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SCO Group's ongoing legal action against IBM and end users of Linux has quietly left one company out of the dog fight: Sun Microsystems.In the legal battle, SCO is claiming that the Linux operating system IBM sells and that many other companies use runs infringes on intellectual property rights it holds to some Unix code.Sun has started to embrace Linux, though on a much smaller scale than have competitors Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. However, it continues to back its Solaris version of Unix. Responding to a question from Silicon.com this week, Sun CEO Scott McNealy said: "I don’t want to...

31 July 2003 Scott McNealy, the chairman, president and CEO of systems vendor Sun Microsystems, has dramatically warned companies of the legal dangers of using open source software such as the Linux operating system. Following on from SCO Group's threats to sue Linux users over its intellectual property claims, McNealy told an audience of UK businesses that they should steer clear of open source software unless their suppliers can offer insurance against such legal action. "Don't touch open source software unless you have a team of intellectual property lawyers prepared to scour every single piece [of the open source code]....

IBM exec: 'Forces' at work against Linux By Andrew ColleyStaff Writer, CNET News.comJuly 30, 2003, 12:57 PM PT An IBM executive has claimed that a "set of forces" is attempting to derail Linux, and hinted that Microsoft and SCO Group are among those responsible. Al Zollar, a general manager of sales for IBM eServer iSeries, told delegates attending the company's Asia Pacific Strategic Planning Conference in Queensland, Australia, on Tuesday that a "set of forces" was attempting to stymie adoption of the open-source operating system. "They're mostly located in Redmond, although they have recruited a few allies," said Zollar. Microsoft...

THE SCO WAR might go down as the first Open Source lawsuit, in a couple of senses. First, because the GNU General Public License, or GPL, might be legally tested for the first time. Secondly, SCO has probably sealed its defeat by ticking off many intelligent Open Source users. It's quite probable that the GPL will be tested in court. If not in the SCO vs IBM case, then in other litigation, either by or against SCO. IBM recently issued a memo, as reported by C|Net here. The IBM memo explicitly refers to SCO's prior distribution of Linux under the...

AMD quietly trimmed the prices of its top-two single-processor system Opteron 100 series and its dual-processor Opteron 200 series yesterday possibly paving the way for a new, faster version of the chips. The Opteron 144's price was cut from $669 to $438, a cut of around 35 per cent. The Opteron 142 fell from $438 to $292, down 33 per cent. the Opteron 140 remains unchanged at $229. All prices are for processors sold in batches of 1000. The Opteron 244 was previously priced at $794; now it's $690, a drop of 13 per cent. The Opteron 242's price was...

Welcome to the newly redesigned haven for the rail gun enthusiast. This page covers some of the latest techniques in electromagnetic propulsion, but the construction of a rail gun is a perilous undertaking so use the information contained herein at your own risk. NOTE: In the interest of simplicity vector directions are ignored, it is assumed that the magnitude is as calculated and in the desired direction.

An approach and landing test version of the X-37, a spacecraft designed to demonstrate technologies for NASA's Orbital Space Plane Program, successfully completed structural testing in Huntington Beach, Calif. The series of ground-based, proof tests are intended to verify the structural integrity of the X-37 Approach and Landing Test Vehicle. The tests apply pressure to the vehicle, simulating flight stresses and loads the X-37 may encounter in flight.

Last month, when Microsoft announced its bellwether decision to award employees restricted stock instead of options, it also made news in a federal courtroom—the kind of news you keep quiet about. Microsoft suffered utter defeat at a crucial pretrial hearing in what appears to be the highest-stakes patent litigation ever—one in which a tiny company called InterTrust Technologies claims that 85% of Microsoft's entire product line infringes its digital security patents. (See Can This Man Bring Down Microsoft?) InterTrust's engineers developed and patented what they say are key inventions in two areas: so-called digital-rights management and trusted systems. The technologies...

Does anyone with XP have this happen? You open a program (particularly IE 6.0 and Outlook Express) and the window is not maximized? Is there a way to correct it? Every other Windows OS I've used would automatically maximize upon program start.

'Potato' Earth's deep secrets By Jonathan Amos BBC News Online science staff It is a map the like of which you have probably never seen before. Gravity highs are marked red; gravity lows are blue The sweep of colours shows minute variations in the Earth's gravitational field. If you were to fly over the red areas, you would be tugged ever so slightly downwards; the blues mark regions where the planet's attraction is much weaker. These gravity anomalies, as they are known, are imperceptible to the human senses, and so the scientists have wrapped the data on to a sphere...

Have been bombarded with annoying pop up ads and traced them back to a file I found lurking in directory c:\windows\system. The file is called SHDOCLC.DLL but when I attempt to delete it through Windows Explorer OR MS-DOS, "access is denied."

Engines of GrowthTheir work won't show up in next year's models, but researchers at MIT's Sloan Automotive Lab are creating the fundamental knowledge that will help car engines keep getting better. Staff Illustration. By Neil SavageJuly 18, 2003A roar fills the small room in MIT's Building 31 as a car engine, minus the car, revs loudly. Outside the room—one of 12 test cells in the Sloan Automotive Laboratory—a student watches as a computer collects data on the engine, whose spark-plug-free design might one day earn it some room under the hood. The engine employs a technique called homogeneous charge compress ignition,...

To: BugTraq Subject: Cracking windows passwords in 5 seconds Date: Jul 22 2003 8:37PM Author: Philippe OechslinAs opposed to unix, windows password hashes can be calculated in advance because no salt or other random information si involved. This makes so called time-memory trade-off attacks possible. This vulnerability is not new but we think that we have the first tool to exploit this. At LASEC (lasecwww.epfl.ch) we have developed an advanced time-memory trade-off method. It is based on original work which was done in 1980 but has never been applied to windows passwords. It works by calculating all possible hashes in advance and storing some...

SCO Changes Tactics in Dispute Over LinuxBy STEVE LOHR he SCO Group, which has spent the last few months suing I.B.M., a leading supporter of the Linux operating system, and warning that Linux violates its copyright, announced plans yesterday for profiting from Linux rather than trying to fight it.SCO, a small software marketer, said that it would offer the large corporations that use Linux a license so they can continue to use it without any worries about lawsuits that accuse them of copyright infringement.SCO contends that Linux is an "unauthorized derivative of Unix." SCO bought the licensing rights to the...

SCO is giving the "tainted" Linux users out there a way to clean up their filthy ways via a licensing program that will begin in the coming weeks. After dolling out threats of legal action, SCO has called on enterprise Linux users to come forward and pay for code the company claims to own. The legal zealots at SCO reckon Linux has grown up too fast by nicking technology such as support for large SMP systems from its copyrighted Unix code. SCO plans to start calling Linux customers this week, asking them to pay up or face the consequences. "Following...

Hackers Publish Instructions for Exploiting Flaw in Widely Used Cisco Systems Internet Hardware Cybersecurity experts went on high alert today, warning that portions of the Internet could be crippled in the coming days as hackers actively exploit a security hole in a widely used class of computer hardware.

Microsoft admits flaw in Windows software By TED BRIDIS The Associated Press 7/17/2003, 7:49 a.m. ET WASHINGTON (AP) — Microsoft Corp. acknowledged a critical vulnerability Wednesday in nearly all versions of its flagship Windows operating system software, the first such design flaw to affect its latest Windows Server 2003 software. Microsoft said the vulnerability could allow hackers to seize control of a victim's Windows computer over the Internet, stealing data, deleting files or eavesdropping on e-mails. The company urged customers to immediately apply a free software repairing patch available from Microsoft's Web site. The disclosure was unusually embarrassing for Microsoft...

Okay, I've had enough with this machine. I'm gonna use the recovery disc and start from scratch. I've installed some new hardware since buying the machine, specifically, an ethernet card and a CD/RW. Here's my problem: When I go to run the recovery disc, It won't read the E: drive that the disc is in. When you go into My Computer, you can see that it knows that the disc is there, you can click on E: and read the contents in the directory, and even click on elements the disc contains. However, when I try to start the recovery...

Ananova: Cannabis charges against MS sufferer dropped The case against a wheelchair-bound woman with multiple sclerosis accused of supplying cannabis chocolates to fellow sufferers has been formally dropped. Kirkwall Sheriff Court heard that Elizabeth Ivol, 55, also known as Biz, was no longer fit to stand trial. The move came Ms Ivol, of South Ronaldsay, an island off Orkney, was at the centre of a medical emergency. She was taken to hospital in ambulance after being found unconscious at her home. Ms Ivol had always said she planned to put an end to her pain by taking her own life...

<p>Next-gen optical camouflage is busting out of defense labs and into the street. This is technology you have to see to believe.</p> <p>Invisibility has been on humanity's wish list at least since Amon-Ra, a diety who could disappear and reappear at will, joined the Egyptian pantheon in 2008 BC. With recent advances in optics and computing, however, this elusive goal is no longer purely imaginary. Last spring, Susumu Tachi, an engineering professor at the University of Tokyo, demonstrated a crude invisibility cloak. Through the clever application of some dirt-cheap technology, the Japanese inventor has brought personal invisibility a step closer to reality.</p>