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Over the past months we have heard about how free and open source software (FOSS) is becoming more and more acceptable in the business community. There has also been a movement to have governments adopt policies that open the door to FOSS. However, it appears that the open source community has overlooked one vital area of the community that would most likely embrace FOSS with open arms, and that is the area of emergency services (Police, Fire and Emergency Medical Services).

Some 75 towns across New South Wales have started accessing the Internet through Linux-based satellite routers in what is said to be largest network of its type in Australia spanning upwards of 800,000 square kilometres.

Seminars to be Taught Nationwide by Leading Intellectual Property Experts

Mbedthis Software today announced support for PHP and the LAMP architecture targeting mobile applications and embedded devices. Mbedthis released an embedded PHP module for its highly secure AppWeb embedded HTTP web server that has been optimized for mobile and embedded applications...AppWeb is available under both an open source GNU license and a commercial license. Support and a security enhancement service are also available.

Avid KDE user and Linux- and Open-Source-advocate Bill Kendrick will be discussing the ways KDE creates a rich, useful and fun user experience for Linux newbies and hackers alike.

R. Hewitt Pate, the U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, issued a statement last week about the European Commission's ruling against Microsoft. Far from being on the side of consumers and a free market, Pate's remarks nestle cheek to jowl with the monopolist itself. It even threatens -- on Microsoft's behalf -- the relationship between the United States and the EC if the Europeans dare to act like sovereign nations and put the interests of their citizens ahead of Redmond's. It's like waking up one morning to find your district attorney, who has sworn an oath to protect you from the bad guys, issuing press releases on behalf of the biggest crook in the county.

You have to admit that the job of a system administrator would be made worlds harder if we had to actually sit down in front of each machine we're responsible for. Why bother having a network if you can't use it to make your life easier? Let's have a look at a couple of cool remote administration tools that are both useful and easy to use.

MPlayer contains a remotely exploitable buffer overflow in the HTTP parser that may allow attackers to run arbitrary code on a user's computer.

Fetchmail versions 6.2.4 and earlier can be crashed by sending a specially-crafted email to a fetchmail user.

Stefan Esser reported that Ethereal versions 0.10.1 and earlier contain stack overflows in the IGRP, PGM, Metflow, ISUP, TCAP, or IGAP dissectors. On a system where Ethereal is being run a remote attacker could send malicious packets that could cause Ethereal to crash or execute arbitrary code. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2004-0176 to this issue.

Squid versions 2.0 through to 2.5.STABLE4 could allow a remote attacker to bypass Access Control Lists by sending a specially-crafted URL request containing '%00': in such circumstances; the url_regex ACL may not properly detect the malicious URL, allowing the attacker to effectively bypass the ACL.

A remotely-exploitable buffer overflow in Midnight Commander allows arbitrary code to be run on a user's computer

A failed password operation can cause the OpenLDAP slapd server, if it is using the back-ldbm backend, to free memory that was never allocated.

...If you want to use Test 2, simply boot off of the Test 1 CD, and then when it gives you the boot prompt, swap out the Test 1 CD for the Test 2 CD.

Australia’s bioinformatics industry will increasingly rely on open source software as researchers look for inexpensive point solutions that are not just a “black box”, according to delegates at an Australian Technology Park Innovations bioinformatics symposium in Sydney.

Red Hat Inc. CEO Matthew Szulik had the air of a motivational speaker last night, citing his company's improving finances and growing user base as evidence of a sea change in the IT industry and promising more Red Hat jobs for beleaguered Massachusetts workers.

A project to produce a free, dual-kernel, real-time Linux distribution has achieved its first stable release. The Open Components for Embedded Real-time Applications (OCERA) project's 1.0.0 release supports real quality of service scheduling, CAN bus systems, and fault-tolerant and real-time Ethernet, along with standard Linux functionalities.

Red Hat's free Linux distribution, Fedora, has added support for the security enhanced modules created by the NSA and known as SELinux, a media release from the company says.

Its litigation assault on Linux remains shrouded in mystery. What's clear is that the open-source movement isn't slowing down. [Editor's note: This story was contributed by a visitor who included a personal note to me, but they didn't give me their name or email address. Please contact me. :-)]

In a sign that the marketplace sees lots of promise in PHP's growth prospects, Zend Technologies has completed a new venture capital infusion of $6 million. The latest investment, from venture capital fund Index Ventures, together with previous investors Walden Israel and SFK Technologies, brings to $12 million the total of VC investments in Zend in less than six months, since November 2003. Israeli-based news service Globes [online] reports that Zend may actually get $2 to $3 million more in funding before the round closes. And as if to justify investors' faith, the long-anticipated PHP5 First Release Candidate is finally for download from Zend.