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Flaws raise red flag on Linux security But many users remain confident about the security of the open-source environment Story by Jaikumar Vijayan JANUARY 09, 2004 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) - A report earlier this week about a critical flaw in the Linux kernel was the latest in a series of recently discovered security problems with the popular open-source operating system. But many users were unfazed by the report and said Linux remains a solid and secure environment for running enterprise applications. Poland-based iSec Security Research on Monday said it had found a critical flaw in a function used to manage...

SEATTLE (Reuters) - SCO Group Inc. (SCOX) , the software company that is suing IBM and extracting royalties from other Linux users, said on Friday that it had held "low-level talks" with Internet search engine Google about a license agreement. "Certainly if they're using 10,000 Linux servers that include our intellectual property as part of Unix, we would want them to license," said Blake Stowell, a SCO spokesman. Linux, which can be copied and modified freely, has been a hit among businesses since it can be run on personal computer hardware and is based on the widely-used Unix platform. Lindon,...

The SCO Group's Australian and New Zealand boss, Kieran O'Shaughnessy, told ZDNet Australia late on Friday afternoon that he was preparing to fly to London to finalise the vendor's strategies for securing licence agreements with large commercial users of Linux in Australia. He said the point at which the licence would be available to Australian and New Zealand users was "very, very close". Pressed for a firm date, he confirmed that it would be before the end of this year's first quarter. A number of Australia's larger organisations, including telecommunications heavyweight Telstra, are deploying Linux throughout their operations, while Air...

Name: Security problems in Ethereal 0.9.16 Docid: enpa-sa-00012 Date: December 12, 2003 Severity: High Description: Serious issues have been discovered in the following protocol dissectors: Selecting "Match->Selected" or "Prepare->Selected" for a malformed SMB packet could cause a segmentation fault. It is possible for the Q.931 dissector to dereference a null pointer when reading a malformed packet. Impact: Both vulnerabilities will make the Ethereal application crash. The Q.931 vulnerability also affects Tethereal. It is not known if either vulnerability can be used to make Ethereal or Tethereal run arbitrary code. Resolution: Upgrade to 0.10.0. If you are running a version prior...

Just before Christmas last year, Novell announced publicly that SCO had known for some time that it did not receive all rights and ownership to UNIX technologies, despite public statements to the contrary. Novell has made public correspondence between lawyers representing both Novell and SCO. Read these in their entirety - they are quite enlightening. These letters finally start getting to the heart of the mysterious "Amendment No. 2" which SCO referred to publicly in a press release dated June 6, claiming it transferred "everything" to them and which Novell claimed never existed - Novell's legal team is adamant that...

Linux sales soar in Japan, Windows sales slump IDC Report will cause some alarm bells to ring Thursday 08 January 2004, 10:51 A SURVEY BY IDC Japan said that Linux licensing agreements in the country soared by 37.5% during 2003. The report, in today's Japan Times, said that sales of Windows only grew by half a per cent during the same period. But the same report suggests that limited availability of application software for Linux could hamper its growth. You can find the report here.

Even as it considers filing a legal claim against a Linux customer, The SCO Group must produce by week's end some proof to support its lawsuit against IBM. Following a court order issued early last month, the Lindon, Utah-based Unix company has until the end of the week to specify and hand over to IBM attorneys the hundreds of thousands of lines of Unix System V code it says IBM improperly donated to the Linux kernel. SCO filed its multibillion-dollar lawsuit against IBM last March, claiming the Armonk, N.Y.-based computer giant had violated its contract with the Unix company by...

Security flaws force Linux kernel upgrade Last modified: January 5, 2004, 11:34 AM PST By Robert Lemos Staff Writer, CNET News.com Open-source developers released a new version of the Linux kernel Monday in a move aimed at quickly fixing several bugs--among them two serious security flaws. The 2.4.24 upgrade to the Linux kernel comes a month after the release of the previous version of the core system software and only includes patches for six software issues, including the two flaws. The release is intended to prompt users to upgrade quickly, said Marcelo Tosatti, the maintainer of the 2.4 kernel series...

Slashdot is reporting the following: "Linux Kernel 2.4.24 has been released and is available on kernel.org. It seems there's a bug in the mremap(2) system call, where a local user can get root privileges.The new version has been released only with the most important bugs fixed - the rest of the changes have been postponed (those changes include the XFS filesystem)."

When my sister and I were growing up, we were almost always about the same size. We still are, actually. So we shared clothes. It was a way to double our wardrobe. But, from my point of view, I shared mine freely and she never wanted to share back. If I'd say, "I'd like to wear your blue sweater today," her answer would often be, "No, I'm wearing it." This happened so often, I eventually began to suspect that it was deliberate, her (perhaps unconscious) strategy to keep me away from her things. I'd complain to my mother and long...

2003 in Review: One Step Backward, Two Steps ForwardDate: December 31, 2003, 19:58:35 ESTTopic: Free Software This year was a year that wasn't exactly how we might have hoped, but overall, the state of GNU/Linux was overall better at this side of 2003 than it was at the other. In our annual tradition, what follows is a look at the ups - and downs - of GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source Software in 2003. The year started hopeful - in our last year-end article, I said, "all indications seem to suggest that 2003 might just be even better [than 2002]." However,...

An anonymous reader writes "The Bar-Monkey is a bar built around a 486 running linux that can dispense an 8 ounce mixed drink in under 10 seconds. It uses a Matrix Orbital Serial LCD panel with a keypad built into the bar surface for user input. Three Harvey Mudd College students built the bar in their spare time last semester. The bar holds 16 ingredients with which it can currently mix 188 drinks stored in its drink database. Total project cost: $235."

Israel has joined what has increasingly become a worldwide crusade to break free of the Microsoft Corporation and their perceived monopolistic constraints. The Ministry of Finance announced Sunday it will begin distributing Open Office, which is a package of basic software programs similar to Microsoft Office, for free starting this coming week. The ministry plans to distribute thousands of Open Office programs on CD-ROM at public computer centers and eventually community centers across the country throughout the coming year. Open Office suite includes all the functions supplied by Microsoft Office – a word processing program, a spreadsheet program, and a...

Linus Torvalds, creator of the popular Linux computer operating system, defended his work yesterday as not always lovely but original - and certainly not copied, as a Utah company has contended. The Utah company, the SCO Group, has begun sending out a round of warning letters to large corporate users of Linux, which is distributed free. The letters, dated Friday, assert that Linux, a variant of the Unix operating system, violates an SCO license and copyright. SCO, based in Lindon, Utah, owns the rights to the Unix operating system. SCO has for months made the broad claim that Linux included...

You might know Lindows as the company behind an aggressively marketed OS based on Linux and KDE. Indeed, LindowsOS is shipped on certain Wal-Mart PC offerings and the company has won huge contracts for LindowsOS machine deployments. You might also know Lindows as a sponsor of the ever popular KDE-Look.org community site. Well, Lindows was in the Netherlands on Dec 8th to show its support in a situation where a certain large software powerhouse has apparently been attempting to intimidate local LindowsOS resellers. Sure enough, KDE Dot News took the chance to meet Michael Robertson for an interview and chat...

The question of what Lindows is should perhaps begin with an explanation of what Lindows isn't. The world may be justifiably confused about the nature of Lindows due to some bold statements from marketers in the early days of the company. Despite its name, Lindows is not a hybrid of Windows and Linux. Lindows is also not a new Linux-like operating system that comes with the power to run Windows software. Lindows has decided to downplay its original dream of Windows compatibility and, instead, now focuses on its role as an extremely simple and user-friendly version of Linux. If you...

Funniest Story of the Day: SCO's Linux "Expert" Contradicts Linus   Monday, December 22 2003 @ 11:29 PM EST   Is this not the funniest story of the entire day? The New York Times' Steve Lohr reports on Linus' reaction to SCO's claim that their list of files is code copied from UNIX: "But Mr. Torvalds is also clearly angered by SCO's accusation that much of Linux was merely copied. 'In short,' Mr. Torvalds said, 'for the files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say that those files were trivially written by me personally, with no copying...

The penguin's going to pack a bigger punch. Backers of Linux, who use the waterfowl as their mascot, have just launched the finished version 2.6 of the software's core framework, or "kernel." The release is touted as more stable and business-ready than the version in wide use now. Developers hope changes in the volunteer-made operating system make it an even stronger rival to Unix and Windows in the corporate market, where Linux is making inroads on lower-end machines. It's the biggest upgrade since 2001's version 2.4, the first edition many big business users took seriously. Getting Up To Speed New...

[Computerworld] IT managers are increasingly turning to thin clients, other options in push to cut PC costs EVERY YEAR Dave Raspallo, CIO at Textron Financial Corp., found himself having to replace a third of his 1,200 PCs. But he grew tired of the cost of the annual ritual, and he began swapping out his desktops for thin clients. Forty percent of those PCs are now gone, and many more will disappear next year. "I would consider it a failure if we don't eliminate completely the use of any desktops," said Raspallo, who has a name for his project: STIMI, or...

NASA Web Sites Hacked By Sharon Gaudin Thirteen NASA Web sites were attacked this morning by a Brazilian group protesting the war in Iraq, according to two separate organizations that monitor hacking. On the same day as President George Bush and 34,000 onlookers celebrated the achievements of the Wright brothers and 100 years of powered flight, the Brazilian group, calling itself DRWXR, defaced the NASA Web sites, according to both mi2g, a digital risk management company based in London, and Zone-H, an organization that monitors hacking. The Zone-H Web site itself was down today. No one at Zone-H could be...