The problem itself appear to be in the kernel from version 6.06, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10. 7.xx versions are not affected . This is a serious problem because it could allow full system access among others.

I received quite a few comments this past week following the publishing of California IT Policy Letter 10-01 which formally establishes "the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in California state government as an acceptable practice." While many of my security colleagues offered words of caution following the announcement (and even a couple of "are you crazy" comments), most were pretty enthusiastic with remarks like, "Finally, enlightenment" and "It's about time government joined the 21st century." As a security guy, I've been on both sides of the OSS fence at different times but I've come to the conclusion that anyone who doesn't think OSS has a place in today's business or government simply hasn't been paying attention.

Monday, February 08, 2010 When Linux Nerds Choose Mates from the Windows Herd. Look...let's face this together. Dating can suck. Now when you are young, it's an adventure. One has relatively little "baggage", the emotional scars are few and the dating world is your oyster...so to speak. And you haven't even begun to think about their therapeutic value yet. Ah, youth... But then you find yourself at midlife, choosing from a large pool of potential crisis'. So many to choose from. Maybe there is a divorce or two under your belt, some strong political or religious beliefs that are deeply ingrained, and oh yeah, there's that messy incident with the hacking conviction... Those tend to narrow down the potential list of candidates for life-long bliss. Throw your use/obsession of Linux into the mix and what do you get? More than likely a room at your mom's house and a NASA-level computer bank in her basement.

Sun used to boast that it was one of the largest contributors to open source. That's being demonstrated now that Oracle has acquired the company. Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and subsequent layoffs, are having ripple effects on the open source community. The cuts are also hitting the GNOME accessibility (a11y) team and leading the project to think about the future of a11y efforts in GNOME.

Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government.

The KDE web team is pleased to announce a major redesign of the KDE.org frontpage and buzz.kde.org, just in time for the pending release of our updated Workspace, Application and Development Platform compilation. The redesign is the result of many hours of work by artists, coders, writers and testers. Keep reading to gain some insight into the people and processes behind the retooling.

More than 2,600 partners will converge at this week’s VMware Partner Exchange conference in Las Vegas. Lots of news will surface at the conference. But I'm looking behind the curtains for new clues involving VMware's strategy for Zimbra, the recently acquired open source email provider. Here's an update.

Computer science veteran Andrew Tanenbaum presented the third version of his Minix operating system at the FOSDEM 2010 conference on February 6-7 in Brussels, Belgium.

All of these require a working setup with ifuse, gvfs, libimobiledevice (aka libiphone) etc as per our previous article. In today's article, StoneCut reviews GTKpod, Rhythmbox, Banshee and Songbird and their current status regarding iPhone/iPod syncing.

Many people use BitTorrent clients to download popular movies, music, and television shows for free, although this practice is illegal in several countries. But legal issues aside, distributing files through torrents is an excellent way to reduce server bandwidth and spread them quickly. For example, many Linux distributions will distribute their ISOs using torrents in addition to their server mirrors. BitTorrent makes distributing large files easy and fast because the files are hosted on users’ computers. In order to download the files associated with torrents, you need a BitTorrent client. KTorrent, a KDE project, is a feature-rich client that is completely self-contained from the moment you start searching for torrents until the last chunk finishes downloading. Ktorrent is available for download in most Linux repositories and requires minimal KDE dependencies to run.

Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip [TPM] with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks.

Many eons ago, GNOME 1.4 still lived, and it was good. It was extremely configurable and hackable. You could use either Enlightenment or Sawfish as the window manager, and could customize it to your heart's content. It was even friendly to homegrown GTK+ hacks. And then tragedy struck: the GNOME maintainers decided that 1.4 needed a ground-up rewrite, and thus GNOME 2.0 was born.

The Microsoft Office productivity suite has risen to become the dominant application of its type for business IT management. But there are open source office productivity suites available that may provide a suitable alternative to Office, depending on your requirements. Despite the scores of additional features found in products like Microsoft Office, most workers only need a simple word processor or spreadsheet to complete their day-to-day office tasks. If your staff are not “power users” then having a full-blown office suite on their desktop can be overkill. In this edition of 5 open source things to watch, we take a look at office suites that can manage you business information without emptying the company coffers.

After just a few weeks, SourceForge has backed off its policy of imposing a blanket ban on all users trying to access the site from countries on the U.S. "banned" list. Instead, it announced on Sunday that it's putting the decision in the hands of each project that hosts on the site. According to SourceForge's Lee Schlesinger, the company has no way of knowing which projects should or shouldn't trigger a block.

Last month many developers were scurrying to prepare for the 2.6.33 merge window. When they weren’t doing that, here are a few of the items that were under discussion, starting with the Big Kernel Lock…

Our story so far: Security expert Frank Adversego comes under suspicion when the Library of Congress is hacked by a mysterious cracker with motives unknown and a taste for the bizarre. To protect himself, Frank had better get to the bottom of things - fast.

Increase your internet speed with Namebench. NameBench is a program that searches for the fastest DNS in your area. After the program is finished searching and comparing between DNS it will give you the results including the fastest and nearest DNS in your area. After that all you have to do is edit your connection settings to use the fastest DNS available. NameBench is available for Windows and Mac systems, but most importantly it is Linux compatible.

There will be a ClearHealth 3.0 Community Edition intensive training event on Saturday, February 20th at SCALE 8x in Los Angeles. Learn about the features, operations, technical info, and installation details of the 3.0 edition at this seven-hour event.

Moonlight 3.0, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet plug-in software on Linux and Unix platforms, is now being offered in an alpha release, according to Web pages from the Mono project, which has jurisdiction over Moonlight. The release features infrastructural capabilities designed to move Moonlight closer to the capabilities of Silverlight 3, said Novell, which sponsors Mono.

New figures from webmasterpro.de show surprisingly high market share for OpenOffice.org around the world - peaking at 22% in Poland and Germany. Has the rise of OpenOffice.org to become a true rival to Microsoft Office begun?

Many administrators who use Postfixadmin, a web based tool to manage virtual domains on Postfix, would like to secure the transactions between the PostfixAdmin program and the administrator. At the same time often you do not want to add the extra burden of SSL on the whole domain but just want to secure one directory. The solution is to create a certificate for that one directory only and also locking that directory with a password so only administrators can gain access. The example is on an Ubuntu 9.10 server, which will be very similar to most server procedures.

SourceForge, the open source project hosting site, has announced that it has turned off the "blanket block" on access from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

Media player maker Archos has posted a full Linux distro that will run on its Archos 5 machine. The 5 ships with Android as standard, but open sourcerers can download a special, emebedded build of Angstrom Linux and use it to replace the Google OS.

Oracle's open source strategy was looking a little fenced in this morning, after the database giant lost one of its most prominent voices and OpenOffice was snubbed by Ubuntu developers. Ken Jacobs resigned from Oracle late last week, according to reports. Jacobs was vice president of product strategy in Oracle's server technologies division, and was seen as the vendor's friendly face when it came to dealing with the Open Source community.

Debian Etch is soon to be unsupported by the Debian team, therefore all Debian Linux Servers need to be upgraded to Debian Lenny. I have upgraded many Linux servers to Debian Lenny over the past months, so I am providing this guide on how to upgrade Debian Etch to Debian Lenny.

Do you use Linux in your enterprise? These are the ten ways that I've seen it used. The world's largest technical support, software and hardware companies use Linux on a daily basis for a variety of tasks and solutions. This post gives you an overview of all the ways in which large companies use Linux. Most don't use Linux on the desktop but do use it in ways you might expect (and a few you might not expect) a company of that magnitude to use it. They've leveraged Linux for some of the most critical workloads and 100% uptime service levels. Welcome to the world of enterprise Linux.

After 3 months of hard work, the new version of GLX-Dock/Cairo-Dock (2.1.3) is out. The new version brings a lot of fixes for some existing problems such as smoother auto-hide, automatic detection of indirect rendering for Intel/ATI cards, but the most visible change in Cairo Dock v2.1.3 is the new configuration panel which is now very easy to use.

As we've written about this week, The Christo Rey Catholic Church houses a 25 computer learning center for the residents of East Austin. The HeliOS Project provided the computers and manpower to make this place a reality. This center serves the disadvantaged people in the area and we are proud to provide instructors and volunteers to teach computer classes there and maintain the equipment. I had a meeting with Christina Collazo, the Director of a non-profit, Centro de Aprendizaje ¡Sí Se Puede! that serves this church and the surrounding community. She agreed that the answer was simple. We will dedicate this learning center to Bruno Knaapen.

Innovation is at the heart of our enterprise search strategy, and a commitment to innovation is what brought FAST and Microsoft together. When we announced the acquisition two years ago, we said that we were committed to cross-platform innovation—that we’d “continue to offer stand-alone versions of ESP that run on Linux and UNIX,” and that we would provide updates to these versions to address customer concerns and add new features. Over the last two years, we’ve done just that. We’ve continued to sell, support, and update the Linux and UNIX versions of FAST ESP, and we’ve designed the next wave of FAST products (scheduled for release in the first half of calendar year 2010) to include a cross-platform search core that has been extended to take advantage of web services and support mixed-platform deployment models.

LXer Feature: 07-Feb-2010