Advogato: “Here are some observations about what would make documentation friendly for non-programmers.

I’ve tried to give back to the Linux community by helping with documentation. I’ve helped with some FAQs, HOWTOs, and am working on a large reference manual. Lately I started wondering how non-programmers actually use documentation so I asked a few.”

Technology companies are pushing the idea of a national identity card for United States citizens and residents. According to the president’s advisor on matters of computer and Internet security, the plan has virtually no support inside the White House. Story at MSNBC.

BBC News gives you something to think about the next time you visit your friendly neighborhood ATM: “A serious weakness has been discovered in the methods used by banks to protect the number that lets you get money from a cash machine.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have found that the computer systems which check that these numbers are valid are easy to defeat.

They warn that unscrupulous insiders could exploit these weaknesses to raid customer accounts.”

“w3m is a text based pager with WWW capability.

Ogasawara Satoshi and Kobayashi Shigehiro discovered a
vulnerability[1] in a MIME header parsing routine. A malicious web
server administrator could execute arbitrary code in the client
machine by sending malformed MIME headers inside the server HTTP
responses.” Full details and upgrade links posted at Linux Weekly News.

Posted at BSD Today: “By my calculations, there were 2513 packages in the Packages Collection on November 1st, up from 2425 last month.
At the end of October, we added initial support for Darwin to the pkgsrc tree – whilst it’s very early days, this new platform is very exciting, and has a large and enthusiastic user base.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
In a last-minute bid, the man many say is the father of Free Software announced his candidacy for the GNOME board of directors. Could he be jockeying for a position of authority because of recent displeasure with GNOME’s mentions of non-free software in its GNOME Summary?RMS posted this notice to the GNOME-foundation-announce list on the evening of November 8. Several other candidates announced earlier with less serious-sounding notices.

“Candidate Richard Stallman

“I’ve been working for GNOME since years before there was a GNOME. In
1983, while formulating plans for the GNU operating system, I decided
it ought to include a window system. Later, around 1988, we obtained
X, but we found out that X only did the lower-level half of the job,
so I decided we needed to develop a free software desktop to do the
rest of the job. After our desktop initiatives in 1990 and 1994/5
didn’t produce a working desktop (*), I became aware of another desktop
project based on a non-free library (**), and spoke to the community
about the problem posed by that dependency. This inspired Miguel to
launch our third desktop project, the one that succeeded: GNOME.

“As president of the Free Software Foundation, I have had years of
experience working with contributors both individual and corporate.
If I am elected to the board of the GNOME Foundation, I will use the
position to improve coordination between GNOME and the rest of GNU — in
regard to technical decisions, public relations, and long-term goals.

“(*) The second effort produced Guile instead of a desktop, because we
decided we wanted a Scheme package to customize the desktop with.

“(**) That library, Qt, is free software today. This change is probably
partly the result of the energetic development of GNOME.”

Several weeks ago, Stallman wrote to Christian Schaller and Steve George, who put together the GNOME summaries. RMS asked them to “stop all mentions of non-free software in the GNOME summaries,” according to a post by Schaller to the GNOME-foundation mailing list. Schaller said that they had mentioned the beta of StarOffice “some time back.”

Schaller said that RMS felt GNOME was legitimizing the use of non-free software by mentioning it, and he asked Schaller and George to confirm that they would not mention non-free software anymore.

Schaller tossed this out to the foundation list for advice, and the members agreed that the summary could indeed mention non-free software as it relates to GNOME, and that although GNOME is a Free Software project, Stallman has no ultimate authority over it.

November 8 is the final day for announcement of candidacy. The roster of candidates for inclusion on the GNOME board of directors has grown rapidly over the last 48 hours. The latest slate of hopefuls, in no particular order:

Glynn Foster
Jody Goldberg
Alan Cox (may have stepped down from candidacy)
Nat Friedman
Chema Celorio
Jonathan Blandford
James Henstridge
Miguel de Icaza
Jeff Wawugh
Ariel Rios
Michael Meeks
Andy Tai
Chris Lyttle
George Lebl
Havoc Pennington
Chris Phelps
Rhett Creighton
Bill Haneman
Bastien Nocera
Richard Stallman
Tim Ney
Ian McKellar
Jim Gettys
Daniel Veillard
Federico Mena-Quintero
Telsa Gwynne

The list may continue to grow tonight. The election will commence over the next week, with winners announced sometime after November 20.

From ZDNEet:”Like the title character in Woody Allen’s movie “Zelig,” whenever industry luminaries–Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy–take the stage to tout their companies’ Web services strategies, XML is right there. Although it predates the Web services stampede, the technology seems almost custom-made for development of the trend.”

“MontaVista Software Inc. has announced that
GET Engineering Corporation has successfully converted to the Hard Hat(R)
Linux(R) operating environment, porting from a proprietary RTOS platform to
embedded Linux. GET Engineering manufactures commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Navy Tactical
Data Systems (NTDS) products that are deployed in tactical applications of all
classes of U.S. Naval and NATO vessels. The company produces interface
adapters and associated products including parallel and serial adapters for
PMC, ISA, PCI, VME and cPCI-based systems. GET’s customers include major
defence and aerospace contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin
and BAE Systems.” Read the press release at PR Newswire

Reported at The Register: “Microsoft’s UK-targeted portal, MSN.co.uk, is now live with the XP colours, nearly two weeks after MS’s 25 October Win XP launch and MSN’s global look and feel relaunch.

What’s more, the site seems to be accepting browsers other than those created by MS. Although not widely tested yet, a cursory attempt with Opera 5.0 and 5.12 (identifying itself either as Opera or Mozilla 5.0) worked with no major issues. Of course, page layout isn’t quite as slick and smooth as when viewed in IE 6.0, but referrals to MS upgrade servers aren’t found, which is encouraging.”

LinuxJournal posts its annual Editor’s choice awards: “Though there’s been a decrease of vendors in some categories (most notably hardware), there are still numerous quality offerings (free and otherwise) that, along with the Linux kernel, have improved in quality during the last year.”