ZDNet says the NSA will soon be looking for bids on a contract to upgrade it’s non-secret systems, estimated to be worth up to $5 billion.

From the humor site, Segfault: “In a surprise press conference made this Friday evening Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft will be
releasing the source code for the upcoming Windows operating system dubbed Whistler.

‘We have already begun work on the project, and have for the past three months collaborated with a small company of
enterprising young programmers from Russia,’ said Ballmer in an impromptu press conference. Ballmer appeared visibly
shaken throughout the press conference, and several times made references to how ‘skillful the Russian programmers
were’, and how Microsoft ‘[didn’t] want to do anything to threaten [their] relationship with them.’ “

Linux World offers a column on tips on reiserfs: “I decided to live dangerously last week and create a couple of reiserfs partitions on my primary Linux server. Reiserfs is a
journaling file system that is purportedly more efficient at handling many small files than the de facto standard ext2fs file system
and just as efficient as ext2fs in other cases.”

From ZDNet UK: “The theft of Microsoft’s code could mean more security breaches, say
experts

Computer security experts are concerned that the possible theft of Microsoft
source code may lead to widespread security problems with its software, if
malicious crackers gain access to key hidden features.”

Linux Journal gives this advice: “If anything claiming to be illegally copied Microsoft source code shows up on the Net, do not download or read it. If you do, you will lose the right to work on free
software.”

The Standard has a preview story about Transmeta going public Oct. 30. “If priced at the middle of the range
of $11 to $13 per share, the IPO would value the company at
more than $1.5 billion and would raise $156 million for the
chipmaker.”

From GCN.com: “The Patent and Trademark Office has begun taking patent applications over the Internet.

The new Electronic Filing System, which went into operation today, uses a public-key infrastructure system to encrypt and digitally sign
submissions.”

The advisory’s at LWN.net: There are several security problems in ypbind, the daemon used by
NIS clients for binding to their NIS server(s). First, there is a
potential buffer overflow; it is not clear whether it is possible
to exploit it at all. Second, there is a denial of service attack
against ypbind that can make it run out of file descriptors.

It’s at Linux Journal, of course. Is your project on the list?

The advisory is at LWN.net: The ncurses library is used by many text/console based applications
such as mail user agents, ftp clients and other command line utilities.
A vulnerability has been found by Jouko Pynnnen
in the screen handling functions: Insufficient boundary checking leads
to a buffer overflow if a user supplies a specially drafted terminfo
database file. If an ncurses-linked binary is installed setuid root,
it is possible for a local attacker to exploit this hole and gain
elevated privileges.