Eugenia Loli Archive

A recent white paper suggesting that an architectural flaw exists in Windows has generated interest in the press and on security mailing lists. While some of the report's findings are correct, its core assertion – that there is an architectural flaw in Windows – is inaccurate, Microsoft says. The Microsoft Security Response Center has thoroughly investigated the report's claims, and they would like to provide information about our findings and the planned future steps.

In an open letter to Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, a group of users has called for the company to make Solaris 9 available on the lion's share of computers based on the Intel architecture. The letter, published as an ad in the San Jose Mercury News and titled "Shame on you, Scott", is the latest move in an eight-month war of words between Sun and a vocal contingent of its users. The spat kicked off in January when the software maker said it would put its next operating system, Solaris 9, on indefinite hold for the x86 architecture. Read more at News.com.

The OpenBFS team today announced that they finally moved to beta stage. This means that OpenBFS (the free and open source alternative, but fully compatible BeOS File System clone) is completely done feature-wise and only testing is missing now. OSNews (over)heard that "the query engine is way faster than the BFS one _and_ it supports searching on non-indexed attributes. Also it performs at least as good as BFS and in some test cases it is even considerably faster than it.".

So what exactly are Sun's plans? While precise details remain close to Sun's chest, it is clear that the company is planning to assemble a suite of both open source and proprietary software products with which to go head to head with Microsoft. Some of these, such as the MySQL open source database, Sendmail messaging software, Samba file and print software, Apache web server, Mozilla browser, and Gnome desktop, have already been discussed by Sun executives. Our Take: At LinuxWorld, I saw their default configuration of Gnome 2 on Solaris. It looked pretty bad, while their X server did not even support AA. I don't think they are going anywhere to "assault" Microsoft. They might "assault" some other Unix or even Linux vendors, but their game will stop there.

From BSDForums: The FreeBSD-STABLE branch (development branch for 4-STABLE) of the source tree has now been frozen in preparation for the release of FreeBSD 4.7. This means that any new commits to the -stable source tree must be approved by the Release Engineering Team first. The expected "ship" date for FreeBSD 4.7 is October 1, 2002.

eWeek and ThinkSecret claim that Apple (since the begining of OSX) is developing in parallel to the PPC version of MacOSX, an x86 version called 'Marklar' as a fallback option, in case the Motorola CPUs could not deliver. The article also claims that this version is assigned only to a few dozen engineers so far, for maintanance purposes-only, and Apple most probably would switch to the desktop Power4 CPU that IBM is preparing instead. We recently wrote an editorial about the probable switch of Apple to x86.