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From the Uh Oh, the Bandages Are Bleeding Dept.:

Cyberattackers, in a major new approach, are exploiting flaws in popular software programs — especially anti-virus and backup tools — to break into the computers of consumers, government agencies and businesses...Security provider Qualys, another participant in the study, found "significant vulnerabilities" in most anti-virus and backup software...

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Network Security is hot these days. There are plenty of offerings, both commercial and free. Usually, a good network security model employs more than a single security product. However, not many commercial or free security utilities play nice with each other. Luckily, you can use perl to glue them together to get more meaningful data from your network.

How do you run video to four different video rooms at an anime convention without having a staff member change tapes or DVDs at regular intervals? How do you run a video room where viewers can choose what to watch and when to watch it? You hire an open source developer to code a video keg and video jukebox.

DistroWatch reports - Nexenta OS is a new hybrid distribution based on the OpenSolaris kernel combined with GNU and Debian software packages. The project's first alpha release was announced earlier today: Nexenta OS (elatte) Alpha 1 is now available for download. This release contains 6 ISO images: live CD, install CD, and 4 source CDs.

OSDir has some nice shots of Nexenta OS Alpha 1.

A Halloween Style Document Uncovers Intel's Dealings with desktop Linux

DistroWatch reports - Third alpha release of SUSE Linux 10.1 has been announced and is ready for download. The most important changes include the following: "Update to KDE 3.5 RC1; update of GCC to the current 4.1 development version; removal of linuxthreads support; NetworkManager will be the new way of managing changing network interfaces, Kinternet is now in maintenance mode; update to Linux kernel 2.6.14.2

OSDir has put together some screenshots of SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha 3.

On November 10, Pentaho Corp., provider of open source business intelligence (BI) software, announced that the Mondrian On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) project is joining forces with Pentaho to become a permanent feature of the Pentaho BI project, which provides comprehensive reporting, analysis, dashboards, workflow, and data mining capabilities.

Despite predictions of its demise, Unix — and in particular, Sun's Solaris flavor — appears to be convalescing instead of following the downward spiral that's typical for operating systems that fall from grace (the PalmOS for example).

A project to create a lightweight, embeddable database is beta testing its second release. Firebird 2.0 features derived tables, support for "execute block," increased table sizes, improved index code, and numerous other improvements. Beta kits are available for Linux on i686, i686-NPTL, and AMD64, as well as Windows.

As part of an update to OpenSolaris, the company this week released the source code for ZFS, a system for managing data and files. Sun released the first portion of code for its OpenSolaris project in June of this year. It has released additional pieces since then.

People are daring to dream bigger. With the advent of OpenOffice.org, often trumpeted as an Office-killer, not to mention the resurgence of Apple as a brand and Mac as a platform, we are beginning to see a new message emerge out here in punditland: maybe it's not enough to just cut the cord. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to go on the attack.
Diggable

On Friday, November 18, representatives from Sun Microsystems joined members of Dartmouth's Computer Science Department to officially launch a collaboration involving Dartmouth's Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Laboratory. The new partnership pairs Dartmouth's expertise in secure and trusted computing with Sun's OpenSolaris Project, an open source operating system that is being enhanced through community input and dialogue.

Core KDE developer George Staikos recently hosted a meeting of the security developers from the leading web browsers. The aim was to come up with future plans to combat the security risks posed by phishing, ageing encryption ciphers and inconsistent SSL Certificate practise. Read on for George's report of the plans that will become part of KDE 4's Konqueror and future versions of other web browsers.

IBM Corp. has won a deal for its 64-bit Power5 Unix servers with China's State Administration of Taxation, that it says represents the company's largest Unix installation in Asia.

The Chinese taxation authority has already installed over 100 IBM servers, a mix of eServer p5 595 and p5 570 machines, according to Karl Freund, vice president of Unix strategy at IBM. The installation will rank among the company's top 10 largest Unix customers, he said.

An AIX based compiler providing implementation for Unified Parallel C (UPC) High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications on large-scale, parallel processing machines. While within an HPC/large scale parallel environment running AIX, the user would simply compile their UPC code with this compiler (xlupc) and have an appropriate object file generated. The compiled executable then can be utilized in HPC environments.

  LXer Thanksgiving Day Feature

Linux News pauses to give thanks for libre software, the libre community, and most of all for freedoms that cannot be easily rescinded.

Editor's Note: This is the first installment in a periodic series ENP regular Deann Corum will be writing on about her experiences moving from a Windows-centric environment to a new job with an emphasis on Linux.

[Ed: This is an interesting take on changing environments. - dcparris]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with two leading national class action law firms, today filed a lawsuit against Sony BMG, demanding that the company repair the damage done by the First4Internet XCP and SunnComm MediaMax software it included on over 24 million music CDs.

Apple has worked on Mac OS X for the past 4 years, and its market share has grown steadily. Now, Apple looks to be making a comeback in the operating system industry. Can it dethrone Microsoft's Windows?

You can crab all you want about vendor-sponsored research, such as the many studies that Microsoft has sponsored directly or endorsed as it tries to fight off the onslaught of Linux, but it does one very practical thing. The heated competition and even more heated words are, of course, amusing, but the truth is, the analytical weapons that the Windows allies and the Linux allies are deploying are getting more sophisticated. And this is a good thing for customers, even if it makes life difficult for commercial Linux distributors and Microsoft.