root/usr/lib/libttf.so.*
>     File not found: /var/tmp/freetype-2.1.2-root/usr/lib/libttf.so
Weird.  I had no problems at all rebuilding from the SRPM with specfile
modified to enable the bytecode interpreter.  The "check-files" test
warns that "/usr/share/aclocal/freetype2.m4" was not included in any
package, but other then that, it's all perfectly clean.
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On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 11:05:21PM +0200, Matthias Saou wrote:
> I've put up a new Red Hat Linux 8.0 build of nessus here :
>
>
> It's 100% untested, although the build should be ok. The new menu was
> added, but some configuration files may be better with new or different
> defaults.
>
> Feedback is very welcome!
It works very nice, would you consider upgrading it to 1.2.6 released only a
few hours after your build?
Thanks!
On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 01:49:11PM +0200, Renaud Deraison wrote:
> I'm pleased to announce the availability of Nessus 1.2.6, which should
> be one of the last versions of Nessus 1.2.x (hopefully), as I will soon
> open a new unstable tree and start to break things again :)
>
> What is new in Nessus 1.2.6, in comparison to 1.2.5 :
>
> * changes by Michael Slifcak (Michael.Slifcak at guardent.com)
>      + Added Bugtraq cross reference in the plugins
>      + Added support for BID in nessusd (this has yet to be done on
>        the client side)
>
> * changes by Axel Nennker (Axel.Nennker at t-systems.com)
>      + fixed the xml and html outputs
>      + fixed array issues in a couple of plugins
>
> * changes by Michel Arboi (arboi at bigfoot.com)
>      + find_service now detects services protected by TCP wrappers
>        or ACL
>      + find_service detects gnuserv
>      + ptyexecvp() replaced by nessus_popen() (*)
>
> * changes by Renaud Deraison (deraison at cvs.nessus.org)
>      + Fixed a bug which may make nasl interpret backquoted strings
>        (\n and \r) received from the network (problem noted by Pavel
>        Kankovsky)
>      + nmap_wrapper.nes calls _exit() instead of exit() (*)
>      + Solved the lack of bpf's on Free/Open/NetBSD and MacOSX by
>        sharing _one_ among all the Nessus processes. As a result,
>        Nessus's ping is much more effective on these platforms
>      + bugfix in plug_set_key() which would eventually make some
>        scripts take too long when writing in the KB
>      + Plugins of family ACT_SETTINGS are run *after* plugins of
>        family ACT_SCANNERS
>      + replaced the implementation of md5 which was used when
>        OpenSSL is disabled by the one from RSA (the old one would
>        not work on a big-endian host)
>      + Fixed plugins build issues on MacOS X
>      + The nessus client compiles and links against GTK+-2.0. Of
>        course, it will be horrible and unstable, as the GTK team
>        does not care about backward compatibility
>
> (*) These two modifications solve the problems of nmap hanging under FreeBSD
>
>
>
> Special thanks go to Michael Slifcak, whose work on Nessus during the
> last months have been truly appreciated even if they have not always
> been as underlined as they should have been. Michael, thanks again !
>
>
> AVAILABILITY:
>
> Nessus 1.2.6 is available at
--
Axel.Thimm@physik.fu-berlin.de
_______________________________________________
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Since libdvdcss-1.2.0, I have been unable to play DVDs using ogle, xine,
vlc, or mplayer.  They all show a scrambled picture with (VERY) choppy
audio.  When I run xine I see tons of these in the console:
liba52: a52_block error
liba52: a52_block error
liba52: a52_block error
liba52: a52_block error
audio_out: inserting 5859 0-frames to fill a gap of 10989 pts
metronom: audio jump
liba52: a52_block error
Has anyone seen this before and know how to fix it?  Or should I file a
bug report?
Thanks for your help.
- Jon
--
jon@tgpsolutions.com
Administrator, tgpsolutions

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RPM-List mailing list


I posted about this last week, and I'm still stumped.  apt-get is just
not working for me, and I can't figure out what the problem is.
I've tried removing the apt rpms, making sure to remove any traces left
behind (/etc/apt /var/state/apt /var/cache/apt), and still, I get
"couldn't find package xmms-mp3" when running "apt-get install xmms-mp3".
Any clues?  Here's a log of a fresh try:
root@canarsie:/tmp # rpm -e apt apt-devel
root@canarsie:/tmp # rm -rf /etc/apt /var/cache/apt /var/state/apt
root@canarsie:/tmp # rpm -ivh apt-0.5.4cnc7-fr1.i386.rpm apt-devel-0.5.4cnc7-fr1.i386.rpm
warning: apt-0.5.4cnc7-fr1.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID
e42d547b
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
1:apt                    ########################################### [ 50%]
2:apt-devel              ########################################### [100%]
root@canarsie:/tmp # apt-get update
Ign  redhat/8.0/en/i386 release
Get:1  redhat/8.0/en/i386/os pkglist [1276kB]
Get:2  redhat/8.0/en/i386/os release [108B]
Get:3  redhat/8.0/en/i386/updates pkglist [14B]
Get:4  redhat/8.0/en/i386/updates release [113B]
Get:5  redhat/8.0/en/i386/freshrpms pkglist
[57.1kB]
Get:6  redhat/8.0/en/i386/freshrpms release
[125B]
Get:7  redhat/8.0/en/i386/os srclist [152kB]
Get:8  redhat/8.0/en/i386/updates srclist [14B]
Get:9  redhat/8.0/en/i386/freshrpms srclist
[14.4kB]
Fetched 1500kB in 11s (125kB/s)
Reading Package Lists... Done
root@canarsie:/tmp # apt-get install xmms-mp3
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package xmms-mp3
root@canarsie:/tmp # apt-cache search xmms
root@canarsie:/tmp #
Beats me..
-SteveK
--
Steve Kann - Chief Engineer - 520 8th Ave #2300 NY 10018 -  (212) 533-1775
HorizonLive.com - collaborate . interact . learn
"The box said 'Requires Windows 95, NT, or better,' so I installed Linux."
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On Mon, 2002-10-07 at 13:28, Matthias Saou wrote:
> I've never heard of any CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive having problems with DMA...
> although there probably is since Red Hat decided to default disabling it a
> few releases back :-/
Heh. I get to see bad CDROM problems all the time. Mostly when vendors
buy crap cables to try to save $0.02/each, but there are chipsets and
drives with known DMA issues as well.
> Normally, even if you try to enable DMA and your device doesn't support it,
> it simply don't be able to make the change, and that's it. The problem IIRC
> is with crappy hardware that is supposed to support DMA but doesn't work as
> expected when it's enabled... maybe Chris could confirm this? ;-)
Usually if you enable DMA on a CDROM that can't handle it gracefully you
won't be able to read data off it relably, and that's about it. No
end_of_the_world problems, and easily fixed.
> I guess I'll settle for the /dev/dvd link change as described and putting
> the DMA tip in the %description :-)
My biggest beef with automatically setting /dev/dvd is that I always
seem to have a CD-Burner and a DVD drive (or DVD burner) in the same
box, and I usually have the DVD as the second drive /dev/cdrom1 in
"kudzu-speak". I agree that the %description is the best place for the
tip. Unless someone can come up with a way to probe CD/DVD drives to
divulge their largest supported media size without loading ide-scsi or
having that media currently in the drive.
--
Chris Kloiber
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On Tue, 2002-10-08 at 04:48, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Jesse Keating wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 7 Oct 2002 19:28:51 +0200
> > Matthias Saou
wrote:
> >
> > # I've never heard of any CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive having problems with
> > # DMA... although there probably is since Red Hat decided to default
> > # disabling it a few releases back :-/
> >
> > When I worked as a PC repair tech for a Computer store chain, I did
> > run across quite a few DVD drives that would lock up if DMA was
> > enabled.  It's more of a chipset/drive problem than a Drive by itself.
>
> And my IBM Intellistation would lock up instantly .. now this is actually
> quite funny .. if DMA was enabled for the CD-ROM *and* you tried to access
> a CD with Joliet extensions. Otherwise it worked just fine with DMA
> enabled :)
Odd. Did I certify that one? What's the 7-digit IBM model number, and
which version of Red Hat were you running?
--
Chris Kloiber
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Oooops!
Doesn't work at all. Got this on startup and on any attempt to change folder (which fail)
/Anders
can't read "flist(seqcount,lists/exmh,unseen)": no such element in array
(reading value of variable to increment)
invoked from within
"incr flist(seqcount,$folder,$seq) $delta"
(procedure "Seq_Del" line 16)
invoked from within
"Seq_Del $exmh(folder) $mhProfile(unseen-sequence) $msgid"
(procedure "MsgSeen" line 7)
invoked from within
"MsgSeen $msgid"
(procedure "MsgShow" line 12)
invoked from within
"MsgShow $msgid"
(procedure "MsgChange" line 17)
invoked from within
"MsgChange 73 show"
invoked from within
"time [list MsgChange $msgid $show"
(procedure "Msg_Change" line 3)
invoked from within
"Msg_Change $msg(id) $show"
(procedure "Msg_Show" line 7)
invoked from within
"Msg_Show cur"
("eval" body line 1)
invoked from within
"eval $msgShowProc"
(procedure "FolderChange" line 55)
invoked from within
"FolderChange lists/exmh {Msg_Show cur}"
invoked from within
"time [list  FolderChange $folder $msgShowProc"
(procedure "Folder_Change" line 3)
invoked from within
"Folder_Change $exmh(folder)"
(procedure "Exmh" line 101)
invoked from within
"Exmh"
("after" script)
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Exmh-workers mailing list
Exmh-workers@redhat.com


On Tue, 2002-10-08 at 10:36, Matthias Saou wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Two new things today :
>
> 1) I've had to install a Red Hat Linux 6.2 server because of an old
> proprietary IVR software that doesn't work on newer releases :-( So I've
> recompiled both the latest apt and openssh packages for it, and they are
> now available with a complete "os, updates & freshrpms" apt repository at
> apt.freshrpms.net, for those who might be interested.
Gack. Did you try 7.3 with the compat-glibc first? Or does it require an
antique kernel?
--
Chris Kloiber
_______________________________________________
RPM-List mailing list


On Tue, 08 Oct 2002 13:05:53 -0700
Ben Liblit
wrote:
> > RPM build errors:
> >     File not found by glob:
> > /var/tmp/freetype-2.1.2-root/usr/lib/libttf.so.*
> >     File not found: /var/tmp/freetype-2.1.2-root/usr/lib/libttf.so
>
> Weird.  I had no problems at all rebuilding from the SRPM with specfile
> modified to enable the bytecode interpreter.  The "check-files" test
> warns that "/usr/share/aclocal/freetype2.m4" was not included in any
> package, but other then that, it's all perfectly clean.
Hi, Ben,
it seems, the RH freetype package should be repacked,
see for this

Please, can you atach and send your sucessfully rebuild of the RH freetype
rpm with the bytecode enabled to me?
--
Regards from Germany
Matthias
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RPM-List mailing list


I wrote:
> [The bytecode interpreter] may improve non-antialiased rendering, but
> only at the expense of making a mess of antialiased rendering.
Then again, perhaps the particular font I'm using just has bad
bytecodes.  That font is "QuickType II", grabbed off my Windows
partition, where it was installed by I-have-no-idea-which-application.
Anybody else experimenting with bytecode-enabled freetype, presumably
with different fonts?  Do you find the same bad antialiased rendering
that I found, or do other fonts work well?
_______________________________________________
RPM-List mailing list


Once upon a time, Chris wrote :
> On Tue, 2002-10-08 at 10:36, Matthias Saou wrote:
> > Hi there,
> >
> > Two new things today :
> >
> > 1) I've had to install a Red Hat Linux 6.2 server because of an old
> > proprietary IVR software that doesn't work on newer releases :-( So
> > I've recompiled both the latest apt and openssh packages for it, and
> > they are now available with a complete "os, updates & freshrpms" apt
> > repository at apt.freshrpms.net, for those who might be interested.
>
> Gack. Did you try 7.3 with the compat-glibc first? Or does it require an
> antique kernel?
It requires a 2.2 kernel, plus antique just-about-everything :-/ Real crap!
Matthias
--
Clean custom Red Hat Linux rpm packages :
Red Hat Linux release 7.3 (Valhalla) running Linux kernel 2.4.18-10acpi
Load : 0.00 0.03 0.00
_______________________________________________
RPM-List mailing list


On Tue, 08 Oct 2002 23:15:07 -0700
Ben Liblit
wrote:
> Ick.  Perhaps this is why Red Hat turned the bytecode interpreter off.
> It may improve non-antialiased rendering, but only at the expense of
> making a mess of antialiased rendering.
>
> This may come down to a matter of personal aesthetics, but for my part,
> I'm going back to Red Hat's standard packages with the bytecode
> interpreter turned *off*.
Yes, confirmed, but for my part, I'm using mostly non-antialiased fonts
and
they are true ugly without the bytecode interpreter enabled.
Remember my stupid request about your RPM ;-)
--
Regards from Germany
Matthias
_______________________________________________
RPM-List mailing list


Hi.
Brian Fahrlander
wrote:
>     What's it take to ensure we're covered against this kind of
>     childish/moronic/Microsoft-era problems?
Well, I am checking the packet signatures while building the apt-tree.
Not very pretty, not very fast, but it works.
Nonetheless:
did anyone ever play with this:

--
R!
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RPM-List mailing list


Once upon a time, Brian wrote :
>      OK, it's now time to work out the PGP securing of apt repository
>      traffic. I've never gotten anything but "sitename.whatever will not
>      be authenticated" until running Redhat 8.0 when I get something
>      about having "No Key" for various files.
I don't think gpg signing my repositories will help anything, as it will
just ensure that my passphrase was typed to confirm the md5 signatures of
all pgklists and srclists. Basically, you'll then just be sure that it's me
who generated the files, and this will of course prevent automating the
process of updating the apt repository when Red Hat updates show up.
In Red Hat Linux 8.0 though, the warnings about "No Key" appear until you
import the right gpg public keys directly with rpm, for example :
rpm --import /usr/share/doc/apt-0.5.4cnc7/RPM-GPG-KEY
(this will import my key, which is used to sign all freshrpms.net packages)
Hopefully it is possible to the tell rpm to install *only* packages who
verify against an imported gpg key? This for me would be the optimal way to
ensure integrity with the way things curently work.
Matthias
--
Clean custom Red Hat Linux rpm packages :
Red Hat Linux release 7.3 (Valhalla) running Linux kernel 2.4.18-10acpi
Load : 0.14 0.18 0.17
_______________________________________________
RPM-List mailing list


On Wed, 9 Oct 2002 11:03:11 +0200, Matthias Saou
wrote:
> I don't think gpg signing my repositories will help anything, as it will
> just ensure that my passphrase was typed to confirm the md5 signatures of
> all pgklists and srclists. Basically, you'll then just be sure that it's me
> who generated the files, and this will of course prevent automating the
> process of updating the apt repository when Red Hat updates show up.
Isn't there a packager-key that's concealed inside the rpm?  Things have changed a bit since I used to work with'em, but I thought there was some internal number that must be compared to be correct (or, presumably, return an error.)
> In Red Hat Linux 8.0 though, the warnings about "No Key" appear until you
> import the right gpg public keys directly with rpm, for example :
> rpm --import /usr/share/doc/apt-0.5.4cnc7/RPM-GPG-KEY
> (this will import my key, which is used to sign all freshrpms.net packages)
Hey, cool; wether it protects me or not, I feel better about it.
> Hopefully it is possible to the tell rpm to install *only* packages who
> verify against an imported gpg key? This for me would be the optimal way to
> ensure integrity with the way things curently work.
Yeah, surely there's a flag for that; there is, for everything else, aye?  :)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Fahrländer              Linux Zealot, Conservative, and Technomad
Evansville, IN                    My Voyage:
ICQ  5119262
------------------------------------------------------------------------
angegangen, Schlange-Hüften, sein es ganz rüber jetzt. Bügel innen fest,
weil es eine lange, süsse Fahrt ist.
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RPM-List mailing list


Looks and sounds a hell of a lot like Clare's cat, Violence...
A tall tail or is it a prowling panther?

Security cameras at the Gardiner house filmed the cat
The Plumstead panther has been spotted just yards from the scene of a
sighting made three weeks ago but this time it was caught on camera.
Steve Gardiner, 41, claims to have spotted the large cat in his garden in
Upton Road, Plumstead, in the sixth reported sighting in Woolwich and Bexley
in just four weeks.
Mr Gardiner told News Shopper he watched the big cat as it walked alongside
the house at about 7.15am, on Wednesday, September 25, while his security
cameras captured it on film.
The father-of-four described the black cat as about 3ft long and
two-and-a-half-foot high, with a large body.
He said: "It prowled past the patio doors moving with all the mannerisms of
a hunter.
"It looked at me calmly before moving on."
The bricklayer told how his work colleagues let him know News Shopper had
been following the big cat story so he decided to call our offices with news
of the sighting.
His wife, Karen, 41, later checked the tape which had captured grainy images
of the large cat prowling through their garden.
She said: "I feel sorry for it not living in its natural habitat I'd hate
for it to get hurt."
Mr Gardiner told how he is convinced of the cat's existence saying how their
usually quiet 18-year-old dog barks at "nothing" in the garden but barked
that morning.
He warned: "I don't think these cats are dangerous but, if cornered, they
might jump you."
Sightings of the large black cat are being reported all over the Plumstead
Common and Shooters Hill as well at the Bexley area.
If you have seen the big cat, call News Shopper on 01689 885712.
12:27 Tuesday 8th October 2002
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Tuesday, 8 October, 2002, 13:53 GMT 14:53 UK
Quiz: Know your Cockney Rhyming Slang?
Cockney Rhyming Slang is alive and well with new terms being invented all
the time, according to the new Oxford Dictionary of Rhyming Slang being
published this week.
But do you know a Raquel Welch (belch) from a Billie Piper (windscreen
wiper)?
...
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On Thursday, August 22, 2002, at 10:24  AM, Justin Mason wrote:
> I plan to
>
> 1. figure out the freqs tonight, suggest what tests to drop
> 2. wait for comments
> 3. drop tests that nobody cares about tomorrow
> 4. sed out the dropped tests from the mass-check logs
This step is unneccesary -- unless you've changed the scripts
much, any test in the logs which aren't in the rules files will
just be ignored I think.  You do seem to have changed the
logs-to-c script and removed the bit where you could specify
immutable tests at the top -- I took a brief glance through the
code and couldn't fully make out how it had changed.  I think we
want to be able to specify immutable test scores though in there
somewhere -- or is that now handled by the tflags stuff?  For
the last couple releases, any test which occurred infrequently
(by thumb-in-the-wind subjective criteria) I set to have
immutable scores, as well as a handful of other rules.
> 5. kick off the GA
>
> BTW I'll be away this weekend at Linuxbierwanderung, so Craig,
> you might
> have to run the GA. ;)
Shouldn't be a problem.  Assuming I can get the darned thing to
compile :)
C


An investigation has been launched after punch bags on sale in Greenwich
were found to be stuffed with incontinence pads and bandages.
Trading standards officers, working for Greenwich Council, were alerted to
the situation after a Bryan punch bag, purchased in Argos, in Charlton Road,
Charlton, was found to be full of bandages.
Also stuffed inside the piece of sporting equipment was a letter from a
woman in Fife stating how she felt quite disgusted' about the bag and asking
for the filling to be tested.
The unfortunate shopper had bought his first bag, at Argos, in Lewisham High
Street, but had returned it because on investigation of a leak he was
horrified to discover it was filled with incontinence pads.
So far, officers have purchased two of the punch bags, only to find they
contain incontinence pads and strips of shredded duvet.
Cabinet member for public services Councillor Angela Cornforth said: "This
is one of the strangest stories I have every heard.
"Our officers are in the process of investigating and will no doubt discover
why the bags contain such unusual contents."
12:18 Tuesday 8th October 2002
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On Sat, 24 Aug 2002, Adam L. Beberg wrote:
--]And yet STILL noone is out there creating _public domain_ content. Is there
--]even one person out there can can even begin to talk without being a
--]complete hypocrite? And no the "open source" people cant talk either, the
--]GPL aint even close. I know I cant talk.
All my music is in the Public Domain.
There are others.


> If the creator didnt say you could have it without paying, it's theft, so
> simple, hell that's even in all the major holy books.
Wow, I've got a great idea!  I'll hire a skywriter to write "you can't
look at this without paying," then lock up everybody who looked at it and
didn't pay!  It can't fail -- Jesus is on my side!


Lucas Gonze:
>Senders should vary the recipient list to include non-targets, like party
>officials, and to exclude targets enough to give them plausible
>deniability.
Which means the sender has a list of who the true
targets are, and who the fake targets are, and
scripts for mixing these. On the receiving side,
my email client distinguishes between messages
that are read, and messages that are not. I like
to mark or save messages that are particularly
interresting or important to me. And even if I
make a point to delete "suspicious material"
immediately upon reading it, even THAT might
leave an interesting kind of trace on my machine.
Sorry, but I don't buy the argument that spam
protects people who want to distribute or see
material the government disapproves.
_________________________________________________________________
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos:


Russell Turpin wrote:
> On the receiving side,
> my email client distinguishes between messages
> that are read, and messages that are not. I like
> to mark or save messages that are particularly
> interresting or important to me. And even if I
> make a point to delete "suspicious material"
> immediately upon reading it, even THAT might
> leave an interesting kind of trace on my machine.
You choose to have your email client do that.  You don't have to.  Short
of Palladium, you can do whatever you want with bytes you hold, including
reading messages and erasing the traces.  I'll buy a chocolate sundae for
anyone who can show otherwise.
An attacker might be able to verify that you *have* read a message (e.g.
by seeing that you saved and edited a copy) but not that you *haven't*.
If your email client was compromised you could put a packet sniffer on the
line before downloading mail.  If an attacker installed a packet sniffer
sniffer, you could run it in a spoofing VM.
The only exception to the rule that your machine belongs to you is --
maybe -- Palladium.
- Lucas


--- begin forwarded text
Status: RO
Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2002 11:39:34 -0400
To: "R. A. Hettinga"
From: Somebody
Subject: Re: "Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch...."(was Re: My brain hurts)
And then there was the one from Prairie Home Companion:
Q. Why is a viola larger than a violin?
A. It  just looks that way because a violin player's head is bigger.
>--- begin forwarded text
>
>
>Status: RO
>Delivered-To: fork@example.com
>From: "Joseph S. Barrera III"
>Organization: Rose Garden Funeral of Sores
>User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.0 [-1214711651]
>To: Flatware or Road Kill?
>Subject: Re: "Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch...."(was Re: My brain hurts)
>Sender: fork-admin@xent.com
>Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 15:17:40 -0700
>
>There are so many good musician jokes.
>
>A couple of my favorites:
>
>Q. What's the difference between a viola and a violin?
>A. A viola burns longer.
>
>Q. What's the definition of a minor second?
>A. Two oboes playing in unison.
>
>- Joe
>
>
>
>
>--- end forwarded text
>
>
>--
>-----------------
>R. A. Hettinga
>The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation
>44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
>"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
>[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
>experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
--
--- end forwarded text
--
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups."
--George Carlin


> From: fork-admin@xent.com  On Behalf Of
Adam
> L. Beberg
>
> If the creator didnt say you could have it without paying, it's theft,
so
> simple, hell that's even in all the major holy books.
Ran across a site which claimed to explain the original meaning of the
Ten Commandments.  It seems some of those meanings have evolved a bit,
too.
In particular, there was a claim that the commandment on stealing was
actually specifically about 'man stealing -- selling a free man into
slavery.  Certainly the US southerners were particularly sensitive to
the term 'man stealer' in a way I didn't understand.
Yep, I know he said all holy books.  No, I don't know if this site was
blowing hot air.  It just read like someone had done their homework.