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Infections found in Australia and New Zealand. A new malware that runs on UNIX-like servers even with restricted privileges has already infected machines in Australia and is actively hunting for more targets, a new research paper has shown. Three researchers from Russian web provider Yandex - Andrej Kovalev, Konstantin Ostrashkevich and Evgeny Sidorov - said in the technical analysis of the malware, published on security and anti-virus specialist publication Virus Bulletin, that Mayhem functions like a traditional Windows bot. -snip- According to the researchers, Mayhem appears to be the continuation of the Fort Disco brute-force password cracking attack campaign that...

It was on this day 30 years ago that the X Window System was first announced. Back on 19 June 1984, Robert Scheifler announced a window system for the VS100 that was based upon the W system at the time. The initial X performance on a VS100 was about twice as fast, the code was in development for a few weeks and already showing signs of stability, and developers at MIT were startiing to build applications to run on X.

WASHINGTON – People who have accounts on the enrollment website for President Obama's signature health care law are being told to change their passwords following an administration-wide review of the government's vulnerability to the confounding Heartbleed Internet security flaw. Senior administration officials said there is no indication that the HealthCare.gov site has been compromised and the action is being taken out of an abundance of caution. The government's Heartbleed review is ongoing, the officials said, and users of other websites may also be told to change their passwords in the coming days, including those with accounts on the popular WhiteHouse.gov...

Apple said Thursday that its mobile, desktop and Web services weren’t affected by a major flaw in a set of security software used by hundreds of thousands of websites. The flaw, codenamed “Heartbleed” and first reported by Web security firm Codenomicon, was discovered in a technology called “OpenSSL” — a set of encryption software used by Web companies to safeguard user information. Sites that use OpenSSL will display a small “lock” icon in the top left-hand corner of your Web browser’s address bar (though not all sites showing this lock use OpenSSL); the technology is used on more than two-thirds...

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- I saw a promo the other day for Google (GOOG) Work. Sadly, I can't locate it or I would have inserted it here so you could see it for yourself. However, it might be fitting that you can't see the promo. Because Google's assault on Microsoft (MSFT) continues to fly under the radar. For whatever reason, it's the most under covered story in tech ... in finance ... and for the sake of extraneous ellipses ... the world. But it's real and it's happening. And Microsoft has no idea what to do in response. How could...

Microsoft announced a new effort to "[protect] customer data from government snooping." FSF executive director John Sullivan issued the following statement on Thursday, December 5th: "Microsoft has made renewed security promises before. In the end, these promises are meaningless. Proprietary software like Windows is fundamentally insecure not because of Microsoft's privacy policies but because its code is hidden from the very users whose interests it is supposed to secure. A lock on your own house to which you do not have the master key is not a security system, it is a jail. Even on proprietary operating systems like Windows,...

The New Zealand authorities have formally called off the search for the sailing cruiser Nina, and say its seven-person crew, which includes Evi Nemeth who for the last 30 years has written the system administration handbooks for Unix and Linux, is now presumed lost at sea. Nemeth was sailing off the western coast of New Zealand in the missing 21-metre vintage wooden schooner with its owner David Dyche, 58; his wife, Rosemary, 60, and their son David, 17; Kyle Jackson, 27; Danielle Wright, 18, and Briton Matthew Wootton, 35. The boat was last heard from on June 4, when Nemeth...

Debian Position on Software Patents February 19th, 2012The Debian Project announces the availability of its patent policy for the Debian archive.The Debian Project maintains a critical stance towards software patents: we consider software patents to be a threat to Free Software and an obstacle to the Debian mission of providing an entirely Free operating system for everyone's use. We believe software patents provide no advantage in promoting software innovation and we encourage our upstream authors to object to software patents.At the same time, given the de facto possibility of patenting software-related ideas in several countries around the world, it is...

In the last two weeks, we have lost two people who had immense influence on our industry. It is undeniable that Steve Jobs brought us innovation and iconic products like the world had never seen, as well as a cult following of consumers and end users that mythicized him. The likes of which will probably be never seen again. I too, like many in this industry, despite my documented differences with the man and his company, paid my respects, and have acknowledged his influence. But the “magical” products that Apple and Steve Jobs — as well as many other companies...

"Dennis Ritchie, an internationally renowned computer scientist who created the C programming language, has died at age 70. ..."

This is the original announcement of the GNU Project, posted by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. The actual history of the GNU Project differs in many ways from this initial plan. For example, the beginning was delayed until January 1984. Several of the philosophical concepts of free software were not clarified until a few years later. Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free(1) to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed. To...

According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death,” and the only way out is “bite the bullet and rewrite everything.” Not that it’s necessarily Facebook’s fault, though. Stonebraker says the social network’s predicament is all too common among web startups that start small and grow to epic proportions. During an interview this week, Stonebraker explained to me that Facebook has split its MySQL database into 4,000 shards in order to handle the site’s massive data volume, and is running 9,000 instances of memcached in order to keep...

I'm about to start learning Fedora Linux and I'd like to build up an older Dell Dimension I have into a box to play on. I was able to get an old copy of Red Hat to load and boot but it's useless because I can't figure out how to get it on my wireless network and besides, I never could figure out anything useful to do with it. I tried PCLinux and Ubuntu but could never get either to boot. I've been told I can boot Linux from a thumb drive and this might be an interesting option so...

It's over. The jury has found that the copyrights did not go to SCO under the APA or anything else. The verdict is in. Novell has the news up on their website already, but I heard it from Chris Brown also. Here's the brief Novell statement:Today, the jury in the District Court of Utah trial between SCO Group and Novell issued a verdict. Novell is very pleased with the jury’s decision confirming Novell’s ownership of the Unix copyrights, which SCO had asserted to own in its attack on Linux. Novell remains committed to promoting Linux, including by defending Linux on...

I think the saying goes that those that don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it. This is likely to point with Apple this month as they sit stunned that Windows 7 is doing so well and they are left looking foolish with products priced out of the segment. Their big news this week was a couple of PCs, a new keyboard and a multi-touch mouse. This last will likely go down in history as one of the lamest devices yet as they should know, given the iPhone, that touch is connected to the screen and not anything else....

Back on Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and found it to offer some terrific performance improvements , but at the same time, there were a few notable regressions. Apple engineers have been working hard at pushing technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), OpenCL, full 64-bit support, and other changes to their OS X stack to bolster its performance capabilities and reduce the overall footprint. Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be out in October and does have...

The computer world is notorious for its obsession with what is new - largely thanks to the relentless engine of Moore's Law that endlessly presents programmers with more powerful machines.Given such permanent change, anything that survives for more than one generation of processors deserves a nod. Think then what the Unix operating system deserves because in August 2009, it celebrates its 40th anniversary. And it has been in use every year of those four decades and today is getting more attention than ever before. Work on Unix began at Bell Labs after AT&T, (which owned the lab), MIT and GE...

Editorial The Moon landing was not the only world-changing event in the summer of '69. An international, cross-disciplinary survey by Nature on page 314 reveals just how powerfully the Apollo programme motivated young people to become scientists 40 years ago — a fact today's space scientists ignore at their peril (see pages 325 and 327). Yet other events in the summer of 1969 would lead to a far deeper empowerment of scientists — and, indeed, many others. Even as Apollo 11 was putting the first humans on the Moon, Ken Thompson at AT&T's Bell Labs was working to get Space...

Do you know how many Ubuntu based Linux distribution there are? More than 40. That’s right. More than forty different Linux distros has been forked out of this ever popular Linux distro. While not all of them are worth mentioning, there are some decent distributions that have evolved from it. For instance, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Ultimate Edition, gOS, and andLinux to name a few. Another Ubuntu based distribution that you might like to checkout is Super Ubuntu. Super Ubuntu contains all that is present on Ubuntu 8.10 and also includes: System and application updates: all updates released for Ubuntu + GIMP...