The Gnat versus the Borg [Microsoft]

This month's Micro Law continues the discussion begun in the last issue, that topic being the contempt of court case against Microsoft that the US Justice Department (DOJ) brought in October 1997. Part I described the background of the present case, and the evidence on whether Microsoft has been coercively packaging Internet Explorer (IE) with Win 95 to swallow up the Internet browser market. Part I concluded that it should be difficult for the DOJ ultimately to persuade the court that the antitying clause of the 1996 consent judgment in US v. Microsoft covers what Microsoft has been doing with IE. It also suggested that the DOJ will probably need to bring a new antitrust case to combat these practices     

Winsocking the competition

Users are throwing bricks at Microsoft for nuking other companies' WINSOCK.DLL entries in Win 95. Users gripe that when they access Internet via either Win 95's MSN (Microsoft Network) or its remote access features, their WINSOCK.DLL file is renamed WINSOCK.OLD. Microsoft then writes in a new WINSOCK.DLL that permits use only of Microsoft's MSN software. Unless a Internet-using program can access WINSOCK.DLL, the program cannot get to the Net. For example, use MSN once and Netscape is unusable after that, because it cannot fire up without accessing WINSOCK, and it can't do that any more. Even one test run on MSN automatically kills any Net browser competitive with MSN. The user is therefore wed to MSN for any access to the Net, and divorce from MSN is tough to make stick. The only way to beat the problem is to use a special Win 95 version of the competitive program, and they are mostly not yet on the market. Is this tactic legal? The facts surrounding the MSN Net browser issue are not completely clear. Conceivably, this is, as Microsoft claim just a technology problem. The author looks at this issue     

基于ASP.NET的FCKeditor的应用

FCKeditor是一款功能强大的开源在线文本编辑器(DHTML editor),它使你在web上可以使用类似微软Word的桌面文本编辑器的许多强大功能。它是轻量级且不必在客户端进行任何方式的安装。FCKeditor兼容Firefox,Mozilla,Netscape和IE。该文对FCKeditor在ASP.NET中的应用给出详细讨论,并给出实例分析。     

When elephants dance, mice watch out! [legal issues]

Bristol Technology develops software tools-in particular cross-platform tools that software developers use to port applications software to Unix from other operating system platforms. Bristol had an agreement with Microsoft to get access to technical information about the Win98 application interfaces (APIs), the means for causing applications software to interact with the operating system. According to Bristol, its Wind/U tool was making it too easy for developers to write Unix programs that could also run under NT. Microsoft therefore used pretexts to deny Bristol access to the updated APIs for Windows NT 5, the operating system that will follow Win98 (probably under the name Windows 2000). Microsoft denies that it is doing any more than trying to gain a fair price for the crown jewels of its intellectual property. Yes; Microsoft is demanding four times as high a fee for access to the source code needed to use the NT APIs, but NT code is worth much more than that for Win98 or Win95. The article focuses on the ensuing legal battle between Microsoft and Bristol Technology     

Trusted Computing Platform Alliance

An industry consortium focused on ensuring that all PCs are secure for electronic business transactions has announced the release of its first version specification. The Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), backed by founding members Compaq, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Intel, said that the specification will adopt the combination of a hardware and a software approach, which includes a security chip that encrypts data whether filed locally, or sent over the Internet by E-mail.     

Case study of a commercial standard

There are several forms of digital currency and electronic charges that will begin to allow micropayments for Internet site access. Once there is a convenient way to collect micropayments, the number of quality sites will increase dramatically and attract a wide range of Internet users. Digital currency schemes, including CyberCash, First Virtual, DigiCash, and CheckFree, have been around for some time. Each has contributed to the development of electronic commerce, but in some ways there were too many solutions to be able to adopt one of them as a general solution. So the author was heartened when in 1995 MasterCard began to work with Netscape Communications to develop LivePayment, an approach to electronic commerce. He thought that Netscape's dominance in both the browser and commercial server market would ensure that the standard would be universally supported. Possibly in reaction to the Netscape-MasterCard alliance, Microsoft and Visa began to develop a competing electronic transaction standard, the Secure Transaction Technology. Later, Netscape and MasterCard accused Visa and Microsoft of planning to charge a royalty for each use of their standard. Eventually the differences were resolved, and in February MasterCard and Visa agreed to support a royalty-free standard called Secure Electronic Transactions. Progress on SET has been good since February. Netscape has announced that it will support SET in addition to LivePayment. Given that Microsoft, Netscape, MasterCard, and Visa are all behind SET, there is a good chance that it will become the universal micropayment scheme     

Securing the Web

For the past year (1996-7), the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft has made Internet news headlines, with each company offering new and better features. But the competition for “more features” leaves an important area of network software behind: security. In fact, packing software with features is the best way to complicate its security. And even if software companies made securing their Web products their highest priority, human related errors would still remain. Securing the Web starts with Web users understanding security. The article goes on to discuss server-side security, cryptography and client-side security     

Social facilitation and human–computer interaction

The Computers As Social Actors (CASA) research paradigm has examined how individuals respond to computers programmed to interact in various ways. In the current research, we extend the principles of CASA to determine whether computer icons can be used to produce social facilitation effects. Varying task difficulty and the presence or absence of a computer icon (i.e., Microsoft word’s Clip), performance on a typing task is considered. Overall, results provide some support for the contention that the mere presence of a computer icon may influence task performance.     

Designers: the browser war casualties

As Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator battle for dominance of the browser market, each company is adopting different versions of some important technologies: Microsoft and Netscape are innovating along paths that reflect their business goals. In the process though, Web site developers and even Web surfers are paying a price. Microsoft and Netscape disagree over several key Web standards under consideration by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), including several key aspects of Dynamic HTML (DHTML). Internet Explorer and Navigator will thus use formats that differ in some key ways. Therefore, to develop a Web site that can work with both browsers, a designer must create either two sets of sites, which costs additional time and money, or one site that satisfies the elements that both browsers have in common, which limits the capability of the site to take full advantage of each browser's strengths. This, in turn, has limited DHTML usage to a small subset of the capabilities that would be possible if there was no standards conflict. In addition, the disparity in browser features makes hand coding HTML in text editors difficult, especially when working with HTML 4.0's new features, such as DHTML and cascading style sheets (CSS). This will make life difficult for tool vendors whose business hinges on visually authoring pages that work well with both Internet Explorer and Navigator     

在Visual C++6.0下实现动态HTML浏览视窗

动态的HTML(超文本标记语言)是一种用来创建Web页的脚本语言,现在IE浏览器和Netscape Navigator都支持的动态的HTML,动态的HTML也称之为DHTML。在Visual C++应用程序中也都支持HTML,在制作程序时可将一个动态的HTML脚本作为资源嵌入到应用程序中。     

基于Web Service的计算网格入口的设计与实现

在对网格系统进行分析的基础上,设计了一种三层结构的网格入口体系,采用WebService技术实现了基于西安交通大学高性能计算环境的计算网格入口,并对系统的特点进行了分析评价。入口提供了友好的基于浏览器的用户使用界面,并且屏蔽了环境的异构性和松耦合性,极大地方便了用户对于网格资源的使用。     

论WinXP补丁的另类修复

在2014年4月8日后微软将停止对经典系统Win XP进行技术支持,届时我们熟悉的Win XP的补丁程序将不在开发,使Win XP系统使用安全性大幅度降低。缺失漏洞的修复环节给操作系统使用带来了较大的风险,采用我们的网络边界虚拟补丁＋可持续性数据双向强策略防护模式将大大增强经典系统Win XP的使用安全性。     

Ode to ‘Digital Defenders’

The advent of spring is typically a time of optimism, but this year we have been treated to quite a rude demonstration of the dangers of electronic commerce in the world. The now infamous I LOVE YOU virus was a case study of the risks to a global electronic commerce environment that is built in large part on an increasingly common applications infrastructure. It is a fact that in nature, biological diversity ensures that an entire species should not be vulnerable to a single infectious organism. In this incident, the users of ‘alternative’ software, such as Netscape and Lotus Notes were able to watch sympathetically while co-workers who used Microsoft products were plagued by the virus and the flood of variants. There is tangible benefit to ‘thinking differently’, at least when it comes to reducing the impact of micro-computer viruses. The lack of diversity and the ubiquity of Microsoft products demonstrated what information security professionals have known for quite a while, that cyber criminals also benefit by identifying vulnerabilities of ‘standard’ applications.     

Micro law: patenting computerized methods of doing business

E-Data's patent on the idea of selling merchandise over the Net is only one of many ambitious schemes to patent computerized methods of doing business. Another example, involved in a pending appeal before the Federal Circuit (the patent appeals court) is the Boes patent of the State Street Bank case. The many ambitious schemes and this pending appeal raise the nonlegal issue (which the court is unlikely to address) of whether it is good public policy to have patents on computerized methods of doing business     

A Java application for quality weighted 3-d interpolation

iw3d is a tool for 3-d interpolation of scattered data. The program is endowed with a user-friendly graphical interface. The interpolation-algorithm is a modified version of the inverse-distance weighting method. It has the capability for a quality-weighted interpolation. The interpolation can be carried out with a sector-search approach for reducing clustering effects. A semivariogram is calculated for the three cartesian main directions to give an estimate for a selectable search-distance. Tests of the program with a synthetic 3-d data set and a large set of measured subsurface temperatures with different qualities show good results.iw3d is programmed with Java (TM) and is a GPL licensed open source. It has been successfully tested with different Java versions on Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris and on several Linux distributions.The current version is available at http://geomath.onlinehome.de/iw3d/.     

用LabVIEW5.0在Win95/Win98下为自制的数据采集卡开发驱动程序

主要介绍了如何在Ｗｉｎ９５／Ｗｉｎ９８下直接访问物理地址内存的方法,并给出用ＬａｂＶＩＥＷ５．０实现的具体细节,即用ＣＩＮ（代码接口节点）通过ＶＣ来实现。同时也介绍了一种用ＬａｂＶＩＥＷ５．０开发驱动程序的方法。     

Security considerations of network outsourcing

Over the last year or two a large number of organizations have looked seriously at concentrating their efforts on doing what they do best, their core businesses, and at outsourcing where possible the management of their IT. Outsourcing the network or network services can be highly beneficial but brings with it major security concerns. In this article we discuss what can be done to protect the business from network security problems when the network is outsourced. The main instruments available to retain the needed level of control are the contract with the service provider and the Service Level Agreement. We discuss the problems with specifying security requirements within the SLA and of measuring the security service provided. We focus on the issues that the contract needs to tackle and on what it is the contract needs to say. At the end of the day, having an open and cooperative relationship with the service provider is possibly the best way to obtain the necessary confidence that the security requirements are being net.     

Visual Fortran创建Win32 API式的DLL

将Visual Fortran开发的数学模型集成到系统,这样的需求正越来越多.在Visual Fortran开发环境中创建符合Win32API规范的DLL成了一个亟待解决的实际问题.对此进行较为系统的探讨,Win32 API事实上的标准是如何要求的,如何调整Visual Fortran的调用约定,如何消除Fortran 90/95的字符串,多维数组及派生类型与Win32 API中的对应实体的差异等,并用典型示例加以说明.给Visual Fortran创建Win32 API式的DLL提供了操作指南.     

AltiVec extension to PowerPC accelerates media processing

There is a clear trend in personal computing toward multimedia-rich applications. These applications will incorporate a wide variety of multimedia technologies, including audio and video compression, 2D image processing, 3D graphics, speech and handwriting recognition, media mining, and narrow/broadband signal processing for communication. In response to this demand, major microprocessor vendors have announced architectural extensions to their general-purpose processors in an effort to improve their multimedia performance. Intel extended IA-32 with MMX and SSE (alias KNI), Sun enhanced Sparc with VIS, Hewlett-Packard added MAX to its PA-RISC architecture, Silicon Graphics extended the MIPS architecture with MDMX, and Digital (now Compaq) added MVI to Alpha. This article describes the most recent, and what we believe to be the most comprehensive, addition to this list: PowerPC's AltiVec, AltiVec speeds not only media processing but also nearly any application in which data parallelism exists, as demonstrated by a cycle-accurate simulation of Motorola's MPC 7400, the heart of Apple G4 systems     

用SIMAN遗留代码建立32位Windows仿真应用程序

文章详细讨论了对ＤＯＳ环境下的ＳＩＭＡＮ仿真语言进行３２位Ｗｉｎｄｏｗｓ化改造（Ｗｉｎ_ＳＩＭＡＮ）的过程和方法。并且完整地讨论了用Ｍｉｃｒｏｓｏｆｔ Ｆｏｒｔｒａｎ ＰｏｗｅｒＳｔａｔｉｏｎ ４．０、Ｍｉｃｒｏｓｏｆｔ ＶｉｓｕａｌＣ＋＋５．０和Ｗｉｎ_ＳＩＭＡＮ创建３２位Ｗｉｎｄｏｗｓ仿真应用程序的方法和注意事项。关键部分用源代码加以说明并已调试通过。