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Note: The following post is a guest blog submitted to Microsoft Subnet by a security expert who wished to remain anonymous. Joanna Rutkowska recently released her new security whitepaper and exploit code entitled Attacking SMM Memory via Intel CPU Cache Poisoning. The thing that struck me about her research is just how easy this is to do. There is nothing super fancy or complex about the exploit code. Due to its simplicity, the odds are very high that this attack vector has been in use, even before this research published last month. Still, because this attack is so stealthy, we wouldn’t necessarily have been able to detect it.

The "open" characteristic of open source tools helps enhance, rather than complicate, the teaching process, say its exponents. Roman Tuma, software practice director at Sun Microsystems, Asia South, said the open source model offers an entirely new way for developers and "increasingly knowledgeable", interactive users to collaborate and build upon the shared work done in the development of OSS.

Linus reflects on 18 years of working on Linux, the developer ecosystem and his goal for Linux on the desktop.

You have to read this paper! Microsoft - A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm [PDF], and it's from the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, or ECIS. ECIS has written it in support of the EU Commission's recent preliminary findings, on January 15, 2009, that Microsoft violated antitrust law by tying IE to Windows. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the issue of Microsoft's patent threats against Linux have been framed in a context of anticompetitive conduct.

[Direct link to the PDF for the interested -- Sander]

JauntyJackalope is coming, scheduled for release in April 2009. For every Ubuntu release we like to organize parties all over the world. At these parties everyone is welcome and we get together to celebrate, meet new friends and often introduce people new to Ubuntu to our community and our Operating System. Release parties are not only a great way to meet people but they are a lot of fun!

After Canonical launches Ubuntu 9.04 on April 23, the company will play an encore by launching a series of training courses — for Ubuntu Server Edition and even cloud computing. Here’s the scoop, only from The VAR Guy.

"For the past few weeks, I've been publishing an ongoing interview with Keith Curtis, an ex-Microsoft employee who walked away from a several-year gig at the software giant with a surprising conclusion: Microsoft's proprietary software development model is doomed, he says, and destined to be replaced by community-created open software."

Three years ago, Tom Foremski wrote an interesting piece called "Adapt or die--the choice facing the open source movement". It concluded: "I'll say it again: In one fell swoop Oracle drew a square around the open source movement and unless it can prove that it can remain independent--it is a dead movement." Needless to say, I wasn't too convinced by the argument. At that time, this was a purely theoretical discussion, but with the acquisition of Sun and hence MySQL by Oracle, those points suddenly gain a new pertinence.

In my previous guide about how to set up Enomalism2 on Ubuntu 8.10 I concentrated on just one KVM host. This tutorial is an extension to that article in that it shows how to add further Ubuntu 8.10 KVM hosts to the setup that can then be managed from one single control panel.

It's April 23rd and exactly on time Canonical has released Ubuntu 9.04 a. k.a. Jaunty Jackalope for download. Ubuntu 9.04 comes in three flavours: the Desktop edition, the Server edition and the Netbook Remix a.k.a. UNR. According to the press release: "Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition delivers a range of feature enhancements to improve the user experience. Shorter boot speeds, some as short as 25 seconds, ensure faster access to a full computing environment on most desktop, laptop and netbook models. Enhanced suspend-and-resume features also give users more time between charges along with immediate access after hibernation. Intelligent switching between Wi-Fi and 3G environments has been broadened to support more wireless devices and 3G cards, resulting in a smoother experience for most users."

Gnome 3 will introduce a new vision of usability and rapid change, rather than continuing with the incremental growth and gradual changes of Gnome 2. Gnome 3 may be just as ambitious and disruptive as KDE4. Will it work? Will users accept it? Bruce Byfield gazes into his tea leaves and tries to figure out how it will all work out.

In association with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Red Hat has carried out an open source index study and published it in the form of a world map.

If you’ve read anything about Windows 7 Starter Edition, your first reaction was probably the same as mine: Is Microsoft nuts? This ultra-cheap edition is intended for use on netbooks, but its biggest restriction sounds like a complete deal-breaker: it only runs three applications at once.

[It's like they're giving the market to Linux — Steven R.]

Florian Effenberger is co-lead of the international OpenOffice.org marketing project. Our sister publication Linux-Community asked him how the deal between Sun and Oracle would affect OpenOffice.

ZFS may be locked into the Solaris operating system but “Butter FS” is on the horizon and it’s boasting more features and better performance.

As I alluded to earlier, I am out of the office this week. With me to Italy I took a Samsung NC10 that is loaded with an Intel Atom processor, Intel integrated graphics, an OCZ solid-state drive, and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Prior to leaving I loaded it up with a clean install of the Ubuntu 9.04 release candidate, but what a mistake that was. As was pointed out in the days prior to that, there are a number of regressions present within the Intel Linux graphics stack due to the switch to the Graphics Execution Manager, DRI2, and other work. While the benchmarks showed there is indeed a drop (a large drop in some), this performance drop nearly renders the system useless.

One of the newest features of Ubuntu 9.04 is the Postfix Mail Server/Dovecot enhancements to make it easier to set up a mail server. This article is a review of those improvements and a tutorial on how to fix several problems that were experienced.

IBM is licensing technology from an open-source database company it's invested in, hoping to convince Oracle customers they should switch to its next DB2. The giant has licensed capabilities in five-year-old EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server, which EnterpriseDB claims will cut by 90 per cent the cost of moving off Oracle. The technology is expected to appear in the next version of DB2, version 9.7, to be announced today.

China-based Skytone is the first manufacturer who offers a Netbook with the Android Operating System, the Alpha 680.

Mac users, the card-carrying NRA members of the computing world, would rather use Linux than Windows.