The only thing worse than a malicious worm writer is an incompetent worm writer. PC World reports that recipients of the worm receive an email message claiming to include a picture that shows “the results” of Anthrax unleash a Visual Basic script used to execute the worm. Fortunately, whoever designed the worm couldn’t script his way out of an open garage door, so it doesn’t spread as designed.

What digital video recorder is right for you? ZDNet takes a look at a few of the notable offerings appearing in time for the 2001 holiday shopping season including the Linux-powered TiVo, calling it “market leader and probably the best choice”.

Apple’s fourth quarter earnings reveal that the company is having yet another
one of its notorious patches of bad luck. Profit for the quarter fell by 61
percent and the computer maker said it may not be able to meet estimates for its
fourth quarter profit. Net income was $66 million (0.19/share), compared with
last year’s $170 million (0.47/share). Sales were down 22 percent to 1.45
billion from 1.87 billion. AAPL closed down 1.02 to 16.99 in regular U.S.
trading. Bloomberg.

Legal
Times (via Law.com) has an interesting and somewhat debatable view on how
to end Microsoft’s monopoly: “Lost in the tempest of litigation is the fact that the government had and has the power to erode Microsoft’s monopoly — without resorting
to antitrust laws — by buying and promoting competing products. That is, the government could use its power as a large consumer of
products and services to promote competition. This is especially so since the federal government is perhaps the single largest customer for
Microsoft Windows.”

Posted at LinuxPR: “Cape Clear Software is today announcing
the full availability of the latest releases of its Web Services products,
CapeConnect(tm) and CapeStudio(tm). These latest versions add extensive
functionality to the product range with wider platform support, enhanced
development tools, and full UDDI functionality. Both products are available for
Linux immediately.

CapeConnect Three, a Web Services platform, introduces tools for building Web
Services that communicate via e-mail, a UDDI registry, and improved
ease-of-use in deploying Web Services. CapeConnect Three also supports Web
Services built on diverse platforms, including leading J2EE application servers,
Microsoft .NET, and CORBA.”

Where in the world is warez.at? Certainly not on the Internet anymore, as the
Business Software Alliance racks up yet another victory in its efforts to force
pirated software offline. Visitors to warez.at, allegedly a popular online
pirated software exchange, are now greeted with a message stating that the site
has been closed. The story implies that warez.at didn’t actually host any
pirated software, but redirected to 20 other sites in nine other countries that
did, and no word is given on whether the BSA has been able to shut down those
sites. BSA reps hailed the closure of warez.at as a major victory, almost in the
same way they did when the software piracy rate in a certain Pacific Rim
national dropped from 70 percent to 68 percent. Full story
at Reuters.

LinuxSecurity.com has posted the Trustix announcement for that OpenSSH issue: “Depending on the order of the user keys in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2
sshd might fail to apply the source IP based access control
restriction (e.g. from=”10.0.0.1″) to the correct key. Users can circumvent the system policy and login from disallowed
source IP addresses.”

Posted at PR Newswire: “SecureWorks announced today that it will
use IBM eServer* xSeries** 340 systems running Linux(R) for the SecureWorks
iSensor, an information security appliance that monitors network traffic.
An integral piece of SecureWorks’ managed intrusion prevention service,
the iSensor proactively blocks attacks by filtering malicious traffic. The
iSensor works in tandem with security specialists at SecureWorks’ security
operations center to provide a complete 24 x 7 security solution for
SecureWorks’ customers.”

Calling it a “transition, not an acquisition,” Linux Journal
reports that former
VA Linux Systems professional services director Marly Larson has found jobs for
most of that division at Red Hat Linux. Larsen: “I went to Red Hat and made a
proposal, and they said they like what we can do and made us an offer.” 22
former VA employees in Larsen’s group had their first day at Red Hat’s offices
on Monday. (VA Linux owns NewsForge parent OSDN).

Tom Johnson tells us of this story at LinuxGram. “Sources say Linux systems vendor Penguin Computing, the one-time VA
Linux Systems wannabe, is in tenuous circumstances after annihilating its
top management and instituting a big round of layoffs.”