Monthly Archive:: June 2010

The fabled Amiga X1000 has been spotted in the wild, in the homeliest of places--Station X, a.k.a Bletchley Park. "The AmigaOne X1000 is a custom dual core PowerPC board with plenty of modern ports and I/O interfaces. It runs AmigaOS 4, and is supported by Hyperion, a partner in the project. The most interesting bit, though, is the use of an 500Mhz XCore co-processor, which the X1000's hardware designer describes as a descendant of the transputer - once the great hope of British silicon." With thanks to Jason McGint, 'Richard' and Pascal Papara for submissions.

"For three years son Ben, and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We've searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC. Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming." Looking beyond the immediate fear-inducing acronym BASIC, this article delves deeply into what it means to simply be in control--via a basic understanding of under the hood--of your own computer, and how our whiz-bang world of technology today is failing to bestow this understanding on this generation of would-be hackers.

I've bored the readers of my personal website to death with two rather prosaic articles debating the Linux security model, in direct relation to Windows and associated claims of wondrous infections and lacks thereof. However, I haven't yet discussed even a single program that you can use on your Linux machine to gauge your security. For my inaugural article for OSNews, I'll leave the conceptual stuff behind, and focus on specific vectors of security, within the world of reason and moderation that I've created and show you how you can bolster a healthy strategy with some tactical polish, namely software.

Hardware companies don't tend to have their own Linux distributions. IBM uses Linux everywhere, but they don't have their own Linux. Dell will be happy to sell you notebooks and netbooks with Ubuntu or a workstation or server with RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). But, no major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has had a house-brand Linux... until now. HP has recently bought not one, but two Linux distributions. Surely HP is not getting into the Linux distribution business? Are they?

I recently got to spend some time with MeeGo, an Intel-sponsored Linux distribution designed for netbooks and other mobile devices (such as Nokia's extra-geeky N900 smartphone). I tested MeeGo on a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook and I was extremely impressed.

"Previously, Java had been made available for OS/2 and eComStation by IBM, Golden Code and Innotek. However, new versions with many changes and improvements have been released since then and current applications require a current JVM implementation. The new project will port such a current JVM to OS/2 and eComStation. Dmitry Kumenov, who is well-known for his work on the Qt 3 and 4 ports, has been hired as chief developer. Funding is provided by several companies and individuals, with Mensys BV being the main sponsor."

Linux Magazine has a profile of Daniel Fore and the Elementary project. Elementary is a Linux distro that's committed to a clean and simple user experience, but it's more than a distro - it's actually a multi-pronged effort to make improvements to the user experience for a whole ecosystem of components, including icons, a GTK theme, Midori improvements, Nautilus, and even Firefox. The work that elementary is doing isn't limited to their own distro, and some of their work is available in current, and perhaps future, Ubuntu releases. The results are really striking, and I think it's probably the handsomest Linux UI I've ever seen.

Canonical recently announced that they are developing a tablet version of their popular Ubuntu operating system, slated to be released in 2011. This comes hot on the heels of the release of the Apple iPad, and the rumors that HP plans to release a WebOS-based tablet sometime late 2010. However, Canonical's foray into the tablet arena is fundamentally different from both the iPad and a WebOS tablet, and unfortunately reeks of a company failing to learn from their competitors successes and failures.

Dell has posted a page extolling the virtues of Linux (Ubuntu in particular), with a quick explanation of what Linux is and how it compares against Windows. Of course, the page links off to Dell's various computers that ship with Linux pre-installed.

An insecurity expert has has discovered a vulnerability in older versions of Windows which pesky attackers could exploit to take over control of your PC. Somewhat ironically, the vulnerability afflicts the Help and Support Center for Windows XP and Server 2003, which users may still - just about - be able to use to get online technical support.

All of us who use computers create a problem we rarely consider. How do we dispose of them? This is no small concern. Estimates put the number of personal computers in use world-wide today at about one billion. The average lifespan of a personal computer is only two to five years. We can expect a tidal wave of computers ready for disposal shortly, and this number will only increase. And as if that isn't challenge enough, there are already several hundred million computers out-of-service, sitting in attics and basements and garages, awaiting disposal.

It seems that the previous news about Mandriva SA being for sale have been more than simple rumors. Frederic Cuif* (incorrectly unaccented due to limitations in our CMS), active member of the French-speaking Mandriva User Group has summed up the various outcomes and proposed projects he found after contacting several key members of the company in order to gather information. The result of his investigation can be found on his blog, along with a detailed analysis of the Mandriva business model and the proposed outcomes, from a renewed interest in the distribution and the community from Linagora, potential buyer, to what could be the end of the Mandriva adventure if nothing is done. (Thanks to everybody who submitted this)

Recently, the Linux version of UnrealIRCd was discovered to have had a Trojan worm its way into the source code. Even more embarrassing for the developers of Unreal is that the Trojan's been holding open the backdoor in the source code since November of 2009-- not very recently. And, of course, bloggers and press in general are taking the opportunity of another breach in Linux security to point out doomsday devices that don't really exist.

The MacOSX sandbox functionality is not talked about, and there exists almost zero documentation on the subject. As Google Chrome uses it to contain it browser, so could any other app. The goal of the ironfox project is to provide the user with a secured Firefox, but still let the user browse the web without the sandbox interfering. It does this by white-listing all the actions that Firefox may do. Should the user's browser be compromised by a vulnerability in Flash or Java, the sandbox would prevent it from leaking any data or executing binaries, preventing system compromise. To break the sandbox the attacker would likely need to have a exploit for the browser and a kernel exploit that would work within the context of the sandbox. The policy is included in the package and should give the user great insights in the workings of the sandbox. It only works in 10.6 but could be backported to 10.5 without much trouble, as both have the seatbelt/sandbox kernel module.