Ever wonder what BSD Unix is all about? Chris Coleman, maintainer of the BSD Development Center at www.oreilly.com and editor of Daemon News at www.daemonnews.org on BSD Unix, explains it. The
story is at Inter@ctive Week.

From a story at Inter@ctive Week: Both Linux and BSD are growing faster as server systems on the Internet than their competitors, including Microsoft’s Windows NT and Windows 2000 combined, according to Nancy Stewart, senior analyst at Survey.com, an Internet market research firm that surveys information technology executives on their purchasing plans. In addition, Linux and FreeBSD, an open-source version of the BSD OS, are expected to grow 177 percent as Web server systems by the end of 2001, Stewart says, compared with a loss of 7 percent for Windows NT/2000 and a loss of 11.2 percent for proprietary Unix, such as Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris.”

Opera Software, PalmPalm
Technology Inc., and Trolltech have announced the formation of a strategic
alliance for the Asian wireless Linux market. The three companies will jointly
develop “Linux Total Solution for Wireless Internet Appliance” for hardware
manufacturers in the wireless Internet space. Read the press release at LinuxPR.

From a review at LWN.net: “Linux audio has long lacked for useful documentation; this
book nicely fills in part of that void. As a guide for clueful musicians and a general
overview of the depth and variety of Linux audio software it is great; it will prove a
little less helpful for beginners trying to figure out how to do simple things.”

Penguin Computing,
a provider of reliable Linux systems for Internet serving, announced that it will begin offering Red Hat Linux 7 on its
systems. The latest version of the industry-leading distribution of Linux offers
users greater security and manageability, enhancing Linux as a platform for
the enterprise. The press release is at LinuxPR.

From a column at eWeek: “While evaluating for this week’s issue the Nautilus graphical shell developed by Eazel — a crew with original Macintosh interface designers at its core — my thoughts turned often to Apple’s upcoming OS X and how much more of a pain it’ll be to put OS X through its paces than just about any up-and-coming to far-fetched OS out there.”

Reuters is reporting that Motorola’s wholly-owned subsidiary Metrowerks has agreed to invest $22.5 million in Lineo, which develops Linux software and apps.

Intel Corp. says a number of the world’s largest Linux
vendors have decided to adopt the chip giant’s Common Data
Security Architecture software infrastructure for security
services. Several Linux players said they will use
the security software in their
operating systems, reports IDG.net. A related press release from Business Wire: Caldera Systems has announced that the company is
collaborating with Intel and Bull to bring Intel’s Common Data Security Architecture (CDSA)
to Linux.

Slashdot readers talk about the latest Red Hat release. One reader: “So, is anyone brave enough to try and upgrade from 6.2 to 7.0?” LinuxWorld.com has a story on the release.

Farm9.com is pleased to announce our first release of Open Source tools. We started off with a simple but very useful tool called Netcat
written by the L0pht and we modified it to provide encryption. We
implemented TwoFish, which is a very strong algorithm and one of the
contenders to replace DES. THe result: Cryptcat = netcat + encryption.

What is Cryptcat good for, you ask? Basically it lets you open an
encrypted pipe, on any port, between two machines. It’s useful for
transferring log files between machines in a safe manner. cryptcat is
easy to use in shell scripts. It’s a poor mans VPN. It is very small
and light.

Source code is included.

Also see our Web site!

Twofish is courtesy of Counterpane, and Cryptix. We started with the
Java version of Twofish from cryptix, converted it to C++ (don’t ask
why), and enhanced it by adding CBC mode and the ciphertext stealing
technique from Applied Cryptography (pg. 196).

How do you use it?

Machine A: cryptcat -l -p 1234 Machine B: cryptcat 1234

This is identical to the normal Netcat options for doing exactly the
same thing. However, in this case the data transferred is encrypted.

Want the source? Hit the Web site or SourceForge.

Windows version — adapted from the Hobbit original by Weld Pond, very
tricky! (and I thought adding Twofish was tricky).

Linux version — why I like Linux, only had to change two lines of
code to add encryption.

Is it really secure?

Not if you know the secret key, which is hardcoded to be “metallica”

— Submitted by mag00@farm9.com