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Here's the Order [PDF] by Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells from the hearing on December 20, 2005 on IBM's motion to compel a recalcitrant SCO to hand over what SCO claimed were privileged materials and on SCO's New Renewed Motion to Compel Discovery. We know the outcome, because Judge Wells announced her decisions on both motions at the hearing from the bench. But now we have it in writing. IBM won its motion, and the order includes the following priceless gem: 1. In the Novell to Santa Cruz transaction, Novell did not transfer to Santa Cruz the entirety of Novell's business;...

In May 2005, a trojan called PGPcoder was discovered in the wild by Websense Security Labs. The trojan's purpose was to encrypt a user's files, then demand a ransom for their decryption. Although this scheme seemed novel, it is actually predated by over 15 years, by a similar scam in 1989. LURHQ's Threat Intelligence Group has now discovered a third such scheme involving ransomware which we are calling Cryzip. Unlike PGPcoder, which used a custom encryption scheme (which was subsequently reverse-engineered by LURHQ), Cryzip uses a commercial zip library in order to store files inside a password-protected zip. Although the...

Bill Gates was recently named one of Time's people of the year for the incredible amounts of money he has given to fight poverty and disease around the world. But just because Bill cares about poor people doesn't mean that he wants to see them use Linux. Gates demonstrated the new Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum this week, and later began trash talking the US$100 PC currently under development at MIT. It's hard to see how a philanthropist could not love a device designed to put basic computing power in the hands of every child on...

  New Search Engine "Gulag.com" Coming To USA By Red Square3/14/2006, 6:43 pm A powerful search tool, originally designed to the rigorous specifications of the Chinese government, is now available in the USA . The latest innovations in search technology allow Gulag.com to provide you with search results without even having to type! Just click one button - your search will be returned immediately. Coming soon is the "advanced" mode, where you can actually type in your request! Immediately, your search is refined before even being submitted! No more faulty searches where you have to retype your query! No more...

Google has now begun censoring web results in the USA. Previously they have admitted censoring sites in China. Like the Chinese censorship the sites being cut from the search results are anti-communist. The following letter is from the web site "The Peoples Cube Worldwide" which is a parody-of-Marxism site. Google Purges The People's Cube Worldwide By Red Square 3/10/2006, 10:13 pm Open letter #2 to Google from the People's Cube (posted on Google.com Help Center at 8:30pm on March 10, 2006 Dear comrades at Google: At some point, quite recently, our popular site "The People's Cube" (ThePeoplesCube.com) was purged from...

I often find myself comparing the strife and pathos of the information technology industry to Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. Yet, the current debate on GPL 3.0 has me thinking back to my high school European history class. In the late 15th century, the Renaissance was at its height and Florence was at its center. Under the patronage of the Medici family, "humanist" scholars were fueling an explosion in new works of art, science and philosophy. Though it was also a time of increased vice (drinking, gambling and lipstick), most of these humanists were dedicated Christians who were merely reconciling their...

IBM switching to Linux destops in Germany according to a Linux Forum 2006 presentation by their head of open source and Linux sales in Germany. Interesting news from LinuxForum 2006During a presentation on IBM's involvement with Open Source, Andreas Pleschek from IBM in Stuttgart, Germany, who heads open source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe for IBM made a very interesting statement... "Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM...

Michael Dell, chairman of Dell Inc. believes in offering Linux on the desktop, server, and workstation. What he doesn't believe in, for now, is giving Linux full support on the desktop. In an exclusive interview, Dell explained his company's Linux desktop strategy to DesktopLinux.com's Steven J. Vaughan Nichols. "People are always asking us to support Linux on the desktop, but the question is: 'Which Linux are you talking about?'," Dell asked.

From our "Linux is for Total Newbies" series, courteousy of Robert Milner for reallylinux.com. Still hesitant to try Linux? I'd like to share a revelation with you. See, for me, Linux adoption always seemed a bit of a battle to get out there on the desktop. No, I'm not talking about getting it installed. The major flavor providers have made stellar strides in set-up, making it a breeze. Take a look for yourself at the powerful and useful features in Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, and SuSe. There are easy to learn graphical interfaces like Gnome, KDE, or XFCE to name a...

Hewlett-Packard has announced that it will certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 as the preferred operating system for its new AdvancedTCA Blade Server, which the company debuted last week at the 3GSM World Congress. The new blade server is HP's most recent addition to its Advanced Open Telecom Platform (AOTP) blueprint, a line based on the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) industry standard created by the PCI Industrial Manufacturer's Group (PICMG). The AOTP is HP's suite of hardware, carrier-grade Linux, and software that supports the ATCA standard. HP's bh5700 server is a shelf-management subsystem with a 14-slot backplane made...

Apple's newly acquired OS, NeXTstep was built on the Mach 3.0 kernel, the same microkernel used by GNU/Hurd. Though by then the Mach kernel was largely abandoned, another kernel, Linux, was gaining support and seeing rapid development. The project at Carnegie Mellon to develop Mach had ended in 1994, two years before Apple acquired NeXT. As early as 1991 papers were published documenting performance issues with the Mach kernel. At the time there was much debate over kernel design, 1992 marked the now famous flame war between Linus Torvalds and Andy Tanenbaum over monolithic vs. microkernel design. Even though Apple...

Is Dell is on its way to becoming the first tier-one PC vendor to offer a mainstream business Linux desktop to US customers? It's starting to look that way. In the recent past, Dell has toyed with shipping a Linux-powered PC to the US market. But, when push came to shove, the results -- a Dimension E510n PC shipped with an empty hard drive, a copy of the obscure, open-source FreeDOS operating system and no support if you did install Linux -- were less then impressive. It's a different story for so-called workstations priced nearly as cheaply as desktops. Dell...

The SCO Group Inc. had a couple motions denied Friday in its ongoing case against International Business Machines Corp.       U.S. Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells ruled that Lindon-based SCO should not get more time for depositions of people at Intel, Oracle and The Open Group and denied a different motion to force IBM to provide more documentation in the case. She did give SCO 30 days to file a renewed motion but said it must "narrowly" define areas that have not been covered in documents IBM already has provided to SCO.       SCO has filed a...

Hold on to your hats! IBM has subpoenaed Microsoft! And Sun! At last, we're getting to the core of the matter. We're going to get to find out the whole story. I'd pay for this. No kidding. Feast your eyes on these and don't skip the topics for deposition: * Plaintiff IBM's Notice of Service of Subpoenas Duces Tecum - yes, plaintiff for the countercharge...oops, I meant counterclaims * Exhibit A - HP's (deposition set for March 15, 9 AM) * Exhibit B - Baystar's (deposition set for March 16, 9 AM) * Exhibit C - Microsoft's (deposition set for...

SCO WAS taken out behind the woodshed by Intel a few days ago in one of the more unfriendly court filings in a long and extremely unfriendly case. The 64K question is not what happened, that is more than adequately documented on Groklaw, the real question is why SCO, or its attorneys got so stupid. The short story for those not reading along with PJ, Darl and the gang is this, SCO faced a discovery cutoff in late January, and by all accounts had little or no evidence as the curtains were being drawn. It was desperate for an extension...

Will Apple adopt Windows? By Jack Schofield / Apple/ Windows 01:15pm "The idea that Apple would ditch its own OS for Microsoft Windows came to me from Yakov Epstein, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, who wrote to me convinced that the process had already begun. I was amused, but after mulling over various coincidences, I'm convinced he may be right. This would be the most phenomenal turnabout in the history of desktop computing," writes PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak. Dvorak predicted Apple moving to Intel chips before that happened, but ... Way back then, Apple was trying...

FOSS for OS/2: Keeping the flame alive Thursday February 16, 2006 (06:00 PM GMT) By: Bruce Byfield After a decade of neglect and increasingly reluctant support from IBM, the manufacturer, the OS/2 community persists. Where users of GNU/Linux or FreeBSD have turned to free and open source software (FOSS) for political and philosophical freedom and software quality, the surviving OS/2 community has been turning to FOSS as a means of defending members' right to use the operating system of their choice. The result is a small but surprisingly diverse collection of projects that, to a GNU/Linux user, is a mixture...

Survey: Research has found that administrators are more productive when working with Linux servers rather than those running Windows, but not everyone agrees with the results

Some folks just dote on mystery. SCO must be one of them. It now turns out that, according to IBM's latest Motion to Limit SCO's Claims Relating to Allegedly Misused Material [PDF] and the Memorandum in Support [PDF], while SCO did list 294 items on its final list of allegedly misused material by the December 22, 2005 deadline, it failed to provide "basic specificity" on 201 of them. So IBM would like the court to limit SCO to the 93 items it actually provided particularized information for. Here's IBM's attached Exhibits [PDF]. Exhibit A is Todd Shaughnessy's Declaration from May...

MooBella has put Linux to work making ice cream, in a vending machine that Wallace and Gromit would be proud of. The MooBella vending machine uses Linux 2.4 and a Red Hat filesystem to make 96 varieties of ice cream, on demand, in about 45 seconds per precisely-measured serving. MooBella showed off its Linux-powered ice cream machine at a DEMO event in Colorado today. Once the customer's selection has been made, a quantity of base mix is precisely measured and pumped, aerated, flavored, and sprayed onto a flat rotating surface, where it is flash frozen. The product is then scraped...