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Despite improvements in code quality, Web servers remain at high risk of being hacked, according to a new paper from researchers who use honeypot technologies to examine how hackers tick. The Honeynet Project, which provides real systems for unwitting attackers to interact with, says Web applications remain vulnerable for host of reasons. These include poor quality code, the fact that attacks can be performed using PHP and shell scripts (which is generally easier than using buffer overflow exploits), and the emergence of search engines as hacking tools.

When the European Commission launched a streaming video service last year which excluded Linux users, large swathes of the open source community became deeply angry. Now, a Surrey local council has shown that open source operating systems can be included in such programmes.

2007 will go down in history as the year Sun Microsystems gave up the reins of the Java platform, releasing it under an open source license to the Java developer community.

The plan is for the rebuttals to be posted on march 5th, to leave plenty of time for people to read about the candidates before the DPL candidate debate happens.

The Gentoo-based SystemRescueCD 0.3.3 live CD was released on March 1, sporting a spiffy new 2.6.19.2 kernel and the WMaker desktop environment. As its name implies, SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM that can be used for repairing a system and its data following a crash.

If a million monkeys typing might eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare, wouldn't a million penguins do just as well? A major book publisher is hoping so with a FOSS-powered online project to create a collaborative novel -- and appropriately, that publisher is Penguin.

The GNOME desktop community will stage its annual European conference, GUADEC 2007, July 15-21 in Birmingham, U.K. Organizers are still looking for ideas on interesting talks, and have requested presentation proposal submissions by March 12.

Though Red Hat is poised to roll out its much-anticipated Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 release shortly, work still continues on previous versions of RHEL. This week Red Hat rolled out a beta release of its fifth update to RHEL 4 officially tagged Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5, providing users with a small taste of the virtualization that is to come in RHEL 5.

Open source software's preeminent vector graphics package, Inkscape, made a new stable release last month. Inkscape 0.45 packs in new features, speed, and usability enhancements, and offers a tempting look at where the package is headed.

In this article, Linux Journal discovers the Citadel groupware server, and boldly declares that this is the one -- though not as widely known as some other solutions, Citadel is the ideal open source replacement for Microsoft Exchange.

Waltham software vendor Novell Inc. credited its controversial deal with Microsoft Corp. for fueling interest in its Linux operating system software in its fiscal first quarter. Article Tools Novell said that Linux sales rose 46 percent to $15 million over the same period last year. In the period ended Jan. 1, the company racked up additional Linux invoices worth $91 million, a 659 percent increase from the previous year. Revenue from these invoices will be recognized in future quarters.

LinuxLink Radio is a free podcast allowing developers to keep up to date with news of interest to the embedded Linux community.

Canadian board-maker Techsol is offering a tiny industrial gateway device preloaded with Linux, along with a lightweight JRE (Java runtime environment). The Gateway Express is based on the company's SA2410 Medallion CPU module, draws under two watts, and is available with IBM WebSphere development tools.

From time to time, it is not uncommon to encounter a confession on the net, a bleating essay that says "I can't run Linux, though I'd love to", and advances a host of assorted "reasons" for this act of commission.

A couple months back, I was at home, working on some changes to my personal Web site. I wanted to see how my work in progress looked in Internet Explorer. On a Windows machine that's as easy as pie, of course, but on my Linux desktop it's not so simple. I usually grab my laptop and boot it into Windows if I need to check something in IE (or interact with a wrongheaded site that requires that browser), but this wasn't an option that day--so I apparently had no choice but to reboot my desktop (which dual boots), select Windows, fire up Internet Explorer, take a look, and boot back into Linux to continue my work.

This year’s event focussed on interoperability, the commercialization of Open Source Software (OSS) technologies and the acceptance of OSS when it comes to running mission critical applications.

Larry Dignan recently posted a piece on Mac in the enterprise (The eternal question: Can Apple go enterprise?). I think a better question is actually why we would want Apple to bother with the enterprise when we have Linux? This assumes, of course, that you're in the market for a Windows alternative. However, Apple has done such an incredibly nice job moving into the world of consumer electronics that I say, "Let them stay there!"

Bug stamp-out list March 2, 2007

For anyone who has been using open source for a while, the current commercial enthusiasm for communities, collaboration, and all things Web 2.0, is rather amusing. After all, the idea that users are not to be regarded simply as passive and grateful recipients of whatever is handed down to them from on high, but need to be treated as partners and participants who can make valuable contributions to the formulation and development of new products, is central to the way that free software works. But some companies that are starting to dabble with Web 2.0 ideas are discovering that you have to be careful what you wish for when you solicit this kind of user feedback. Just ask Michael Dell.

Chairs, anybody?