Technology Trends

Google are no longer allowed to name their popular free-mail service “GMail” in Germany. Daniel Giersch har run the similar free-email-service gmail.de since year 2000 - long before anyone at Google even considered the name GMail. They launched their service gmail.com 1. April 2004.

Not their first loss

Google lost a similar case against the British corporation Independent International Investment Research (IIR) in 2005. Google now refer to their e-mail service as “Google Mail” i England. IIR has used the name GMail for an investor service since 2002. They estimated that “GMail” within the UK is worth between 48 and 64 million dollars in 2004.

It is not know how many other gmail battels are left. Gmail.no, for example, is owned by Gallagher & Robertson AS.

Japan’s government has issued a edict to all IT procurements to make Linux and open source software a priority starting July this year. They specifically mentioned that they would like to reduce their dependancy on Microsoft software.
Japan’s central government says it plans to use $1.25 trillion yen, or $10.4 billion, on IT the next year.

Nikkei.net story is that big IT vendors including Oracle, NEC, IBM, HP, Hitachi and Dell are now forming a consortium to develop and sell Linux software and computers to the Japan’s central government. However, Oracle has responded to their story with a claim that Oracle involvement with Linux consortium is not indicated.

It’s interesting to note that none of the corporations claimed by Nikkei.net story to be forming a Linux consortium are major Linux-vendors (like Novell, Red Hat, etc). It’s also interesting to note that most of these corporations are run and owned by foregin devils.

Proof-of-concept local software execition expoit code for a security hole in Internet Explorer 6 which has been known since July 2006 is now posted at milw0rm.com. The security hole has been in the open for a long time, and is fixed in IE7, but this particular exploit code is new and makes it even simpler for anyone who wants to put up a website which runs local shellcode on every IE6-using visitors computers. It also means that more off-the-shelf IE6 exploit code will become available the coming months.

The exploit code at milw0rm just runs calc.exe, but it can easily (using a variable..) be modified to do something much more harmfull. If you are using IE6 then you really should upgrade or check out some of the other browsers who are available such as Opera, Seamonkey, etc.

Increasing number of websites are telling me that I need to “Upgrade my Flash Player” in order to - mostly - view some annoying advertisement or video clip at video websites such as MetaCafe. But I already have the latest working version of Flash for Linux: Flash Player v7.0.

I’ve tried installing Flash Player v9.0. Both when it came out and this week. The result: Mozilla-based browsers frequently luck up, and the only solution is to kill the browser process. This applies to Firefox 2.0, Seamonkey and Galeon. It also applies to Konqueror, which makes it perfectly clear that the lockups are causes by FP 9.x, not the browser running the plugin. Flash Player v7.0, on the other hand, works perfectly. Upgrade, they say? I already have the latest usable version of Flash installed. Flash Player 9.x is a pile of dung on Linux.

It’s interesting to note that Flash Player v9.0 does not cause these problems when it is used in Internet Explorer 6.0 running in the Windows runtime library Wine (A Windows runtime API layer for GNU/Linux).

So I’ll stick with Flash Player v7.0 - until or unless there is a actually working version of Flash Player 9.0 available. You’ve been warned: If you’re using Linux then just don’t “upgarde”, because it will basically destroy your ability to open more than one tab with a flash object without having to restart your browser..

Welcome to Livelyblog. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!