Showing all newswire headlines

Microsoft recently sent out half a million free copies of Microsoft Office, some of which were sent to members of the United States Air Force. Staff Sgt. C. Todd Lopez has informed members of the Air Force that they are obligated to return the software without using it, because of military regulations prohibiting the acceptance of gifts from those with which they do business. Interesting!

Microsoft's legal entanglement with Lindows.com turns focus on possibilities of desktop Linux; Novell and Sun best positioned in enterprise market, says analyst; server Linux penetration could mean opportunity on desktop side.

Skolelinux is an ambitious project that aims to provide schools with a flexible and low-cost IT solution based on Linux and KDE. I interviewed Bart Cornelis (Belgian), Kurt Gramlich (German), Conrad Newton (American) and Knut Yrvin (Norwegian) to learn more about Skolelinux and the role that KDE plays in it.

A variety of issues are addressed in this update.

"I was just sent this photograph, and it made me laugh, so I asked for permission to share it with all of you, so you can enjoy it too. Someone drove by SCO headquarters and took a picture."

The Open Palmtop Integrated Environment (Opie) project to develop a free graphical application environment for Linux handhelds and webpads has released a software develpment kit (SDK) based on the KDevelop3 open source IDE.

"Move to open source frees enterprise communications market from proprietary solutions currently stifling industry innovation and stalling mass-market adoption."

Paul Starzetz identified a new vulnerability in the linux memory management code that can be used by local attackers to obtain root privileges.

Opera board member John Patrick explains why Microsoft's domination of the browser market won't last forever and how Linux will continue to evolve.

MySQL AB's open-source database license has long confused ISVs and others who want to support MySQL but aren't sure whether they need to purchase a license. ... MySQL is open to input.

CVS is a tool to record, manage and distribute different versions of files. In other words, CVS is a version control system. It allows easy collaborative work, as each of the contributors can work in his local copy at the same time, without fear of overriding each other modifications. It allows the recovery of past versions (useful for tracking bugs), the creation of branches (for experimental development or for releases) and more.

Turbolinux Japan announced February 18 that the Department of Computer Science, Waseda University has installed "Turbolinux 10 Desktop" in 300 notebook PCs the department will use in Java programming courses for the new academic year that begins in April.

Lindows.com, Inc. today announced that the Microsoft Corporation has begun legal proceedings in Canada against Lindows.com, Inc. to prohibit the company from using the marks "Lindows", "Lindows.com", and "LindowsOS.

Omar Shahine is one of Microsoft's mail guys. In this blog entry, he discuss IMAP support in Entourage (which he and Mike Fullerton and Steve Friesen designed), Outlook and other clients.

Linux may be heading toward World Domination, but there still are plenty of incumbent legacies (Exchange) that haven't been dominated. There's only one way to deal with them.

An analysis of hacker attacks on online servers in January by UK-based security consultancy mi2g found that Linux servers were the most frequently hit, accounting for 13,654 successful attacks, or 80 percent of the survey total. Windows came in a distant second with 2,005 attacks.

The U.S federal government is looking at open source software in response to the E-Government Act of 2002. This year's Open Source in Government Conference March 15-17 in Washington, D.C., aims to promote the use of Internet and emerging technologies within government agencies as an efficient way to provide citizen-centric government information and services.

Simon Paquet wrote in to tell us that version 0.1 of Minimo, a Mozilla browser for small devices, has been released. As well as creating a slimmed-down version of Mozilla for PDAs and the like, the Minimo project also aims to allow developers to embed Mozilla in any system with limited resources.

CAN-2004-0083: Buffer overflow in ReadFontAlias from dirfile.c of XFree86 4.1.0 through 4.3.0 allows local users and remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a font alias file (font.alias) with a long token, a different vulnerability than CAN-2004-0084.

CAN-2004-0084: Buffer overflow in the ReadFontAlias function in XFree86 4.1.0 to 4.3.0, when using the CopyISOLatin1Lowered function, allows local or remote authenticated users to execute arbitrary code via a malformed entry in the font alias (font.alias) file, a different vulnerability than CAN-2004-0083.

Paul Starzetz and Wojciech Purczynski of isec.pl discovered a critical security vulnerability in the memory management code of Linux inside the mremap(2) system call. Due to missing function return value check of internal functions a local attacker can gain root privileges.