When .NET launched, one of the most talked-about feature was rich metadata. But what does that mean to the day-to-day developer? Shawn Wildermuth discusses why understanding the way metadata can be used in your types can open up development avenues you never knew existed.

L.A.S. Linux is a 'live CD' distribution of Linux (based on Knoppix) with a CD-bootable toolkit for information security professionals and systems administrators. Its small footprint maks it able to fit on a 185MB mini-CD. Despite its small size, L.A.S. contains over 100 security tools including basic desktop applications, an array or forensic, penetration testing, intrusion detection, sniffers, and administrative utilities. Changes in this latest version include the addition of Ettercap-GTK, Clam Anti-Virus, MiniCOM, SpikeProxy, MRTG, and many of the Cisco-centric Open Source Exchange tools.

Motorola is planning on selling its 19% stake in the Symbian Consortium to Nokia and Psion. The company claims that it isn't ending its relationship with Symbian nor will it necessarily cease to use the Symbian OS in its phones, but that its focus is on developing its Java environment, and the underlying OS isn't that important to them. Motorola recently developed a Linux-based smartphone.

It's semi-official: the next major update to Windows, which has already had its release slip from 2004 to 2005, will likely be even later. Microsoft executives are now reluctant to even discuss a release date. "We do not yet know the time frame for Longhorn, but it will involve a lot of innovative and exciting work," said Bill Gates at a recent financial analyst meeting.

A trade group has urged the US Department of Homeland Security to reconsider its recent decision to use Microsoft as its preferred supplier of desktop and server software, citing recent security problems. Quote from the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) report: "Because of these recent developments, historical experience, and the inherent risks associated with lack of diversity, we ask that you reconsider your heavy reliance on a single, flawed software platform to protect our national security."

There is a group trying to develop an exokernel operating system for real world use, and it is supposed to be a hybrid with microkernels. There's not a lot at their SourceForge site yet, except for a cute slogan, but there's a comprehensive overview of the project's goals.

IBM researchers in Zurich, Switzerland, have developed novel worm-squashing software the company says it wants to turn into a product to help guard against computer-network attacks such as those that slowed Internet traffic earlier this month . . . The system uses a unique approach to detecting malicious software by looking at traffic flowing to Internet addresses that aren't assigned to specific computers, trying to isolate computers on a network that attempt to infect others

Citing the recent havoc caused by worms and security holes, three Asian powers are considering jointly developing an alternative to the Microsoft platform, probably using an open source OS as the foundation. From the Reuters story: The plan is to be proposed by Japanese Trade Minister Takeo Hiranuma at a meeting of economic ministers from the three nations in Phnom Penh on Wednesday, it said, adding that agreement was seen as likely.

According to Leo Laporte of TechTV, Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) is considering selling his technology television channel which he bought it from Ziff-Davis in 2000. Two candidates are Viacom or Sony. Some people who think this is a bad idea have set up a petition at Petition Online.com.

On Microsoft's Protect Your PC page, there are some graphical representations of firewalls and virus protection, and the icon that they're using to represent external threats is a familiar-looking curly-cue that Debian GNU/Linux fans might recognize. Coincidence?

As a system administrator, I have used Windows on the desktop since 2.0 and used to run Windows XP at home for my family. I use Linux and Windows servers at work and prefer (Red Hat) Linux for its security, stability and usefulness in a company with a diminishing IT budget. More than a year ago I started experimenting with Linux as a desktop solution and after installing and using more than 7 different distros along with many various versions of those distros, I found a distro that is doing everything its suppose to do, right out of the box. I'm talking about the pleasantly suprising Lindows 4.0.

I checked my email this morning. The tally: 80 spams, 65 emails asking me to "See the attached file for details," and 6 legitimate emails. This worm thing is getting ridiculous. Has anyone else noticed a big spike today?

OpenBSD's Todd Miller reports that an improper bounds check in the semget(2) system call can allow a local user to cause a kernel panic. No privilege escalation is possible, the attack simply runs the kernel out of memory. The bug was introduced in OpenBSD 3.3, previous versions of OpenBSD are unaffected. Earlier, Mike Frantzen has committed "Passive operating system fingerprinting" to PF which exposes the source host's OS to the filter language.

In keeping with their policy of releasing all commercial products as BSD licensed open source within two years of development, PostgreSQL, Inc. has released a robust, scalable replication solution for PostgreSQL under the BSD license. The article quotes an statement from the company which says: