Showing all newswire headlines

As part of the March 2004 issue of the "Application of the month" series on KDE.de, Andreas C. Diekmann has interviewed Nicolas Hadacek, author of KSirtet, a Tetris clone for KDE. The Dutch KDE website is offering an English translation of the interview as well as the overview of this issue.

"a cross-realm vulnerability allowing someone with control over a realm to impersonate anyone in the cross-realm trust path."

In March of 2004 we posted 726 stories (security alerts were not counted). Here are the biggest newsmakers of the month, along with the most interesting story posted about them during that time.

A flaw has been found in the temporary file handling algorithms for the sandboxing code used within Portage. Lockfiles created during normal Portage operation of portage could be manipulated by local users resulting in the truncation of hard linked files; causing a Denial of Service attack on the system.

We've all heard the news: JBoss has received $10 million in funding and now it's time to sit back and mull it over. Without a doubt this infusion of capital is a signal of confidence for JBoss Group. But is this investment a good thing for open source? Not an unimportant question for those of us who have decided to use open source in our enterprise applications.

Microsoft yesterday released the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolkit under IBM Corp's Common Public License (CPL) to what is believed the industry's largest open source development community, SourceForge.

Smartsource Corporate Training, a Cape Town-based Linux training specialist with a network of business partners in Johannesburg, has been appointed the first Linux training partner for Novell SA.

NTT Data Corp and NTT Comware Corp plan to buy interests in VA Linux Systems Japan, a Sumitomo Corp unit that specializes in creating Linux operating systems and related software, with a goal of co-developing Linux-based telecommunications systems.

FlashMob I took place on a typically foggy April Saturday at the University of San Francisco's Koret Center gym. Exactly 700 computers of various shapes and sizes -- donated by individuals and several organizations -- were gathered in the auditorium and interconnected via a homegrown local area network to in effect try to become one of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers. Surprisingly, it wasn't the huge tangle of wires many people thought it would be; all the networking hardware was kept well under control by all the event "hub captains."

If it had happened on 1st April nobody would have believed it - but Microsoft has posted its first piece of open source-approved software.

Let the flame wars begin, right? Before you get your fingers warmed up for another typical Linux vs. Microsoft debate, let's keep in mind what the survey focused on. First of all, it covered only 1,000 I.T. administrators and execs. Second, it did not say that Linux did not offer an improved total cost of ownership for everyone--small firms still realized some gains.

There is no lack of blockbuster headlines coming from Sun Microsystems these days. On Friday, Sun announced a news trifecta: 1) a new partnership deal with its longtime archenemy, Microsoft; 2) a new president, the ponytailed and bespectacled Jonathan Schwartz; and 3) a stunningly paltry quarterly earnings report.

Dell CEO Michael Dell and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison plan to host a joint press conference on Tuesday. Industry analysts speculated that Dell and Oracle will create a new bundle that includes Dell's two-processor servers and Oracle's database cluster software. About a year ago, the two companies announced a deal to install Oracle's 9i database cluster software on Dell's two-processor PowerEdge 2650 servers, which run Linux.

The Gentoo website is having trouble, the newsletter link is returning intermitten 404's, so I've mirrored it here.

A remotely exploitable buffer overflow vulnerability was found in MPlayer. A malicious host can craft a harmful HTTP header ("Location:"), and trick MPlayer into executing arbitrary code upon parsing that header.

Sun Microsystems Inc. has promoted John Loiacono to replace Jonathan Schwartz as the new head if its software business. Schwartz was elevated to president and chief operating officer Friday, when Sun announced a broad technology-sharing agreement with its erstwhile nemesis, Microsoft Corp. Sun also said Monday that Rich Green, the head of its Java tools division, has decided to leave Sun after 14 years with the company. He will be replaced temporarily by Chris Atwood, a director of engineering with Sun's tools group, until a permanent replacement is found, the company said.

...there are some pretty big differences between Linux and Unix. The biggest difference, by far, is the Linux kernel itself. When Unix forked, each variant had a different kernel. In other words, the core code of each Unix system was unique, which often resulted in incompatibilities and difficult cross-platform application integrations.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) Indonesia says that it is prepared to support the recent plan of its parent company to globally expand its line of desktop personal computers (PC) based on the GNU/Linux operating system (OS).

MySQL AB today provided a preview of the news announcements and top attractions expected at next week's MySQL Users Conference & Expo. The annual conference brings together MySQL users, partners and industry leaders for an in-depth look at the technology and business behind the MySQL database and open source software. This year's event is April 14-16 at the Peabody Hotel in Orlando, Florida.

...beyond the public relations benefit that comes from embracing open source, IBM also wants to push the spread of Linux on commodity x86-based hardware. That would shaft both Microsoft and Sun, and open the door to more sales of expensive IBM applications like WebSphere, not to mention any attendant service contracts down the road. Can Big Blue pull it off? Keep in mind that this is an infinitely more capable company than the Keystone Cop outfit that introduced OS/2 and PS/2 on this date in 1987.