The promised batch of windows updates for today are now out and it turns out there were 3 critical updates out of the 6 released. It looks as though the biggy is an RPC problem with the plug and play system (Plug and play needing a remote procedure call?) This is one that could likely be quickly exloited. There is a workaround on this of having port 139 and 445 firewalled (many places do that by default now, last I checked my ISP does.) Don’t take that as a tool for complacence though. Patch it anyway!
Category: Software
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Browser competition, market decisions and open standards
I just read a blog entry at zdnet. The writer, John Carroll, essentially asserts that the free market has chosen that monopoly in the case of the web browser IS what’s best for it. There are a few things that I think he fails to take into account in his perspective on browsers and competition.
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Siebel supporting Linux
This item is coming from infoworld. It looks as though Siebel will be supporting their CRM software on linux (Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9). They didn’t comment on other supported distributions. They are among the last of the major enterprise software vendors to take the plunge of releasing their software for linux.
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Linux – ToVid for vcd creation
Linux.com has an article about ToVid, a utility to help convert video into VCD format. ToVid started out as just a VCD imager for mpeg files, but has expanded to be able to handle most video formats for input. It can also work with dvdauthor and other tools depending on whether you want to creat dvd or vcd’s.
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OpenSuSE site live
It looks as though the OpenSuSE site is open for business. Several days ago there was a story that Novell was opening SuSE up to build a community model much like Red Hat has with Fedora.
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Interesting NASA open source software
I was just browsing Sourceforge.net and looking at the most downloaded software and something from NASA caught my eye. It’s called World Wind. The link is to their home page (not the project page.) It’s Windows only, but looks very nicely done from what I can see.
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Intel investing in open source
PClinuxonline.com is reporting that there is a zdnet article concerning Intel’s investment in Open Source software. Specifically the article is about Intel’s support of the Xen Virtualization Technology Project which is being integrated into the Linux Kernel.
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Linux using wine passes Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage test
This will likely not last long, but according to this post at bit-tech.net, the author went to windows update to try to download directx on his linux machine just to see if it would work. (I assume he was using Internet Explorer running on wine.)
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HP virus throttler available for Linux
HP will be making their virus throttler software avialable for Linux. Their virus throttler software detects compromised machines on a network, mails the administrator and throttles network connections to the machine, attempting to minimize the impact of the viral outbreak. (It seems as though it would be especially useful against network worms.
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Linux: Using Mandrake (Mandriva’s) URPMI tool
As background for this, I’ve used Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva) for my main desktop since around 8.2 I can’t remember quite how long ago that’s been, but around 3 to 4 years I think. The why is something best saved for another writeup. Early on I was frustrated by installing software. I read everyone give instructions on installing from source. That went along the following lines….
from a command prompt type the following….
tar -xzvf yournewsoftware.gz
cd yournewsoftware
./configure
make
su
enteryourrootpassword
make install
and your done!Well…. no it isn’t always that simple
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