Showing all newswire headlines

Following the very successful inaugural Open Source Software Africa conference held in Johannesburg, South Africa, last year conference organisers Trade Conferences International(TCI) this week announced that they will be hosting the 2nd Open Source Software Africa event next month.

Women'sNet, a non-profit women's organisation based in Johannesburg, is hosting a SADC(Southern African Development Community) regional workshop to build awareness and use of free and open source software (FOSS) in the non-profit sector, and women's organisations specifically. The workshop will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 6 - 10 September 2004.

The two previous editions of "Tech Support" introduced software to help you monitor the security of your Linux system. March's column showed you how to monitor filesystem changes with Tripwire, and last month's column explained how to detect rootkits and loadable kernel modules (LKMs) with chkrootkit. This month, let's see how to monitor and analyze your system logs with Logwatch

Samba 3.0 adds a new feature, Unix extensions, that adds support for Unix filesystem features to the SMB/CIFS protocol, and the 2.6-series Linux kernel provides client-side support for these features in the form of a new filesystem driver known as cifs. Using these tools, you can gain access to many Unix filesystem features that would have otherwise been lost using the older smbfs mount code or the smbmount command.

Sunbelt Software recently upgraded its Sunbelt Network Security Inspector (SNSI) to version 1.5, adding Linux system support, IP-based scanning, port and Windows service scanning, vulnerability searching and new configuration and scanning wizards. Platform extensions bring its continually updated database to 3,100 vulnerabilities.

CNET News.com is reporting that two new flaws in the way Mozilla handles security certificates have been discovered. The more serious vulnerability allows a site to appear to have a security certificate when it does not (bug 253121). The other hole makes it possible for an attacker to overwrite the root certificate authority certificates, causing an error message to appear whenever the user tries to access a (genuine) secure site (bug 249004). Both bugs have now been fixed, but updated end-user releases of Mozilla products are not yet available.

This tutorial (Part 3) is ideal for those who want to improve their knowledge of fundamental Linux administration skills. We'll cover a variety of topics, including system and Internet documentation, the Linux permissions model, user account management, and login environment tuning.

Life online is certainly getting complex. As if spam, spim, crackers, and worms weren't enough, you now have to worry about dragons, thieves, spells, and Sith lords. It's almost enough to make you pull the RJ45 plug. But don't. Dragons aren't a new Windows exploit (yet), and you don't need to protect your hard disk from the Sith. And while you might run into such beasties online, have no fear: you'll have a trusty axe, light saber, or passel of pigs to protect you.

You know Linux is easy to run and is as stable as houses. I know that, too. But does your friend Joe Windows know it? Chances are he doesn't.

I remembered someone recently talking about how Perl-Tk can create nice graphical user interfaces. I'd never spent much time learning Perl-Tk, so I considered this the perfect opportunity to tackle the learning problem via a practical problem. I cracked open my recently acquired Mastering Perl/Tk from O'Reilly, and started reading.

Let's look at some powerful things you can do on a command-line. Even if you don't want to do exactly these things, you're likely to get some ideas for related uses. This "related-ness" ability of the shell and its command-line -- letting you combine tools to do just what you need to do -- is the very spirit of "Power Tools."

Half of Australia wrote in to tell us that today's issue of The Sydney Morning Herald features an opinion column in which technology correspondent Graeme Philipson recommends Mozilla Firefox over Microsoft Internet Explorer. The actual article itself is short but it is strikingly splashed in the promotion box under the print newspaper's main masthead (as a PDF of today's Herald front page shows).

Linux on Intel is driving the commoditization of computing. But it's not the only game in town, nor is it the only combination of software and hardware with influence. Linux also runs on PowerPC processors - including IBM's POWER series, Apple's G5, and other embeddable cores - and runs well. Here's a look at the "other" Linux, the one that runs on PPC.

Novell this week announced the availability of Mono 1.0, an open source development platform based on the .NET framework that allows software developers to build Linux and cross-platform applications. A community initiative sponsored by Novell, the Mono project makes it easier to build and develop applications on Linux and other platforms, allowing developers to get software to market faster and more cost effectively.

Ninety two percent of survey respondents indicated that their Linux systems have never been infected with a virus, according to Evans Data's new Summer 2004 Linux Development Survey. Further, 78% of Linux developers say that their Linux systems have never been hacked and less than 7% were hacked three or more times. Of the 22% that have been hacked, 23% of the intrusions were by internal users with valid login ID's. The main ways that Linux machines can be compromised are: Inadequately configured security settings, vulnerability in internet service and Web server flaws.

Yesterday was the last day of Ottawa Linux Symposium, and I can't help comparing it with the Usenix Annual Technical Conference, which was only a few weeks earlier. The difference in the quality and relevance (at least as far as my interests are concerned) of the papers, the energy of the attendees, and the overall atmosphere of the two conferences were distinctly different.