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One potential way for a user to escalate her privileges on a system is to exploit a vulnerability in an SUID or SGID program. SUID and SGID are legitimately used when programs need special permissions above and beyond those that are available to the user who is running them. Unfortunately, a poorly written SUID or SGID binary can be used to quickly and easily escalate a user’s privileges. This leads us to the need for scanning systems for SUID and SGID binaries. This is a simple process.

mokoNinja posted a video a few hours ago on YouTube showing the newly created media player application for the OpenMoko. This is a pretty standard feature for all smart phones, and since I am looking to replace the need for a portable media player when I get a Neo1973, it is nice to see that it is coming along nicely with all the standard features one would expect raised when raised in an iPod generation. While it seems to lack the polish of the iPhone interface right now, OpenMoko seems to be shaping up into a decent contender, and once all the basic functionality is covered, we will start seeing some real innovation that makes open source applications so exciting to use.

Ubuntu is NOT causing aggressive power management settings! I’m afraid that quite some people are getting a high Load_Cycle_Count because their laptop (BIOS or harddrive firmware) uses too aggressive powermanagement. These aggressive power management settings are set by your BIOS or harddrive firmware. Windows and/or Mac OS X might be overriding these settings which might make Ubuntu look bad if Ubuntu doesn’t override these settings.

Day 2 of the Developer Summit was sunny and beautiful, as many took advantage of the rooftop garden near the conference rooms. Starting the sessions today were roundtables about many topics including the community, desktop, server, and others. After these followed the usual sessions, as per today’s schedule: The Community Roundtable, Defining a roadmap for supporting LoCo teams, Rethinking the logout dialog, Automatix and Ubuntu collaboration and Third Party Apt.

You know, I've never found any real use for a shell script. Recently, I found an actual reason to write one for moving and converting audio files using a few less keystrokes.

The problem with distributed computing is that everyone with the technology to reverse-engineer your crypto chip can listen to your broadcast and know exactly what you're trying to break. Build a robust distributed computing application that is opaque to observers—even those who have access to the source code— by attaching a simple neuron implementation to HTTP transport code.

Of all the tasks in FreeBSD, setting up a broadband connection isprobably one of the easiest. All the various BSDs are built aroundnetworking, and most broadband connections operate pretty much like anextended LAN, using the same hardware, often called an“ethernet”connection:...

PulseAudio is a next generation sound server for Linux, making all sorts of "ear-candy" possible: from dynamically changing the volume of individual applications to hot-plugging support for many different devices. Fedora 8 is going to be the first distribution to ship and enable PulseAudio by default and with this in mind we talked to Lennart Poettering who is the upstream and Fedora developer of PulseAudio and Avahi about the work he has put in to this.

Medsphere Releases Code for Development Testing Automation Framework 'Strongwind' Enhances Software Quality, Supports Open Source Community ALISO VIEJO, California, October 30, 2007 - Medsphere Systems Corporation today announced the release of code for a user interface test automation framework that enables developers to create automated quality assurance scripts to test features of user interface applications. Dubbed Strongwind, this new tool developed by Medsphere engineers has improved the process of testing updates and enhancements of Medsphere's OpenVista electronic health record (EHR), a commercial version of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' VistA solution.

Crossbeam Systems has started shipping a massive chassis-style, "unified threat management" (UTM) system based on an open Linux OS. The X-Series UTM server runs the company's Linux-based "XOS" OS, and targets highly scalable firewalls and other security applications for large data centers and service providers.

A settlement has been reached in the case filed last month against Monsoon Multimedia by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of two BusyBox developers. BusyBox is a collection of lightweight, standard utilities that is often used in embedded devices -- and has also been the victim of at least 18 possible license violations in the past. As reported earlier on Linux.com, the case concerned Monsoon's shipment of code borrowed from BusyBox, in a product called Hava -- without any accompanying offer of source code, as required by the GNU General Public License (GPL), under which BusyBox is released.

Since AMD introduced their new Linux display driver last month, we have published a number of different articles looking at the Radeon performance across their different GPU product generations. This ATI/AMD Linux driver testing and exploration continued this month with the release of the 8.42 driver, which finally introduced AIGLX support for the fglrx driver. One area though we haven't yet analyzed is how their official Linux driver now compares to their much-optimized Windows Catalyst driver. Today, however, we will be looking just at that as we compare the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB performance under Linux and Microsoft Windows Vista.

Making the point about Open, Closed and Free Softwares. We can notice that Closed Source software tends to look FLOSS-Like, while Open Source tends to use the Free Culture image. I will expose my views concerning the Free philosophy, and tell why informatics should only deal with Free Software.

Mandriva today announced that the Nigerian government has selected Intel-powered classmate PCs running on Mandriva Linux for educational use in nationwide pilot in Nigeria. Mandriva is working with Intel Corporation and Technology Support Center Ltd. to provide 17,000 Intel-powered classmate PC. The aim of this project is to improve the quality of technology delivered to students, and to help teachers and parents.

With the increase in complexity and data rates, modeling tools need to allow noise-free designs with fast turn-around times for many iterations in the design cycle. IBM Electromagnetic Field Solver Suite of Tools is a suite of full-wave and quasi-static electromagnetic field solver tools used to calculate the electrical parameters for interconnection and packaging design.

Even if you're too old for trick-or-treating this Halloween, you can still get in the spirit of things with these free software games, tools, and applications. Why should kids get to have all the fun?

A recent study has found that open source software's adoption by business has exceeded analysts' expectations, with bright prospects in the future.

"There needs to be a reform in how software purchases are counted. I originally wrote a paper called "The Open Letter to the Gaming Industry" where I outlined many points of interest that need to be reformed in order for the gaming industry to allow for greater competition. I did not, however, publish this paper because I never finished it. But, there is one major point that I continually address that needs to be changed."

Over at our sister site LinuxDevices, we're always looking at small, embedded-Linux systems. While reviewing Freespire recently on a Mini koobox, an Apple Mini-sized system, I began to wonder, Just how small do full-featured, Linux-powered PCs come?

AppArmor is one way to protect your assets on your Ubuntu Gutsy system. AppArmor attempts to protect processes on the server or desktop from security threats. AppArmor enforces limits on what processes can access on the system.