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Internet servers (such as Web, email, and ftp servers) have been the target for different kinds of attacks aiming to disable them from providing services to their respective users. One particular exploit, which has become almost ubiquitous in the last several years, is the buffer overflow exploit. In Part 1 of this article, we describe the buffer overflow exploit and provide detailed examples to help understand it.

If you're new to Linux, the only the thing you may have to lead you along is the recommendations of those who already know about it. While Rickford Grant's book Linux Made Easy will help you set up Xandros 3 and give a spot-on tour of what you need to know, it's written for those who know far less about computers than they may think.

The Holy Grail of Linux is to be so easy to install and use that the technologically illiterate can do it. The penguin community is working feverishly to this goal, which would give Microsoft's Windows a run for its money.

Security expert Packetstorm's claim to have found a potential denial of service attack in the latest Firefox browser turns out to be a slight over-exaggeration.

With the release of the new version 1.5 of Firefox, there's never been a better time to download the open-source browser, take it for a drive, kick the tires and see what it can do. In the case of a browser, mainly what it can do is show you web pages, hopefully quickly. So the real satisfaction comes from finding enhancements and add-ons, because you can only have so much fun timing page loads with a stopwatch.

Fortunately, Firefox is famous for its pluggable extensions architecture, which allows you to download little snippets of code that act as the software equivalent of small consumer electronics devices, only they are free.

The Secretary of State of Massachusetts thinks it would be a great idea for a task force of political appointees to tell 2000 IT professionals what they can and can't do. How's that again?

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This is a practical selection of the commands we use most often. Press to see the listing of all available command (on your PATH). On my small home system, it says there are 2595 executables on my PATH. Many of these "commands" can be accessed from your favourite GUI front-end (probably KDE or Gnome) by clicking on the right menu or button. They can all be run from the command line. Programs that require GUI have to be run from a terminal opened under a GUI.

Alfresco Software has released the first version of its open-source enterprise content management (ECM) software aimed at small to midsize businesses (SMBs).

The 13-person UK startup's coming-out party was at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) East in Newton, Massachusetts, recently. At the event, Alfresco was one of 16 startups focusing on the open-source market chosen to exhibit at the event's Emerging Elite Showcase, according to the show's organisers.

Intalio, Inc., The Open Source BPMS Company, announced that it has acquired FiveSight Technologies, a privately held company based in Chicago, Illinois. FiveSight is the company that brought to market the first open source implementation of the BPEL 2.0 specification, developed to address the growing need for Business Process Management (BPM) as a core competency for companies large and small.

Comment Away with sound-bite principles. It is entirely possible to write applications as a monolithic slab of undifferentiated code. Indeed, for some this appears to approach an art form, with a stream-of-consciousness code style not dissimilar to Jack Kerouac's spontaneous, amphetamine-fuelled writing style.

Welcome to this year's 50th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. This issue covers a variety of interesting topics, including a call to protest against introducing a DMCA-style law in France, Linux migration efforts by Berlin, Prague and Cape Town, and an insider's feedback to our last week's feature on backporting newly released applications to existing distributions. In the news section we'll introduce Security Enhanced SUSE, congratulate Patrick Volkerding, and draw your attention to a newly compiled list of FreeBSD projects for volunteer programmers. Finally, we'll take a brief look at the new Ark Linux 2005.2. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

Typically, software companies are given a window of between one and a number of months to examine and release patches for the problem, before the finer details are released to the public. But fearwall is understood to have said in his auction description: "Since I was unable to find any use for this by-product of Microsoft developers, it is now available for you at the low starting price of $0.01 - a fair value estimation for any Microsoft product." The seller even offered Microsoft employees a discount: “To qualify, you must provide @microsoft.com email address and must mention discount code LINUXRULZ during checkout," he said.

FOSS.in, India’s largest Free and Open Source Software conference, was held in India’s IT capital, Bangalore, from November 29th to December 2nd this year. The event attracted over 2700 attendees indicating the coming of age of the open source, free software movement in India.

FOSS.In — known in its earlier four editions as Linux Bangalore — itself was sponsored by the Ministry of Information and Technology. The event saw four days of ideological debates, tech exchange workshops and interactions with some of the who’s who of the free and open source world. The event covered a wide range of topics related to FOSS technologies, products and initiatives.

If you spend any time working at the shell, you probably use many GNU utilities. One thing that distinguishes the GNU versions from the classic Unix versions is that the GNU programs are rife with additional options. Some of these options are so useful you may want to create an alias so you can use them all the time without needing to do all the extra typing.

Optimized for PC, MAC, Linux Based Video Editing and Post-Production, Apace Systems Network Storage Equipped With 10GbE Connectivity and in Partnership With Fujitsu Ultra-Low Latency 10GbE Switch Fabric Offer End-to-End High Performance Multi-Stream HDV, SD and HD Workgroup Video Editing Access, Playback and Archive Over 10GbE LAN

With the recent release of Firefox 1.5, many people are eagerly awaiting the new version of its email client counterpart, Thunderbird. Thunderbird 1.5 is slated to be officially released in January 2006 and its Release Candidate 1 had been available for a few weeks now. The enormously effective Spread FireFox has sparked interest in Thunderbird and no doubt had a positive effect on its growth so this is an important step for Mozilla and its supporters. This article take a brief look at Thunderbird 1.5 RC1, looks into what to expect from 1.5, and what the future holds for this email client.

Panasonic Mobile have announced that they are to cease production of GSM handsets from January 2006 and concentrate on 3G handsets. Also, they will cease development on the Symbian platform and concentrate on a Linux-based solution for their phones.