Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has fixed several critical Kerberos 5 flaws attackers could exploit to cause a denial of service, bypass security restrictions and hijack targeted machines.

TIBCO's GITAK (General Interface Test Automation Kit) has now been open sourced by the company. This gives developers a free tool for building automatic quality assurance testing routines for enterprise applications components.

An open source initiative to reverse gains for Microsoft web server software appears to be using edited server headers to try and improve the showing of the Apache web server. Sites using the Open Source Parking service report that they are running on Apache, but appear to actually be hosted on lighttpd. Both Apache and lighttpd are open source web servers, but Apache leads in the Netcraft survey with a 59 percent market share, while lighttpd is a newcomer with just 1.2% share.

A hackergotchi is a picture of a person's head that's used as an avatar for identification on a blog. Any region below the neck is cut out, as are any portions of the picture that don't include the head. You can create a hackergotchi easily with a digital camera and the GIMP.

The Minitel, a French government-sponsored minicomputer that was wired into 14 million French homes at its peak in the mid-1990s, had a limited service offering, a black-and-white screen and slow connection speeds that doomed it to near-extinction in the face of the Internet. Now, a French Internet service provider, Neuf Cegetel, has taken inspiration from the Minitel to develop a computer based on a similar low-cost model, aimed at people who are unable or unwilling to buy a computer. In a gesture to high-technology enthusiasts, however, the system uses the open-source software beloved by many engineers and programmers.

The Free Software Foundation has released the second draft of version 3 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). In addition to general editing, the new draft ties the LGPL more closely to the GNU General Public License (GPL), introduces the concept of a "linked version," and adds a new option for distributing combined works.

A fairly detailed article entitled"VistA Electronic Health Record (EHR) System: The Market Today and Tomorrow" was recently published in Virtual Medical Worlds. See the articlehere.

South African state power utility Eskom backs open software as it sponsors a new open source centre under the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering.

The Meraka Institute has been appointed the official South African affiliate for the Linux Professional Institute, ending months of speculation after the Shuttleworth Foundation ended its relationship with the LPI.

Company will provide and support certified SuSE Linux Desktop 10 operating system on its x64 workstations.

MontaVista Software of California has cut the size of and improved real-time support in its embedded Linux operating system. Called Pro 5, “it has 3Mbyte flash memory requirement”, product director Patrick MacCartee told EW. “Version 4.0 needed 12Mbyte.” Based on open source components, this is “the first embedded OS to provide integration of the latest real-time patches from Ingo Molnar, a leading contributor to Linux kernel development,” said MontaVista. “These patches will provide enhanced user space options in real-time.”

I recently wrote a simple bash script to incorporate a lyrics database into some of my music-handling scripts. I took advantage of one of the benefits of open source software by finding an existing application that performed this task and inspecting the code to see how the developers did it.

Microsoft has been accused of deceiving US consumers by marketing PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" when they could only run the most basic version of its latest operating system.

Former Vice President Al Gore told Embedded Systems Conference keynote attendees in San Jose, Calif. today that energy-efficient IT systems of the future -- many containing embedded processors -- will be a major factor in helping overcome the major climate problems the Earth is now facing.

The Defense Department has launched a new program to encourage the use of open- source encryption software within DOD systems. The Open Source Software Institute of Hattiesburg, Miss., will support the OpenCrypto Management Program, which is part of DOD’s Open Technology Development road map initiative. The goal of that program is to provide DOD with greater system development and acquisition flexibility through collaborative software development.

The last two years, Google and O'Reilly have presented a set of Open Source Awards at OSCON. For the first time, we're opening the nominations up to the entire open source community. The award will recognize individual contributors that have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, collaboration, in the development of Open Source Software.

Bangalore-based Mistral Software is shipping a Linux-based development kit for TI's ARM11-based SoC (system-on-chip). The OMAP2430 Starter Kit (OSK) targets wireless application development, and includes a 2.6.19 kernel, open-source bootloader, JFFS2 filesystem, and NFS-mounted root filesystem.

Lotus Software on Wednesday extended its Linux support to the desktop with the introduction of a Web-based client for its Domino messaging and collaboration server.

Intel has been creating a mobile PC specifically aimed at developing countries. The device had to be lightweight, mobile, and rugged, while offering sufficient power for standard desktop applications to be run. That PC is known as the Intel Classmate PC and is set to go on sale commercially in the second half of 2007.

Like clockwork, the GNOME project released GNOME 2.18 six months after the release of GNOME 2.16. The new version carries a number of improvements over the 2.16 release, but doesn't bring many "must have" features that would compel users to upgrade right away.