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Projects, Linux, networks, systems, finds and internet standards from 1997.
The dispute over the trademark “Linux” ended in 1997 with an out-of-court settlement that transferred the mark to Linus Torvalds. William R. Della Croce had registered it in Della Croce’s own name in September 1995, although Linux was already widespread, and had sued several distributors. Torvalds, Linux International and companies such as Digital Equipment sued in return.
Read the full postIn 1997 PGP 5.0i was available for download as Unix source code on a DFN server for the first time. This was made possible by a scanning campaign led by Ståle Schumacher: the source code was only allowed to leave the USA in printed form and was digitised again in Europe. The Windows and Mac parts needed a few more weeks because of extensive checking.
Read the full postAccording to Netcraft, more than 43 percent of almost 1.27 million recorded websites ran Apache in August 1997. More than 300,000 of the over 500,000 Apache servers had already switched to the current version 1.2. Microsoft came to 17.69 and Netscape to 11.76 percent, and the CERN server had disappeared from the statistics.
Read the full postIn 1997 Novell worked with Netscape in the joint venture Novonyx on porting Netscape’s products to NetWare. In the next IntranetWare version, codenamed Moab, Netscape’s FastTrack Server was to replace Novell’s own web server, and the LiveWire development environment was to come with it. Novell had not yet officially confirmed the plans.
Read the full postIn 1997, ideas of charging broadcasting fees for internet-capable PCs met with fierce opposition. The industry association for information technology threatened to sue, and research minister Rüttgers spoke of a brake on innovation: a company with 1,000 PCs would have had to pay almost 30,000 marks a month. The fee collection agency GEZ admitted that the state treaty had not foreseen the technology and waived fees for the time being.
Read the full postIn August 1997, PGP 5.0 appeared as a public beta for Linux, as an ELF binary for Intel. Officially, US export restrictions applied, but the file was already on the Dutch Hack-Tic server, and obtaining it from there was considered legal. At the same time, activists in Norway were scanning the printed source code for an international version, PGP 5.0i.
Read the full postRFC 2131 describes DHCP for dynamic addresses and other network parameters from centrally managed pools. Automation simplifies operations and makes the DHCP service critical for network access. Leases connect identity, time and address management.
Read the full postRFC 2104 defines HMAC, which securely combines existing hash functions with a secret key. Good cryptographic constructions use primitives with a clear security analysis. A hash alone does not prove authenticity.
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