More quibbles for Keith...

Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Tue, 18 Nov 1997 10:16:05 -0500 (EST)


Keith Dawson writes:
> Son of CDA bill is filed in the Senate
>
> Sen. Dan Coats (R-Indiana) was the main Republican sponsor of CDA-I.
> He has filed a bill, S.1482 [1], that would punish commercial dis-
> tributors of material deemed "harmful to minors" with six months in
> jail and a $50,000 fine. Unlike CDA-I, this proposed statute applies
> only to Web sites. The ACLU, which won in the fight against CDA-I,
> says [2] the the new bill is clearly out of bounds...

Also, I hear on the radio that Coats wants to require sites with
material "harmful to minors" to take a credit card for age
verification; the government offered the availability of such means as
one of its arguments in court for the constitutionality of CDA 1, and
I could have sworn the Supremes' majority opinion (7-2, an unusually
large margin these days for a controversial case, with even the two a
partial concurrence) specifically stated that they didn't buy it...

> ..Pentium "f00f" bug
>
> .... Linux
> was first out of the chute with a f00f fix, introduccing patch
> 2.0.64 [6], which traps the offending op codes before they get
> to the CPU, before Intel had announced its workaround. BSDI is
> testing a fix. Microsoft says it is "in the process of studying
> the implementation of potential workarounds."

This is a bit confused. The first linux patch was incorporated into
bleeding-edge development releases 2.1.63 and .64 --- the 2.1.x series
being a set of kernels which introduce new features and internal
organization (for instance, a radical rework of the way SMP works)
which are not yet regarded as sufficiently stable for ordinary use.

A complete release incorporating these changes in the 2.0.x "stable"
line of development (bug fixes only, at least supposedly) was finally
made sometime yesterday, though patches had been circulating earlier.
This release, however, is numbered 2.0.32, not 2.0.64. There has not
yet been, and will hopefully never be, a 2.0.64 release.

rst