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."

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

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.

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.

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.

KernelTrap has a new story showing how to upgrade your GNU/Linux OS from the 2.4 stable kernel to the latest 2.6.0-test4 development kernel. Included among the the eight detailed steps are a number of screen shots.