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Internet users at home are not nearly as safe online as they believe, according to a nationwide inspection by researchers. They found most consumers have no firewall protection, outdated antivirus software and dozens of spyware programs secretly running on their computers. One beleaguered home user in the government-backed study had more than 1,000 spyware programs running on his sluggish computer when researchers examined it. Bill Mines, a personal trainer in South Riding, Va., did not fare much better. His family's 3-year-old Dell computer was found infected with viruses and more than 600 pieces of spyware surreptitiously monitoring his online activities....

Report Considering the publicity that has surrounded - and, despite super new security-focused Service Packs, continues to surround - Windows security issues, Microsoft's determination to demonstrate that Linux is less secure than Windows shows a certain chutzpah. The company has however had some support here; Forrester, for example, provides some numbers that can be used to support the contention that Microsoft flaws are less severe, less numerous and fixed faster. And although there's a general readiness among users to believe that Windows is a security disaster area, there's also a reasonable amount of support for the view that Linux would...

After a year and a half of being flamed, dissected and dismissed on the Groklaw.net Web site, The SCO Group (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc. (SCO) has decided to set up a Web site of its own to cover the latest happenings in its many legal disputes. "We will be launching a Web site in a few weeks to tell our side of the story," said Darl McBride, SCO's president and chief executive officer (CEO), speaking at the Etre conference in Cannes Tuesday. "We think IP (intellectual property) is very important and to go back to the Wild West metaphor there...

After a year and a half of being flamed, dissected and dismissed on the Groklaw.net Web site, The SCO Group (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc. (SCO) has decided to set up a Web site of its own to cover the latest happenings in its many legal disputes. "We will be launching a Web site in a few weeks to tell our side of the story," said Darl McBride, SCO's president and chief executive officer (CEO), speaking at the Etre conference in Cannes Tuesday. "We think IP (intellectual property) is very important and to go back to the Wild West metaphor there...

October 4, 2004 I.B.M. Updates Old Workhorse to Use Linux By STEVE LOHR .B.M. has just completed a three-year, $100 million overhaul of the software engine behind the world's airline, hotel and rental car reservations systems, and credit card systems like Visa and American Express.The company plans to announce the retooling of the little-known program, an aging workhorse of mainframe computing, this week. Its goal, executives said, was to rejuvenate what it considered a strategic product - T.P.F., for transaction processing facility - with the help of the Linux operating system. The potential new markets, according to the executives...

"SCO is chafing badly under the propaganda war it's losing to Groklaw," writes Maureen O'Gara, who describes Groklaw as "the pro-IBM Web site that's following its $5 billion case against IBM." Her controversial report continues:  SCO and its legal A-Team of Boies and Silver want the world to start seeing the case the way they see it and are going to file a motion asking the court to unseal most of the documents that are currently under seal. What it wants aired are IBM's e-mails, which they think tell a killer story about AIX, Dynix and Project Monterey. SCO says that...

The news is out: SCO is losing money. Fast. Considering that SCO has no revenue and lots of expenses, the news is not surprising. Raising revenue and cutting expenses might help, but neither will be easy.The company reported a significant net loss in the third quarter, which it blamed mostly on a loss of income from SCOsource licensing and litigation costs that were higher than it expected.Sales were down by 44 percent, from US$20.1 million to $11.2 million. Income from licensing agreements fell from $7.3 million a year ago to $678,000, a drop of 91 percent. Altogether, SCO lost $7.4...

'Open Source Solaris' to debut this year Published: September 13, 2004, 12:49 PM PDT By Martin LaMonica Staff Writer, CNET News.com BURLINGTON, Mass.--Sun Microsystems will create an open-source project around its Solaris 10 operating system by the end of the year, company executives said Monday. Through the initiative, Sun engineers, partners and other programmers will be able to contribute to the development of the Unix operating system. Sun is testing the program right now with customers and will finalize it by the end of the year, according to Mark McClain, Sun's vice president of software marketing. Sun discussed its open-source...

A start-up company plans to release software at the end of this year that it claims will make it possible for applications designed for one platform to run on another at near native speed. Transitive Technologies Ltd.’s QuickTransit software, which resides in Flash memory or on a computer’s hard drive, decodes application binaries into an intermediate form, optimizes blocks of code and stores them in cache, then encodes for the target processor. It’s sort of a plug-in approach where companies will be able to mix and match starting and target operating systems, explained vice president of marketing Ed McKernan. “We...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news) late on Wednesday rolled out a new version of its database software aimed at users of Linux (news - web sites) and Unix (news - web sites) operating systems that it hopes will help the company take away market share from market leader Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq:ORCL - news). IBM said the latest version of its DB2 software that runs on Linux and Unix automatically self-manages databases, allowing companies to better manage, process and retrieve data such as product pricing. Armonk, New York-based IBM said that the latest database software,...

Since eWeek content is banned on FR, I'll try to summarize: Revenue reported: $11.2 Million SCOSource Licensing Revenue: $678,000. The increase came from only two unnamed customers. Net loss for the quarter: $7.4 Million "SCO has been finding it "very difficult to get new customers" and is focusing on keeping its installed base." "To help manage its finances, SCO is renegotiating its legal fees agreement with its primary IBM litigator, the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. In this revised fee agreement, in return for giving the law firm as much as 33 percent of any settlement awards...

Tired of being portrayed as the bad guys of IT, Kieran O'Shaughnessy, director of SCO Australia and NZ, last week declared "we are not the anti-Christ of cyberspace" but a defender of Unix fighting the monolithic power of IBM. Claiming SCO's business was stolen by "foul means", O'Shaughnessy said the company didn't just go out and pick a fight with IBM, but was backed against a wall and had to fight back. "The only reason we are [pursuing a lawsuit against IBM] is to defend our Unix business; we are not a litigation company, we are about Unix on Intel,"...

Tired of being portrayed as the bad guys of IT, Kieran O'Shaughnessy, director of SCO Australia and NZ, last week declared "we are not the anti-Christ of cyberspace" but a defender of Unix fighting the monolithic power of IBM. Claiming SCO's business was stolen by "foul means", O'Shaughnessy said the company didn't just go out and pick a fight with IBM, but was backed against a wall and had to fight back. "The only reason we are [pursuing a lawsuit against IBM] is to defend our Unix business; we are not a litigation company, we are about Unix on Intel,"...

THE UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld a series of public complaints over an advert in a magazine comparing the cost of Linux versus Microsoft Windows. An advert it ran compared the two operating systems to each other, but Windows was running on a measly dual 900MHz Xeon configuration, while Linux was running on a z900 IBM mainframe. The advert appeared in an IT magazine and was headed: "Weighing the cost of Linux vs Windows? Let's review the facts". The ad contained a graph comparing the cost in US dollars between a Linux images running on two z900 mainframe...

One of the benefits of attending conferences like Blackhat Briefings and Defcon is the networking that occurs in the background. In this case, wireless networking. I met John Hering when he and his posse were in the press room giving a demo of their Bluetooth Sniper Gun ahead of their presentation. That's when I heard John mention the "UnwireIraq" project, which aims to provide American servicemen and women in Afghanistan and Iraq with high-speed Internet access, so that they can stay more closely in touch with friends and families back home. He gave me a brief overview of the project...

IBM asked a federal court to bar the SCO Group, a Linux adversary, from distributing any Linux software, in the latest filing in their ongoing legal battle. In a motion for partial summary judgment filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, IBM asks the court to rule in favor of its counterclaim alleging SCO has violated the terms of one of the most common licenses under which Linux software is distributed. An IBM representative declined to comment beyond the text of the motion. An SCO representative said the company disputed IBM's allegations and would respond soon in...

IBM Files For Partial Summary Judgment on 8thCounterclaim (Copyright Infringement) -PDF and text Wednesday, August 18 2004 @ 06:37 PM EDT Man, this just isn't SCO's week. IBM has just filed *another* Motion for Partial Summary Judgment, this one on its 8th Counterclaim, the one for copyright infringement. No, silly, not IBM copying SCO. It's where IBM says that SCO has literally copied more than 783,000 lines of code from 16 packages of IBM's copyrighted material. They are asking for summary judgment as to liability and a permanent injunction. Here's the lesson. You don't ever want IBM legally mad at...

Take a look at the largest companies in the world. Of them, only Microsoft makes the majority of its money from software licensing. A handful of them ..... make some of their money from software sales, genally a small part. A few... make a small portion of their revenue from retail sales of software. So the vast majority of large global companies consume software rather than produce it...if the cost of software is driven down by competition from open source, and thus a major cost of doing business is reduced for global industry, will it be a net gain or...

IBM Goes For the Jugular -- Files Motion For Partial Summary Judgment on Contract Claims! Monday, August 16 2004 @ 11:16 AM EDT Here is IBM's Redacted Memorandum in Support of Motion for Partial Summary Judgment On Breach of Contract Claims, filed by IBM on Friday. It's a hundred-page document. As you will see, they are going for the jugular now. Astoundingly, they say that all parties involved in the contract between AT&T and IBM have now provided testimony in discovery that IBM has the right to do whatever it wishes with its own code, contrary to SCO's claims, or...

The open-source movement has had a remarkable run of success that has seen software such as the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server emerge as major challenges to Microsoft. However, the movement is now facing a crisis. At its heart is a question that has been around from the very beginning: How does software owned by everyone and by no one survive in a world where copyrights and patents shape the legal landscape? The question is being forced on a number of fronts, and if open source is to play an important role in software's future, the issue...