Reported at Wired News: ”
Undeterred by the July arrest of his employee, Dmitry Sklyarov, the president of ElcomSoft, is planning to make the now famous presentation again.

But this time in a country where there’s no Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Alexander Katalov, president of ElcomSoft, will present an updated version of “EBooks Security: Theory and Practice at the Black Hat Briefings” on Nov. 22 at a security
conference in Amsterdam.”

LinuxPower: “About a year ago, Sun joined the GNOME Foundation and promised both to support the development of GNOME and use GNOME as the default desktop for
Solaris. Ever since that time people have been wondering exactly what Sun does and how much they do. Lately some of their work has received public attention
like their work on the new accessibility library for GTK+ and their GNOME usability report.

Still, most of the Sun hackers and their work is not well known to all members of the GNOME community and definitely not to the Linux community in general. To
do something about this, I decided to interview some of the members of Sun’s Desktop Division and ask them what kind of things they are working on. The
number of people interviewed here is still just a small subset of the people working at Sun on GNOME and GNOME related technologies. Most of the people in
this interview work at Sun’s offices in Ireland.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
A press release at SuSE.com chirps: “SuSE CTO and president says Good-Bye!” The announcement sounds upbeat, and we wonder how Dirk Hohndel, former SuSE CTO must feel about that.

“After three years in the management team of SuSE Linux, Dirk Hohndel announced his decision to leave
the company. His years of excellent service and vision in helping guide SuSE to its present successful
position are unparalleled within the industry. Dirk steps away from SuSE to pursue his personal and
professional interests.”

The statement goes on to share a snippet of Hohndel’s history, and reminds us that SuSE is still going strong. Holger Dyroff is listed as the main spokeperson for the United States, but it is unclear who, if anyone, will replace Hohndel at the helm.

Xenia von Wedel, public relations spokeperson for SuSE, says that Hohndel is leaving for strictly personal reasons and not as a result of any company restructuring or downsizing. His departure didn’t come as a complete surprise, however. “He’s let it shine for the last month or so that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in an airplane,” von Wedel says. “But he hasn’t given us any information” about his future plans or the specific reason for leaving.

Holger Dyroff was unavailable for comment. Hohndel has not returned an email sent to his personal address.

Advogato: “Many readers on this fine site are users of the Linux operating system. Although Linux has many fans, and some critics, many of us have differing reasons to use it.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Is the FBI simply trying to help a web host protect its intellectual property by pursuing charges against Brian K. West? He claims he was only trying to help the Poteau News agency (Poteau, Oklahoma) plug some serious security holes at its Web site, hosted by Cyberlink Rural Telecommunications (CRTI). CRTI, Poteau, and the FBI say that West had malicious intent. Who is telling the truth? And is this somehow all Microsoft’s fault?It’s a messy story. Brian K. West says that on January 29, 2000, he was testing a banner ad that his ISP employer was going to place on the Poteau Daily News Web site, according to a report at LinuxFreak.org. He surfed to the site, clicked the “edit” option in MS Explorer in order to place a copy of the banner ad on a locally cached copy of the main page of the Poteau Daily News. Inexplicably, through Front Page (an HTML editing program), West gained write-level access to all the files on the PDN site, which is hosted by CRTI, a competitor to West’s employer, CWIS.

In the report, West says he contacted PDN to alert them to the situation. The editor-in-chief freaked out and sicced the FBI on West. No charges have been filed in the case, but the Department of Justice, amazingly, has asked West to accept a felony conviction and five years of probation.

West’s attorney, Cherie Chapell, is bringing out the big guns to defend her client. “Because it appears that Microsoft’s software may have caused this unfortunate situation to occur, we will likely subpoena Microsoft personnel if the case goes to trial,” Chapell told NewsForge. A statement released by Chapell’s office explains the statute (Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 1030(a)(2)(C)) being used to assert a claim of wrongdoing against West:

“…it is a crime
for: “Whoever intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information from any protected computer if
the conduct involved an interstate or foreign communication;” The statute also provides definitions for certain key phrases used in the statute.
18 USC 1030(e): As used in this section – (1) the term ”computer” means an electronic, magnetic, optical, electrochemical, or other high speed data processing device
performing logical, arithmetic, or storage functions, and includes any data storage facility or communications facility directly related to or operating in conjunction with
such device, but such term does not include an automated typewriter or typesetter, a portable hand held calculator, or other similar device; (2) the term ”protected
computer” means a computer – (A) exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the United States Government, or, in the case of a computer not exclusively for
such use, used by or for a financial institution or the United States Government and the conduct constituting the offense affects that use by or for the financial institution
or the Government; or (B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication; (6) the term ”exceeds authorized access” means to access a computer
with authorization and to use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter; This statute may be fatally
flawed.”

Following the logic, Chapell believes that while her client, West, accidentally gained access to files on the Poteau Daily News server, the true fault lies with Microsoft, whose products including Windows, Internet Explorer, Front Page, NT 4.0, and IIS, are flawed enough to allow illegal, unauthorized access to information.

Chapell adds that the statute is overly broad and possibly unconstitutional. “There has been a concern for some time over how
to integrate law and technology on the internet,” she says. “The question exists as to whether the Internet should be regulated, if so by whom, and to what degree.”

Perl Script?

In an affidavit sworn by the FBI special agent assigned to the case, it appears that CRTI, Poteau’s Web host, is concerned about a perl script written by James McCoy, a former employee at Cyberlink Rural Telecommunications. The script was used by Poteau as a “backend” administration tool with which reporters and editors could enter and manipulate the contents of the Web pages. According to the affidavit, CRTI was testing the tool, which they named “EZ Net News,” on Poteau’s site and anticipated marketing their program as an “off-the-shelf software package that could be customized and sold to medium and small news agencies.” The affidavit states that CRTI planned to sell the script at prices ranging from $4,000 to $6,000 per copy.

The FBI special agent doesn’t go into the reasons why this information was included in his affidavit, which was used to obtain a search warrant for the hard drive contents at CWIS, West’s employer. Neither do any previously published reports, including an article written (PDF – 567k) by the editor-in-chief at Poteau News — but the tacit implication is that since West gained access to the program, he has in some way either damaged it, or has taken possession of intellectual property with the intent to distribute it for profit.

Poteau News and Cyberlink are now aware that West is making waves with his story. An article published at Poteau News this morning states: “It is evident that West’s words are getting around. CNN, Fox News
Channel and USA Today have made inquiries to the PDN concerning his
story.” NewsForge found that no one at Cyberlink or Poteau has been willing to comment on the case, citing legalities.

Related Links:

Brian K. West’s archive of case-related documents: www.bkw.org/pdf
Story at The Register: MS bugware blamed for
‘inadvertent’ hack
Cyberlink Rural Telecommunications

ZDNET: “As I escorted him to the elevator after an interview in 1998, Gordon Eubanks, then president and
CEO of Symantec, made a casual observation that forever changed my perspective on open source software. At a
time when the world’s No. 2 computer security company realized almost all its revenue by protecting machines
running Microsoft and IBM/Lotus Development platforms, Eubanks noted that open source was inherently easier to
protect than proprietary software.

Using Linux as an example, he said, “Everybody can see what’s under the hood, so we’re on equal footing with
hackers. With proprietary systems, intruders often have illegal means of learning things about the underlying code
that are superior to the legal information at our disposal – even though we get excellent cooperation and support
from Microsoft.”

Peter Birrell writes: “Hi. I thought your readers might be interested in online 2-hour programming competitions that pay out cash to the winners: TopCoder, a company that develops and hosts programming competitions, would like Java and C++ developers to know about two important developments at www.topcoder.com:
– Our weekly single-round matches taking place online at www.topcoder.com
– The $250,000 TopCoder Invitational Programming Tournament, which will begin September 12.

COMPETITION IS FREE
Without paying a dime, developers can become members and compete in single-round online matches or qualify for full-scale tournaments. The single-round matches, held online twice a week, pay out up to $300 per winner.

ELITE 16 WILL COMPETE FOR A SHARE OF $250,000 TOURNAMENT PURSE
Those who qualify for the TopCoder Invitational in September will compete for a share of the $250,000 prize purse, $100,000 of which will go to the champion! The Invitational will begin as a series of online elimination rounds, where a field of 256 top-rated coders will be reduced to an elite 16. Those 16 will travel, at TopCoder?s expense, to the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket, CT where they will compete for their share of $250,000.”

Avatar writes “Evil3D has posted a new review today. The review covers the recently released 2.0 version of VectorLinux:
“One of the major changes is there are now two different sub-versions of VL. The first stays true to the original form, optimized for lower end machines and sticking with version 3.3.6 of XFree86. The second sub has been optimized for the more mighty machines and includes XFree86 4.1.0.” The full review can be found here.”

Mark Hatch writes: “Developers for embedded systems can now use industry standard for user
interfaces.
SAN JOSE, CA, August 28, 200 — Integrated Computer Solutions,
Inc. (ICS), the leading supplier of user interface development tools for
professionals, announced it has produced a version of Open Motif® targeted
at embedded and handheld devices with limited displays, memory, and processing
power. Open Motif is the industry standard user interface toolkit for UNIX®
systems. The availability of Embedded Open Motif provides enterprise developers
with a single user interface toolkit.Embedded Open Motif has been ported to the Compaq iPAQ and the Agenda
VR3 from Agenda Computing. At LinuxWorld Expo, San Jose, the ICS sponsored
site, Motifzone.org, will be demonstrating a set of Open Motif based, PDA
applications built with its industry leading GUI Builder. Code-named “Usable”,
these PDA applications will be freely available under the GNU Public License
(GPL). Embedded Open Motif is built from the Open Motif source code that
resides at the MotifZone (http://www.motifzone.net). Both source code and
binary packages are available for free download from the MotifZone.

“Although it is more fun for developers to reinvent the wheel there
is no need when you have an industry standard such as Motif,” said Allen
Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group. “We congratulate ICS in its
development of Embedded Open Motif. They have again demonstrated that Motif
is still the standard for user interface development, whether you are on
a supercomputer, engineering workstation, or even on a handheld PDA.”

Key Business Benefits: Proprietary Software Stays Proprietary and No Runtime
Fees
Embedded Open Motif is made available under The Open Group Public License.
Unlike some open source licenses, this license does not require
developers of proprietary software to release their source code if they
choose to use Embedded Open Motif. Furthermore, The Open Group Public License
provides for free redistribution of Embedded Open Motif for systems based
on open source systems such as Linux and FreeBSD. Protection of proprietary
source code and no runtimes are critical business advantages for manufacturers
of hardware and software targeting the highly competitive PDA and embedded
markets.

“Motif was originally designed to run on machines with much less capacity
than the typical embedded device or PDA of 2001,” said Mark J. Hatch, Chief
Operating Officer of ICS. “Embedded Open Motif provides a small footprint,
no cost solution for user interface development that is also the industry
standard among enterprise developers.”

ICS to Offer Porting/Support Services
ICS also announced its intention to offer commercial support services to
hardware manufacturers of embedded devices and PDA’s wishing to provide
Embedded Open Motif for their customers. In addition, ICS is offering porting
and development services for developers wishing to build or port existing
applications to embedded devices.

About ICS
Founded in 1987, ICS was chartered to create software development tools
for developers working with the then emerging X Window System. The company’s
first product offerings included X training and a version of Motif for
systems manufactured by Sun Microsystems. Prior to widespread adoption
of Motif by the UNIX workstation vendors, ICS was the leading independent
shipper of the Motif toolkit. In 1998, The Open Group chose ICS to provide
technical support for its Motif source code licenses.

Today, ICS is the current market leader in Motif graphical user interface
development tools, Builder Xcessory. In its fifth major release and representing
over 100 person years of effort, BX defines a level of sophistication,
functionality and ease of use that is unmatched in the industry. In November
of 1999, the combination of BX from ICS and Code Fusion from Red Hat software
was awarded the Editor’s Choice award by the leading Linux magazine, The
Linux Journal, for the Best New Application for Software Development.

ICS sponsors the MotifZone (http://www.motifzone.net), a community site
for Motif developers to gather additional knowledge and request input on
technical problems from other engineers. The MotifZone also hosts the Public
CVS source code repository for Open Motif as well as the defect database.
The Open Group also sponsors a site for Open Motif developers at http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif.

For further information on ICS, its products or services, call 617-621-0060,
or visit the ICS Website at http://www.ics.com.
Press Contacts:

Linda Drukman

ICS

617-621-0060 x106

linda@ics.com

UNIX and Motif are registered trademarks of The Open Group
in the US and other countries. The Open Group and the X Window System are
trademarks of The Open Group. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus
Torvalds. All other names and trademarks are the property of their respective
owners.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “Bang and Olufsen, the high end audio equipment manufacturer, has released their first MP3 product. Interestingly, that first product is not hardware, but rather a digital music player for the desktop called BeoPlayer 1.0.0 that can be downloaded from the company site.

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/bangolufse n.html“