2005 September

With most people, when they think encryption, they think of things like PGP encryption. But how many of us truly understand it? Not as many as we might like to think apparently. Good thing there are guides like this to help us along the way.

Seeing a law being passed with regard to Free Software just goes to prove that OSS is not alone and the older movement has not vanished just yet.

Excellent piece below outlining some mistakes that more IT mangers make than some of us may even realize. Point by point read, it has some good ideas that you ought to check out…

They present and interesting argument here. And I do see some of the points being made as valid. But to say that there is a lack of leadership leads me to believe that they are totally missing the point behind the OSS concept.

I hate to say it, but the article stating just how dangerous the Firefox exploit really is has some great points. The best point being made all around though, don’t run as an administrator. That is just good advice regardless of your browser choice.

Oh wow, this has got to be a bad day for Torvalds. It seems Australia is claiming that the Linux Mark Institute failed to register the Linux trademark in that country. Boy, this could lead to a real mess if it is not resolved here soon.

I’m an artist who is trying to translate my skill with a canvas onto the computer, and I’m a bit baffled by all the options on the market. If I can, I’d like to stick with Linux as my brother is a Linux expert, but I’ve also heard lots of good things about Mac systems [...]

Windows may be the winner of the Unix war, but can it seriously stand up to Linux? Some say no way, others are still not so sure…

Some might go so far as to speculate that BEA is getting spanked with a sock price of $8 a share. Personally, I believe that it is too early to say whether OSS software is the sole contributor to any instability in their value. Then again, that is just me.

While the title may say differently, to me the bulk of the article below seems to encompass breaking through myths and hype to get the real benefits of OSS at the core.

While I may agree or disagree with much of what Russell is saying here, there are some interesting points that need to be examined I think. See why neither Linux or the Mac ‘do it for him’.

A vulnerability has been discovered in Thunderbird, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user’s system.
The vulnerability is caused due to the shell script used to launch Thunderbird is parsing shell commands that are enclosed within backticks in the URL provided via the command line. This can e.g. be exploited to execute [...]

Oh this is definitely a PR nightmare! It seems that there was an issue with some infected files on the Mozilla site. Not good, not good at all.
Kostya of Viruslist writes:

Much like the Summer of Love in the 60’s, the Sumer of Code offered by Google has come to a conclusion. And judging from what I am reading below in the attached article, it looks like it was quite a summer at that!

Once again the question remains: Could Google be working to dethrown MS? Not only could they, but they have the power to take Linux and do what Linspire has been trying to do all this time, thus making it something that a PC newbie can use without various driver issues.

The bugs are being addressed! Yes, with the latest release of Firefox, a number of security issues are in fact, being dealt with.

“Secunia Advisory: SA16846
Critical: Extremely critical
Impact: System access
Where: From remote
Solution Status: Unpatched
Software: Mozilla 1.7.x
A vulnerability has been discovered in Mozilla Suite, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user’s system.
For more information: SA16869
This vulnerability can only be exploited on Unix / Linux based environments.
The vulnerability has been confirmed in version 1.7.11. Other versions [...]

More a project for fun than anything else, today I found a fun little article on rolling your own answering machine - with Linux!

Reality is that right now, OSS is making huge strides in the enterprise markets. I see this as being especially true with the following detailed below…

Could Linux really be that large of a threat to Microsoft? Perhaps it is the combination of Linux and Google that has MS on red alert. Whatever the reasoning, MS is streamlining big time in hopes of maintaining their competitive edge. One thing you have to wonder though, how does one compete with free?