McKusick Tells of the BSD Days As Only He Can

BSD & Darwin 4 Comments
"The drought of those who speak without depending on slides has ended at the 12th Australian national Linux conference. Last evening, Marshall Kirk McKusick, a well-known BSD hacker, took those assembled down a slightly different track - after all, this is a Linux conference - with his narrative history of BSD. And what a rollicking ride it was! And the venue for his talk could hold only 100 people. He based his talk on notes he had made while travelling through Australia on a train in 1986 - he was a keynote speaker at the now-defunct Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group conference in 1986."
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Hobby OS-deving 1: Are You Ready?

OS News 89 Comments
It's recently been a year since I started working on my pet OS project, and I often end up looking backwards at what I have done, wondering what made things difficult in the beginning. One of my conclusions is that while there's a lot of documentation on OS development from a technical point of view, more should be written about the project management aspect of it. Namely, how to go from a blurry "I want to code an OS" vision to either a precise vision of what you want to achieve, or the decision to stop following this path before you hit a wall. This article series aims at putting those interested in hobby OS development on the right track, while keeping this aspect of things in mind.
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Judge Silences GeoHot, Seizes His Computers

Legal 47 Comments
"Sony has won its request for a temporary restraining order in its PS3 jailbreak case against Geohot and fail0verflow, despite a jurisdictional technicality. At the same time, the judge at the US District Court for the Northern District of California has allowed Sony to keep the lawsuit in San Francisco. The restraining order forbids the jailbreak team from distributing or linking the jailbreak procedure, or encouraging others to jailbreak or hack their PS3 or PSN. They've also been ordered to turn over any computers or storage media used to create the jailbreak to Sony's lawyers." Land of the free fail.
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NICTA Releases Security Software for Operating Systems

Privacy, Security 4 Comments
"National ICT Australia, in conjunction with Open Kernel Labs, has released new software aimed at researchers, developers and manufacturers that has the ability to protect computer hardware from failure or being attacked. The seL4 microkernel is a small operating system kernel which regulates access to a computer's hardware and is able to distinguish between trusted and untrusted software."
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Concept Enables PC Operating Systems to Survive Attacks

  Submitted by jimmy1971 Privacy, Security 4 Comments
"Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a method to restore a computer operating system to its former state if it is attacked. The concept involves taking a snapshot of the operating system at strategic points in time (such as system calls or interrupts), when it is functioning normally and, then, if the operating system is attacked, to erase everything that was done since the last 'good' snapshot was taken - effectively going back in time to before the operating system attack. The mechanism also allows the operating system to identify the source of the attack and isolate it, so that the operating system will no longer be vulnerable to attacks from that application. The idea of detecting attacks and resetting a system to a safe state is a well-known technique for restoring a system's normal functions after a failure, but this is the first time researchers have developed a system that also incorporates the security fault isolation component. This critical component prevents the operating system from succumbing to the same attack repeatedly."
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New Linux Network Device Naming To Be Tested by Fedora

Fedora Core 13 Comments
Fedora is holding a Test Day tomorrow (2011-01-27) to test a new network device naming scheme, as implemented by the biosdevname utility provided by Dell. biosdevname aims to give network interfaces names that are both consistent and appropriate to their physical attributes (onboard device number, or PCI slot), an approach that has been kicked around upstream for a while. This new system will likely come to most distros in future. The Fedora test day will concentrate on making sure it behaves as intended on both new installations and upgrades.
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KDE 4.6.0 Released

  Submitted by zegenie KDE 91 Comments
Before we get underway: I'm sorry, we don't have enough headline space to write 'KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.6.0'. Then again, do any non-anal people every refer to it that way? No? I thought so. In any case, there's a new KDE version out with lots of new features, bug fixes, and performance enhancements.
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Obama Nominates Former RIAA Lawyer For Solicitor General

  Submitted by brewmastre Legal 26 Comments
"President Barack Obama on Monday nominated former Recording Industry Association of America lawyer Donald Verrilli Jr. to serve as the nation's solicitor general. The solicitor general is charged with defending the government before the Supreme Court, and files friend-of-the court briefs in cases in which the government believes there is a significant legal issue. The office also determines which cases it would bring to the Supreme Court for review. Verrilli is best known for leading the recording industry's legal charge against music- and movie-sharing site Grokster. That 2003 case ultimately led to Grokster's demise when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the RIAA's verdict." Cough.
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Microsoft’s eMIPS Port Now Part of NetBSD

  Submitted by reez NetBSD 3 Comments
A month ago Microsoft released a NetBSD port for their eMIPS ("Extensible MIPS") platform. Now the port found its way into the NetBSD source tree. "The 'extensible MIPS' is a dynamically extensible processor for general-purpose, multi-user systems. The reconfigurable logic (Extensions) dynamically load/unload application-specific circuits. Extensions add specialized instructions to the processor, security monitors, debuggers, new on-chip peripherals. Extended Instructions dramatically speedup application programs, just by patching their binaries." Besides the eMIPS port, Microsoft also contributed a machine independent framework for hardware accelerator scheduling, a scheduling policy for it, and a secure executable format.
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Major Linux Distributions Collaborating on Application Store

  Submitted by fran Linux 41 Comments
Installing software on Linux has gotten progressively easier over the years, down to being downright foolproof in Ubuntu's Application Center. However, there is still the problem of each distribution relying on its own frontends and backends, and this needs to be addressed. Members from all the major Linux distributions have held several talks, and have come up with a solution which is already being implemented.
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Microsoft To Work with Jailbreakers on Windows Phone 7

Windows 28 Comments
Right, it's good to be back. This is news from last week, but heck, it's relevant for me since I just got my HTC HD7 Windows Phone 7 device. Anyway, if you're running a very large company in the business of selling phones, gadgets, and so on, there are several ways to deal with jailbreakers. It seems like Microsoft is one of the few companies who knows what it needs to do.
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