Vnunet.com: “Paul has spent hours looking for vulnerabilities in one particular UK
website. Sometimes he goes a step further and waits outside the
company’s head office to watch staff arrive in the morning.
Gathering information on who works where, and how they get into
the building, helps him plan his attack.” Paul eventually got into the building and its computer systems. Fortunately for that company, Paul was a contractor hired to find and report their physical and computer security holes before someone with malicious intent finds them.

Open CASCADE will be responsible for creating the new version of CIGAL (i.e., CIGAL 2), an application developed in-house at Alcatel Space for visualizing the results of thermal calculations and for constructing radiative models. The first phase of the project represents around 300 developer days of work.
The selection of Open CASCADE by this major aerospace company, world leader in orders for geostationary communications satellites (27% of the market in 2000), demonstrates the growing confidence of industrial companies in the advanced capabilities and reliability of this open-source software development platform. (Open CASCADE is available for downloading free of charge at http://www.opencascade.com/getoc/.)

Kelly McNeill writes “The U.S. District Court judge overseeing the Microsoft antitrust case has chosen a mediator to preside over settlement talks. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued an order late Friday appointing Boston University law professor Eric Green to mediate for the two sides. The judge noted that both parties had suggested Green for the job. Judge Kollar-Kotelly has warned both sides that if they fail to reach a settlement by November 2nd, she will set hearings in March to determine sanctions against Microsoft for its antitrust violations.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
People are bitching about the long wait at Themes.org (a sister site to NewsForge) for the re-design and the re-opening of several key sections of the site that houses desktop graphics for Linux GUIs. But KDE folk are doing something about it.”The site’s still down and has been down so long that it’s almost laughable,” goes a post on kde-devel. “Rather than rely on OSDN (corporate parent of NewsForge and Themes.org) to do it for us, is there any chance of our own themes site being hosted at [for example] themes.kde.org?”

Turns out there’s no need to create a themes.kde.org, because “things are piling up quickly” at www.kde-look.org, a whole siteful of wallpaper, themes, window decorations and icons. It’s strictly for KDE-related content.

Registered users can upload their theme creations to have them displayed and available for download on the site. The most popular download right now is “High Performance Liquid,” a mosfet theme. If you know who mosfet is, you won’t be surprised to hear he’s checked out of Linux again. The theme, however, is safely archived at the kde-look site.

Themes.org seems to be making progress, albeit slowly, with its site redesign in the wake of a break-in that raised questions about possible security problems. A surf to the main page just brings up a sign telling us to go to classic.themes.org.

A September 15th post to the Themes.org forum by site director ElCoronel calls for volunteers to help with staffing, writing submission guidelines, and scanning content. He writes, “Development is nearly done and it appears the new site will arrive very soon.”

Soon can be a relative term, though, and looking at the speed of KDE’s development timeline, it’s not surprising that they just couldn’t wait.

Ximian today announced Mitchell Kapor’s appointment to to the company’s board of directors. Kapor created pioneering spreadsheet application Lotus 1-2-3 and fouded Lotus Development Corporation, and has worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Massachusetts Commission on Computer Technology and Law.

Command Prompt co-founder Joshua Drake offers a quick, basic overview of break-in detection procedures. If your box has been cracked by a run-of-the-mill untalented script kiddie, chances are good that the instructions here will help you explore the tip of that particular iceberg. Detection is nice, but it’s after the fact, and as Drake writes, “Linux security is not a 10-minute job.” Read at LinuxWorld.

Top Japanese arcade game maker Sega announced this week that it would start making arcade motherboards based on the design of Microsoft’s new Xbox games console. Sega didn’t provide much more information than that, but it doesn’t take any investigative reporting to figure out what a sweet deal this is for both companies. With arcade and home consoles sharing some of the same hardware, delivering the console version of a hit arcade game will be much easier (and faster) then ever before and vice-versa. IDG (via CNN) has the story.

LinuxSecurity posts news of a new Zope hotfix available fixing an issue that became known late last month: “”The issue involves the fmt attribute of dtml-var tags. Without this
correction, Zope does not check security access to methods invoked
through fmt. This issue could allow partially trusted users with
enough knowledge of Zope to call, in a limited way, methods they would
not otherwise be allowed to access.”

Kelly McNeill writes: “Sure, there will always be the early adopters and those who expect to cut their IT support costs by jumping on the Microsoft OS bandwagon, but it’s the CFOs that sign the checks. It is these individuals who are most aware of the uncertain economic conditions that their companies face. Because of the current climate, it is commonly expected that IT department budgets will be cut significantly, and employees will be asked to do more with less. It has been suggested that many IT departments will not be upgrading their computers with Microsoft’s latest, but instead will try to remain productive using the existing operating system.”

Ioman writes: “For those you out there still using a VCR, there is now a viable replacement. Panasonics new DMR-E20 DVD recorder is out. The DMR-E20 can record on both DVD-RAM and DVD-R. You can even watch a recorded program as you are recording another. This device is pretty cool and since the DMR-E20 is 2nd generation, its about 1/2 the price as last years model. I can’t wait to get one of these. My question is whether it records DTS or Dolby Digital as well. I also wonder how good the quality is. Here is a link.”