Showing headlines posted by tuxchick

The wonderfully useful dsniff utility makes snooping on switched segments rather easy. As with all tools, it can be used for good or ill. It's a great addition to the network administrator's toolbox, and it can also be used for difficult-to-detect unauthorized snooping.

Linux kernel 2.6.14 is out, the fourth major kernel version of 2005, and chock full of improvements, including driver updates, new virtual filesystems and wireless connectivity improvements.

Nokia announced that it has started deliveries of the first device in its new Internet Tablet product category, the Nokia 770. The sleek, pocket sized device is Nokia's first Linux -based terminal product and is dedicated to convenient Internet browsing and email communications over Wi-Fi.

'We recognise that more and more people are using Firefox, so it's something we want to support,' says one high-street bank

Two large financial companies in the UK have pledged to try to make their Web sites compatible with Mozilla's Firefox, a week after it celebrated its first birthda

From the would-you-just-get-a-room dept:

Within days of the launch of Apple's new video iPod, companies were rushing to deliver content ranging from mild to shocking.

"We think the growth of viewing adult content on iPod devices will be explosive in the coming months," said Harvey Kaplan of Xobile.com, which describes itself as "the leading provider of adult movies for mobile phones."

An ambitious new Google Inc. service will let anyone upload most anything to a publicly searchable database, potentially laying the groundwork for a foray by the Internet juggernaut into classified advertising.

In Cambridge, Mass., Nicholas Negroponte and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been chipping away at a long-held dream: producing a laptop so cheap that governments could afford to link every child in the world to the Internet.

An operation that uses the lure of free lyric files, browser upgrades, and ring tones to download spyware and adware on consumers’ computers has been ordered to halt its illegal downloads by a U.S. District Court at the request of the Federal Trade Commission.

If you want to kill yourself, or anybody, with candy, Energy Fiend has produced a handy Death by Penguin Mints calculator.

Even though I've had problems with Microsoft, I can't recommend using OSS in every situation. In this installment of a two-part column, I'll not only discuss what I consider to be Microsoft's unethical practices, but I'll offer advice on when not to use OSS.

Anti-spam vendor Postini has looked at spam from both sides now.

The Spamhaus Project, a popular U.K.-based organization that maintains a database of spamming activity, placed two of the San Carlos, Calif., company's IP addresses on its Spamhaus Block List (SBL) last week after receiving numerous complaints of unsolicited e-mail from the company.

Oh, swell. Just when you thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, here comes another report of Sony DRM anti-customer treachery. J. Alex Haldeman on Freedom to Tinker describes in detail yet another DRM scheme from Sony, SunnComm's MediaMax. It's not a rootkit this time, like XCP. He calls it spyware. While Sony has said it has temporarily halted shipments of the XCP rootkit, it hasn't promised to stop shipping CDs with this junk on it, from all I can determine. Haldeman describes how it works at length, but here's the executive summary:

[Ed.- If it weren't for PJ, where would we see this sort of vigilance and in-depth reporting? - tuxchick]

There you are all bright-eyed and eager, ready to roll up your sleeves and go to work in the exciting new world of Free/Open Source software. You have rosy visions of getting paid to do enjoyable, challenging work. Maybe even fat stock options that vest while you are still young, so you can quit the wage-slave routine and venture forth on your own and maybe even fund projects yourself.

Diggable

...antivirus firms are already warning about a new trojan in the wild taking advantage of the rootkit. This story raisess some questions. These CDs with rootkits have been sold for 8 months. Where was Microsoft? Why didn't they and antivirus companies notice this rootkit themselves long ago? ...So, Symantec and "the big antivirus companies" already knew about the rootkit? According to this statement, it seems they did. Are they then liable as well as Sony?

Open-source advocates have lashed out at SAP AG after a senior executive's "bold and ill-informed" criticisms. Shai Agassi, SAP's head of product development and technology, had said last week in a presentation that open source represents a kind of "IP socialism" that kills innovation.

Researchers at Purdue University's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing have created open-source software that makes it easier to collaborate in virtual reality environments with colleagues at other locations. The Access Grid Juggler software, now available free of charge on the Internet, eliminates the need to create customized programs. The software, referred to as AGJuggler, can be used on platforms ranging from desktop simulators to a sophisticated virtual reality system called a CAVE, or cave automatic virtual environment, in which users are immersed in an interactive 3-D environment.

This mini-lesson deals with the WWW that you may or may not have known about - the Wonderful World of Wikis. A wiki (or wikiwiki, from the Hawaiian word for 'very quickly') is a web-based application to create content quickly for whatever reason you desire.

A consortium is chartered to turn embedded Linux into a plug-and-play mobile phone platform comparable to Microsoft's Windows Mobile Smartphone OS, but with greater flexibility and lower costs.

Industry-Leading iSCSI Target Mode Performance of 400,000 IOPS Now Available for PCI-Express Servers and Storage Systems