CRN has a story about the coming release of Linux 2.4: “It’s not your father’s way of making an operating system.

Creation of the next version of Linux,version 2.4, the first
version of the OS expected to be widely adopted
commercially, isn’t occurring behind closed doors. Day after day,
far-flung developers are grinding out new source code and
patches for Linux in full public view.”

Linux.com has an article on the transition in recent months away “from the traditional
source distribution of software using tarballs towards a more ‘user-friendly’
approach of binary packages destined for use on a specific platform.”

ApacheCon 2000, which may be the largest gathering of Apache ssers in Europe ever, will be in London in October.
The details are at Apache Week.

The security advisory is at LWN.net: “Screen allows the user to overload the visual bell with a text message that
can be set by the user. This text message is handled as a format string,
instead of as a pure string, so maliciously written format strings are
allowed to overwrite the stack. Since screen in Red Hat Linux 5.2 and
earlier releases was setuid root, this security hole could be exploited to
gain a root shell.”

From a story at LinuxGram: “A gaping hole has been discovered in the GNU General Public License (GPL), the legal
document at the heart of open source, and dear Sun has driven a Mack truck named
Solaris x86 straight through it.

At least that’s how open source demigod Bruce Perens assesses the situation and he’s
the primary author of the “Open Source Definition,” the philosophical basis of the open
source movement.”

Campus police confiscated an Oklahoma State University student’s computer after
the Recording Industry Association of America notified the school that a person on campus
was allegedly distributing copyrighted material. CNet has the story .

From an announcement at LWN.net: “Debian is phasing out support for Debian 2.1 (slink). We believe that
this will have a minimal impact on our user community as we expect that
most slink users have already upgraded to potato. In order to ease the
transition for those who have not yet upgraded, we will provide minimal
support until Sep 30, 2000.”

The nation’s government-funded
computer security watchdog issued a warning
Friday that computer intruders have taken control
of hundreds of computers connected to the
Internet. The attackers are in a position to launch a
serious attack, according to the CERT
Coordination Center, which said that the situation
“poses a significant threat to Internet sites and the
Internet infrastructure.”

Computer vandals are exploiting two fairly
common vulnerabilities in Unix computer systems discovered
since July. In about 100 cases since then, intruders have used
the vulnerabilities to install distributed denial-of-service tools
on machines, according to CERT Incident Response Team
Leader Kevin Houle. The story is at MSNBC.

“Still knocking bugs out,” Cox says in an email published on LWN.net.

MSN is overbilling
subscribers by hundreds or thousands of dollars
for what is supposed to be a $21 monthly fee,
MSNBC.com has learned. MSN has not,
however, issued a general warning about the
glitch, opting instead to handle irate customer
service calls on a case-by-case basis. The report is at MSNBC (yes, the MS stands for Microsoft at MSNBC, too).