Monthly Archive:: August 2003

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.

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.

"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.