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:

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.

SkyOS, the popular hobby OS, now supports OpenGL for its normal 2D operations and also freeform windows are supported. SkyGI windows can have a per pixel window shape now.

The SCO Group said today it had never planned to sue any Linux companies, had no concrete plans to sue anyone and also no current plans to take a commercial Linux customer to court. The company was responding to questions routed through its PR people in Sydney. Full story at TheAge.

IBM is pushing Linux as the upgrade path for current users of IBM's venerable OS/2, but most customers of OS/2 computing, especially branch banking, are looking towards a Windows migration.

"Some think the software maker is at fault for the latest viruses. But you can't blame a target. "Let's all just beat the hell out of Microsoft. It unleashed the worms!" Well, that's what some people think, if the e-mails (uninfected) I got during the past week are any indication." says Wrastler for CNN Money. "So why doesn't Microsoft make its software more secure? They're trying, company officials say. But they also argue that like any other company, there's only so much Microsoft can do to prevent a crime if a criminal truly wants to commit it." a Statesman article says. In the meantime, the FBI has identified a teenager as the author of Blaster and plans to arrest him early Friday, a U.S. official confirmed.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced significantly expanded hardware support for the Solaris Operating System (OS) x86 Platform Edition. Sun's goal is to ensure that the Solaris OS x86 is available on the widest range of x86 systems by adding 100 new third-party systems and 100 new components to its Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) delivering more value, choice and flexibility to customers. Read on for the rest of the press release.