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Research contract from US Department of Homeland Security results in rapid fix to “worst case scenario” security vulnerability in critical software system

"Most operating systems were developed for commercial or technical motives, but GNU was developed for the sake of giving users the freedom to cooperate in a community," said Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project. "If users don't know this, they will be in danger of losing their freedom."

Here is a unique opportunity for all students residing in the Indian subcontinent to win scolarships from one of the leading open source software product companies.

Specialist EPOS provider Viridian Sun and distributor DED Limited offers retailers cost savings when it comes to their EPOS systems with Open Source.

OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt began developing OpenBSD in October of 1995. KernelTrap first spoke with Theo back in November of 2001 [interview], around the time that OpenBSD 3.0 was released, discussing much of the early history of the project. The project has continued to offer regular releases of their "free, functional& secure" operating system every six months, with OpenBSD 3.9 made available yesterday, May 1, 2006.

In this latest interview, Theo examines the past five years of OpenBSD development. He also discusses the OpenBSD 3.9 theme song, "Blob!", detailing what blobs are, why OpenBSD avoids them, and how OpenBSD developers work to reverse engineer them. Looking to the development process, Theo talks about recent and future "mini-hackathons", small and focused OpenBSD development gatherings. Finally, Theo also discusses the OpenBSD project's funding issues, and the response to requests for funding from users of the project's OpenSSH software.

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) will present several new open source-based desktop and security applications on Wednesday at a local Linux event.

Anti-software piracy group the Business Software Alliance (BSA) is offering a £20,000 reward to anyone who informs on their employer using illegal or unlicensed software. The BSA already has an online hotline for people to report the use of illegal software within UK organisations but it has now doubled the reward from £10,000 to £20,000 until the end of June this year.

[The dirty rats! The nice thing about the FOSS community is that you get to resolve most disputes amicably. In other words, "we don't do that here." Apologies to Warren Woodford - dcparris]

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – It’s a rare day indeed when chairmen and chief executive officers go public with complaints about a rival, let alone a long-time partner. But when Larry Ellison of Oracle took some pot shots at Red Hat in an interview with The Financial Times two weeks ago, the Red Hatters’ CEO Matthew Szulik was quick to respond.

People all over the world use Linux in dozens of languages. Since Linux's source code is free and open, speakers of minority languages can add support for their languages themselves, even though a large corporation might not consider them a worthwhile market. If you use more than one language, or a language other than English, you should know about Linux's use of locales to support different languages. Indeed, understanding locales can be useful even if you only use English.

Special to LXer: 2-May-06

Microsoft extended an olive branch to the open source community with the launch of Port 25, but visitors to the Web site have been treating the branch as if it were poison ivy.

[Lxer regulars will enjoy this one. Word of warning: Loftis is apparently confused about the Korea issue - that was very recent. Otherwise, he was dead on about what LXer's new Editor-in-Chief said. - dcparris]

Devicescape has partnered with wireless and wireline switch and router specialist LVL7 on Linux-based "wireless LAN switch" software expected to ship this quarter. LVL7's FastPath Wireless LAN stack leverages Devicescape's Wireless Infrastructure Platform (WIP) to support a variety of intelligent wireless network capabilities useful in enterprise environments, the companies say.

EXIST Engineering, a global company founded by a Filipino, is providing open source technology training in Manila this month, INQ7.net learned.

Linux dependency tree is an attempt to organise common linux libraries and their dependecies into a human readable diagram. The diagram can be used freely by anyone. [Link here: http://110mb.com/deptree/ - dcparris]

Wireless networking specialist Devicescape has added standards-based self-configuration capabilities to its WiFi stacks for consumer electronic devices and wireless infrastructure products, including those based on Linux. The "Easy Access" capabilities are based on Wi-Fi Alliance standards, and make setting up secure, WPA2-encrypted wireless networking trivial, the company claims.

The Age newspaper's IT section had a front-page article discussing a letter sent by a group of women researchers to Bill Gates about Microsoft's 2020 Science Group programme. In essence, the women were raising the issue that no women researchers were included in that group. I decided to write my own letter in response to some of these women researchers, pointing out that there may be better ways to harness womens' research energies towards a better world in 2020, than by aligning themselves to Microsoft.

Last week in part 1 we changed a bale of passwords. Today we'll take two more important steps to lock down our Asterisk@Home server: make sure that all Web administration traffic is encrypted, and lock down OpenSSH more tightly.

By default, Asterisk@Home sets up OpenSSH to run after installation, and to accept root logins. Accepting remote root logins is not the best security practice..

Open source Windows Lasso

If you think the toys you built with ordinary Legos were cool, robotics enthusiasts are about to make a quantum leap forward. The Lego Group announced today that it plans to release the firmware of its Lego Mindstorms microprocessor (the new NXT brick) as open source in August 2006.

To hear some banks and other financial outfits tell it, digital certificates are the answer for all your email security worries. But at the 15th European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research Conference, one researcher discussed how digital signatures could be perverted on virtually any operating system, including BSD, Linux, OSX and Windows. Conclusion: A digital signature is only as valid as the combined security of the sending and receiving computers allow.

Forget bootable USB pendrives and use an iPod to boot Linux on a Mac.