ComputerNewsDaily: “Civil liberties groups are concerned that the anti-terrorism bill proposed by the Bush Administration
would lump small-time hackers in with murderous terrorists.

The draft proposal from Attorney General John Ashcroft would expand law enforcement’s
freedom to catch and punish terrorists. It would also expand the definition of “federal terrorism
offenses” to include various crimes, including damaging computers by breaking into them or writing
viruses.”

MSNBC: “Motorola is getting a little cranky. The handset maker said Thursday that by year’s end it
would start selling a cell phone battery that can be recharged by hand, using an attached hand crank.”

Wired: “Recent terrorist attacks against the United States and the discovery of a shipment of cell phone guns in the West
have made airport authorities worldwide scrutinize mobile phones.

The improvised cell phone guns — digital phones that harbor .22 caliber handguns capable of firing four rounds in
succession with a standard telephone keypad — were apparently not used in the hijackings of American aircrafts on
Sept. 11. But many airports are jacking up security against them anyway.”

Wired: “Teachers in Michigan are starting the school year with their own computers, thanks to a new technology initiative paid for by the state.”

AustralianIT: “A message with greetings to prime suspect Osama bin Laden and anti-US, Indian and Israeli comments was posted at www.tradecentre.com.au, a website belonging to Sydney-based company Trade Wind Communications.

The website’s index page was replaced by a plain text message warning the company to patch its systems.

The text read, “greetz to….Osama Bin Laden Big fuqz to INDIA THE US AND ISRAEL” (sic).

It also included a line saying: “JEnKinZ is lookin fer a JOB in Aussie” as well as greetings to Pakistani hackers.”

jpmcc writes: “Packexpo.com turns to open source – including Apache, MySQL, Tomcat and Harvest-NG – as proprietary technologies – IIS, ColdFusion, and MS SQL Server – fail to scale. Shame they had to run it on Solaris, but if they hadn’t, it’s unlikely that Sun would have featured it in a Dot Com Builder case study.”

LinuxSecurity: “Denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been around for years, but with reports that 4,000 DoS attacks are
launched each week, it’s clear the problem isn’t close to being resolved. In fact, in a recent poll of Information Security readers, 90 percent said they
remained either “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about DoS or DDoS (see Reader Poll).”

Kelly McNeill writes: “With the recently released update to Mac OS X, Apple can now boast that it has created the first Unix-based operating system fit for the masses. The newly refined OS has not only managed to incorporate its tried-and-true ease of use with the speed and stability that is Unix, but also has managed to bring about incredible developer support in a very short amount of time. However, despite the incredible work being accomplished by Unix user interface developers, their efforts have not brought about the same surge of development for Linux that Apple is enjoying.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Yes, we all know that IBM is one of the biggest supporters of Linux and other Open Source software. We know they’re a huge company with many interests in many different companies. If one were to stumble onto a section of the IBM.com Web site dedicated to hardware, one might come to the conclusion that IBM favors Microsoft.Try it. Go to www.ibm.com and click on that cool looking Thinkpad deal right there on the front page. Now that is a good price. Click through to the specifications, and you’ll see that, according to the verbiage, IBM recommends Microsoft: “IBM PC’s use genuine Microsoft Windows.” Probably something they have to say contractually. Not a big deal, we all know how to put the Linux CD in the drive and hit “install.”

However, there are places on the IBM website to which one could surf and truly believe that IBM is sold out to Linux — even, to my eyes, to the point of being anti-Microsoft. Check it out: go to www-1.ibm.com/linux/. Nothing too terribly surprising — we’ve even reviewed the Linux section of IBM’s high-quality developerWorks webzine before and we gathered they like Linux pretty well.

The thing that shocked me was the newsfeed under “Industry News.” You have to scroll down to see it =- maybe there’s a reason for that. The headlines showing up when I visited included: “Korean Firms Protest Against Microsoft;” “MS moves to head off Linux desktop ‘threat’;” “When Operating Systems Advocates Attack;” “Time to stand up to Microsoft;” “Consumer Group Coalition Warns Feds about Microsoft;” “Microsoft XP is Bigger, But Not Better;” “Exposing Microsoft Contracts to the Light;” and more — I could go on, but you get it, I’m sure.

What would the Windows reps say if they saw the Linux at IBM site? I’m not complaining here, just following a train of thought =- does it seem a tad bit hypocritical that, on the one hand IBM “recommends” Microsoft Windows for its hardware, yet on the other hand sets up a site that seems to bash MS, not overtly, but by dint of its linkage? Obviously, they need to get rid of that “recommendation” crap right away. (wink, wink.)

Another new and interesting feature on the front page of the Linux at IBM site was a small ad admonishing me to “take the IBM Linux Scholar Challenge.” OK, I’ll bite, I thought. Clicking on the penguin took me to the not-Linux-specific IBM Student Portal. Not being a student, but having the curious nature of a really young person, I read on. The object is to select a Linux project, write a three page paper detailing objectives, methodology, research and results, and submit it for evaluation. You have to be enrolled full-time in an accredited college or university and you have to be at least 18. Winners get one of those cool IBM Thinkpads, among other things.

Backing up to the front page, I see a few other things that spark my interest: a Linux IT Executive Corner — which turned out to be a bad link; a link to a photo entitled “IBM and Linux cut cake,” which was a picture of a Linux marketing dude handing Linus a birthday cake with a penguin on it; and a link to a free cluster starter kit for Linux, which is kind of a demo version of IBM’s Cluster Systems Management app. The free version enables clusterization of up to six nodes with a single control point.

You might also like to check out the Software Evaluation kit, which is free and gets you hooked up with preview versions of IBM’s development tools. There’s a lot more to explore at the Linux at IBM site, so don’t just take my word for it — go see.

From Linux Security: “The SELinux web site including the mail list archive has been updated. The site includes a new release of the LSM-based SELinux prototype. This release contains many bug fixes and improvements to both LSM and SELinux and is based on the lsm-2001_09_23 patch against kernel 2.4.10. The release includes new and reworked hooks to control additional operations.”