From eWeek: "Symantec Corp. has admitted to using a rootkit-type feature in Norton SystemWorks that could provide the perfect hiding place for attackers to place malicious files on computers. The anti-virus vendor acknowledged that it was hiding a directory from Windows APIs as a feature to stop customers from accidentally deleting files but, prompted by warnings from security experts, the company shipped a SystemWorks update to eliminate the risk."

Remote Python Call (RPyC) is a python library providing transparent and symmetric IPC/RPC and distributed computing. It supports both synchronous and asynchronous operations. It works by giving you transparent control over a remote python interpreter: you can import remote modules, access remote classes, functions, and instances, just as you would do locally. Typical use cases are remote administration, distributed testing, resource sharing, and tunneling. Version 2.60 was released last week, adding supports for secure (TLS) connections.

Remember Yoper? Yoper is working towards version 3.0 of their Linux distro. For those of you that want to help with the beta testing, a download is now available. Yoper is optimized for i686 processors and speed. You can also find a short review of Yoper 3.0 beta over at Tuxmachines.

Some Friday fun: OSDir has some sweet screencaps of Ubuntu 6.06 RC, Kubuntu 6.06 RC, Xubuntu 6.06 RC, and Edubuntu 6.06 RC. Along with Fedora Core 5 and SuSE 10.1, this generation of desktop Linux distros has really stepped up the polish. Updated by AS: Added Xubuntu and Edubuntu links.

Google Labs has released Picasa for Linux, ported using Wine by CodeWeavers. The free Picasa download is available now. My Take: The software requirements are fairly hefty in that some features require cutting edge programs like HAL and a 2.6+ kernel, but this is fantastic news for Linux users. Picasa is an excellent program that rivals iPhoto. Update by AS : Google ported Picasa using Wine, but it was still a LOT of work and the result was completely effective. Please read more on the WineHQ mailing list. Update 2: You do not need Wine installed to run this - it's a self-contained Wine lib. Also, the Picasa download apparently doesn't work from all countries. Update by TH: Here's a review.

"The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the Release Candidate for version 6.06 LTS of Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu - codenamed 'Dapper Drake'. The Release Candidate includes installable live Desktop CDs, server images, alternate text-mode installation CDs and an upgrade wizard for users of the current stable release."

"It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.5-RELEASE. Work done between the 5.4-RELEASE and this release has mostly been bugfixes. Some 'vendor supplied' software has also been updated, mostly due to security concerns (specifically BIND and sendmail). This is the last planned release on the 5-STABLE branch."

The numbers in the Unix market may be flat, but Hewlett-Packard sees a bright future for its HP-UX operating system. The company this fall will release HP-UX 11i v3 - the first major revamp of the OS in three years - with enhancements in its virtualization and automation capabilities, according to Don Jenkins, vice president of HP's Business Critical Servers unit.

If it is up to Microsoft, the omnipresent JPEG image format will be replaced by Windows Media Photo. The software maker detailed the new image format Wednesday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here. Windows Media Photo will be supported in Windows Vista and also be made available for Windows XP, Bill Crow, program manager for Windows Media Photo said in a presentation.

Don't expect Microsoft to talk much about the Basic edition of Windows Vista when the operating system ships. The software maker wants you to go Premium. Microsoft is readying its marketing efforts for Vista, the successor to Windows XP slated to be broadly available in January. In its consumer campaigns, the company plans to highlight specific uses - which it calls 'scenarios' - of the operating system. In each case, Windows Vista Home Premium will be the product Microsoft tries to sell.

"Sun today announced new benchmark results involving the performance of the open source MySQL database running online transaction processing workload on 8-way Sun Fire V40z servers. The testing, which measured the performance of both read/write and read-only operations, showed that MySQL 5.0.18 running on Solaris 10 executed the same functions up to 64 percent faster in read/write mode and up to 91 percent faster in read-only mode than when it ran on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Advanced Server Edition OS." Take a look at the item below, though.

"Since the second computer was built, users have compared the performance of different computers. Performance matters. Sometimes, a performance difference is just a question of whether a job will be done sooner or later; in other cases, a performance difference might prevent a job from being done at all. Measuring performance of a particular task is not too daunting, but developing a prediction of how quickly other tasks will run can be nigh impossible. A benchmark is a task designed such that a measure of performance on this particular task will be a good proxy for performance across a wide variety of tasks."

Roumen Strobl, a Sun employee, has created a five minute flash demo to show how easy it is to create dynamic websites using NetBeans 5.5 and Java EE 5. In the demo, he uses two new wizards in NetBeans 5.5: one creates entity beans from a database; and the second creates JSF pages from the entity beans. The wizards automatically take care of the relationships between entity beans. This was previously discussed on OSNews. A beta of NetBeans 5.5 is now available for download.

At WinHEC, Microsoft CEO said Vista might be pushed back a few weeks, depending on the feedback received on Vista Beta 2. "We think we are on track for shipping early in ," the Microsoft CEO said. "We've talked about the month, but we get a chance to critically assess all of the feedback we'll get from this beta release then confirm or move a few weeks. We put the beta out today... So we should start getting feedback right away." Other than that, Bill Gates said Microsoft will focus its products on 64bit, starting later this year.