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The SANS Institute conducted a security briefing today in a teleconference hosted by Alan Paller, director of research at SANS, with a guest panel of Internet security experts on hand to elaborate. A press release from SANS warns of a surge in zero day attacks -- those which have been identified in the wild but have not yet patched by the vendors or projects involved -- and in attacks on the Apple OS X platform.

[In the Marine security forces, our motto was "complacency kills". The same applies to your IT systems. - dcparris]

When Richard Stallman learned that a compiler architect from ATI would be speaking at MIT, he immediately started organizing a protest against ATI's damaging free software policies.

[Hmmm... this at least borders on an overreaction on the assistant's part, especially in light of his promise not to disrupt the speaker. I know of no incident in which RMS has caused a disturbance before. - dcparris]

BOSTON, May 1 /PRNewswire/ -- From the animated world of Pixar Animation Studios to the around-the-world network of PlanetLab, the 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, May 30 - June 3 in Boston, presents cutting-edge technologies in a wide variety of environments. Featuring five days of training -- 30-full- and half-day tutorials -- USENIX '06 provides immediately useful information on the latest techniques, effective tools, and best strategies on topics including Ajax, administering Linux, next-generation storage networking and VoIP.

AN FRANCISCO -- For Golden Gate University, patience and sticking with a legacy application may end up paying dividends. An e-mail/collaboration package and related products long used by the university have matured to a point of being positioned for a glove-like fit with the university's aggressive new Linux and open source strategy.

Jitterbit has released 0.9.10 beta of its Open Source Integration software.

The new release of Jitterbit includes a standalone Jitterbit Apache server included in the installation that is meant to eliminate conflicts with other software that uses Apache or port 80. You can get directly to the downloads at the link below.

Download Jitterbit 0.9.10

A new security company says it has developed a novel approach to protecting PCs from software that exploits unpatched Windows vulnerabilities. Exploit Prevention Labs Inc., founded in 2005 by some of the same executives behind the PestPatrol antispyware product, has developed software that scans network traffic for known exploits, called 0days, which take advantage of unpatched bugs in Windows software.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is frequently considered an organization for developers rather than end users, but Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF, would disagree. "We don't just want freedom for software developers," Brown said in a telephone call interview last month. "We want freedom for all." One of the ways that the FSF promotes this goal is with its high-priority project list.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., May 1 /PRNewswire/ -- NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell, has selected and installed DataCore's SANsymphony software to manage its growing storage area network (SAN) complex that serves over 5,000 users and adds an automatic fail- over architecture to eliminate downtime from failures, upgrades and change requests. Data is absolutely critical to hospital operations and patients' well-being, so it must be not only highly available, but safeguarded against catastrophe. Downtime previously incurred by routine tasks, such as maintenance and upgrades also has to be eliminated in order to spare users from the pain of disruption.

TEL AVIV, Israel – Safend has said that Zvi Gutterman, CTO and co-founder of Safend, has discovered several security vulnerabilities in Linux, the most common open source project. As Safend's CTO, Gutterman designs key technologies such as the algorithms and theory behind Safend Auditor and Safend Protector implementation and is a Ph.D. candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Recently, he has been conducting analysis of the Linux Random Number Generator (LRNG) along with Benny Pinkas from the University of Haifa and Tzachy Reinman from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

RALEIGH, N.C. --(Business Wire)-- May 1, 2006 -- Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, today announced it will present at the following investor events.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. – According to a recent IDC study, open source is becoming a fundamental aspect of services portfolios for IBM Global Services, HP Services (HPS), Unisys, Novell, and other major services providers. The study also reveals that open source is moving up on the investment agenda of companies worldwide, as services providers (mostly services arms of technology companies) have formalized support, training, and certification services to encourage adoption of open source (principally Linux) on their products. As open source software goes mainstream, IDC finds that services vendors must further develop open source capabilities in order to meet their clients' needs and attract new customers.

Another issue of ACM's excellent digest about the risks of using computers in our society.

SALT LAKE CITY, May 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Linux Networx, The Linux Supercomputing Company, today announced that Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has ordered a Custom Supersystem for the NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The new system is designed to dramatically increase throughput for applications ranging from studying weather and climate variability to simulating astrophysical phenomena. The system will supplement the NCCS architecture with improved price/performance and is designed to scale to as many as 40 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) in its full configuration.

As long as Red Hat refused to touch Mono--the open source, multi-platform implementation of Microsoft's .Net framework--various power struggles and problems were occurring. So why include Mono in Fedora Core 5, given the controversies and the fact that Mono isn't strictly necessary for the future of GNOME? Dee-Ann LeBlanc files this report on the technology behind one of GNOME's new Mono-based apps: Beagle.

2008 will be a critical year for Apple, Microsoft, and the Linux contingent. If Apple can't significantly expand its presence by then in the PC market it is likely going to be finished with this segment. Its likely path in that case will be to focus more aggressively on the consumer electronics market it currently dominates.

Actually, this title is not very descriptive, as sharing music with Rhythmbox takes only one click of the mouse. However, this article intends to provide an overview of what happens behind the scenes after this mouse button has been pressed and how Rhythmbox and Avahi work together in order to make the sharing of music such an easy task.

Scott McNealy is out. Jonathan Schwartz is in. And the future never looked brighter for Sun Microsystems—or so we're told. But if Sun's new CEO is going to convince me that his company can remain a dominant player in enterprise software, first he's going to have to get his story straight, particularly when it comes to Linux and open source.

The Ark Linux team has announced the release of the first test version of Ark Linux Live, a Live CD edition of the Ark Linux operating system.

Welcome to this year's 17th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. This issue focuses on Linspire, or more precisely Freespire, a new distribution built with the same user-friendly aspects as its commercial partner, but without the price tag; besides revisiting the Freespire press release, we also bring you an interview with Kevin Carmony, the company's CEO. The news section then informs about all the recent BSD releases, brings news from the Slackware current changelog, and provides updates on the development of Kubuntu. Robert Storey is back with his "tips and tricks" column, advising on how to use GRUB with the XFS file system. Finally, its our pleasure to announce that the April 2006 donation of US$260 goes to the Doxygen project. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

Faster broadband, but only for Linux users?