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FreeBSD Security Guide, Chapter 1

Author: JT Smith

DaemonNews.org has the chapter, which goes over the lockdown procedures of a FreeBSD machine.

Category:

  • Linux

Artful, Tribeworks present Webkool Open Source application server

Author: JT Smith

From InternetWire: Artful and Tribeworks
announced today the arrival of a new application server called
Webkool. Webkool is written in Key, the versatile programming
and description language that was developed by Tribeworks
and used to construct Tribeworks’ application authoring
product, iShell. With it’s flexible architecture based on XHTML
and SQL, Webkool will allow multi-platform development of
high-performance applications on systems including Linux, OS
X, Solaris and Windows, on servers such as Apache, IIS and
Zeus, and on server databases such as MySQL, Oracle and
SQL Server.

Mac OS X 10.1 leaks confirm speed bump

Author: JT Smith

The Register reports that three versions of the long-awaited Puma upgrade to Mac OS X appear to be in circulation, “and some fairly authoritative
reports confirm that the speed improvements demonstrated by Steve Jobs at
Macworld Expo New York are very real.”

New platform for massively multiplayer gaming

Author: JT Smith

From BusinessWire: In a bid to establish a cost-effective standard for massively multiplayer server solutions for the online gaming industry, two former
senior entertainment industry executives have formed a new company and enlisted a pair of industry leaders to help realize that vision.
Paul Villadolid, a former senior vice president at Walt Disney Television, and Larry Hess, a former software engineer at special
effects pioneer Digital Domain, have joined together to form Rebel Arts, a technology and software developer with a proprietary
server platform designed to handle simultaneous, complex interactions on a massive scale. Rebel Arts’ Versatile Accelerated Server
Technology (VAST) System will first be deployed in the online game industry.

Both AMD and Linux NetworX are also providing the resources necessary to deploy the VAST System in the online game industry.

Netcraft Web server survey for July

Author: JT Smith

It’s at Netcraft.com. The survey shows a slight upswing in Microsoft usage and a slight decrease in Apache. “Primarily this is a result of two
large US installations converting from Solaris.”

4Front Technologies announces OSS/3D plugin for XMMS

Author: JT Smith

From 4Front Technologies: 4Front Technologies, a leading develope
of digital and analog audio solutions for the Linux and UNIX Operating System
platforms, announced today the release of its new OSS/3D plugin for X Multimedia
System (XMMS).

OSS/3D comprises of a set of proprietary 3D audio algorithms that provide audio
spatialization, depth perception, bass boost, fidelity enhancement and speaker
/headphone correction. OSS/3D works with standard 2-speaker based soundcards.

“OSS/3D has been a huge success on Winamp for Windows and now with support
for XMMS, 4Front Technologies once again demonstrates leadership in digital
audio on Linux.”, said Dev Mazumdar, President of 4Front Technologies.

Tim Joslin, a user of OSS/3D on Windows, had this to say: “I just thought
I’d write to thank you for this extraordinary dsp plugin. I was using Power
Technology’s DFX and thought it was super, until I tried your plugin. It
nearly blew me off my chair! Now I’m nearly in acoustic nirvana.”

OSS/3D technologies will be available to Linux PDA and audio appliance
manufacturers who wish to provide more feature rich audio products and provide
a product differentiation in a market that is mostly saturated with standard
stereo audio output.

More information on the OSS/3D is available at http://www.oss3d.com and the
Plugin for XMMS can be purchased online at an introductory price of $10.00.
A free trial demo version can be also downloaded from this site.

About 4Front Technologies

4Front Technologies is a privately held company with development facilities in
California, Finland and Sweden. 4Front’s main focus is on developing audio
solutions for the UNIX and embedded Systems marketplace. 4Front’s Open Sound
System has become the “de-facto” audio API for UNIX and is distributed with
Linux and FreeBSD kernel sources under the GNU Public License (GPL). Open Sound
System has been licensed by companies like SCO, Hewlett Packard, Wind River
Systems and endorsed by SUN Microsystems. The commercial version of Open Sound
System sold by 4Front Technologies is also bundled in Linux distributions from
Corel, Caldera, SuSE and MIZI, Holon Software and MandrakeSoft. Additional
Information on Open Sound System is available at http://www.opensound.com

The X Multimedia System (XMMS) project is developed under the GNU Public
License (GPL) by 4Front Technologies. XMMS is a cross platform multimedia
player that supports MP3, Wave, MPEG1 Video, VideoCD, Amiga MOD, MIDI, and
other digital audio and video formats. It also provides MP3 streaming playback
support over the Internet and provides visual graphics synchronized to sound
output. It also provides complete control over GUI layout and design. XMMS
has received many prestigious awards as the most popular media application
on Linux from Linux Journal, Linux Magazine and SlashDot.Org. More information
on XMMS is available at http://www.xmms.org

Notices:

OSS/3D is a trademark of 4Front Technologies.
All copyrights mentioned are the property of their respective owners.
Copyright © 2001, 4Front Technologies.

The effects of tuning a FreeBSD box for high performance

Author: JT Smith

From DaemonNews.org: “We can see that a default FreeBSD installation, while optimized for safety and integrity, is not optimized for
maximum performance as a dedicated network server. Particularly in cases of serving many simultaneous connections,
reliably supporting large numbers of processes, and filesystem performance, one needs to take steps to improve the
performance of the system over the default configuration. The gains that can be realized from this are great, often at least
doubling the performance of the system.”

Category:

  • Unix

Ottawa Linux Symposium: Similar to last year, only smaller

Author: JT Smith

LWN.net reports. “In many ways, this year’s Ottawa Linux Symposium looks much like last year’s event.
It’s in the same place, with a similar schedule of seriously technical talks mostly
oriented around the kernel and GNOME. But the differences jump out after a short
time. Many companies who were here in force last year — Corel, Zero Knowledge, VA Linux — have much
reduced attendance (or zero attendance) this year. And a number of the more prominent speakers from last
year (David Miller, Alan Cox) are not around.”

Category:

  • Linux

Penguin Computing, Scyld Computing to offer high performance computing solutions

Author: JT Smith

From BusinessWire: Penguin Computing Inc., the first company that is “Simplifying the
Solution Process” by removing the complexity involved in developing and deploying fully customized, Linux-based solutions, and
Scyld Computing, the leading developer of second-generation Beowulf cluster operating systems, today announced a partnership to
deliver high-performance computing solutions.

Free Sklyarov advocates: More public pressure needed

Author: JT Smith

By Grant Gross

They’ve organized street protests around the world. They’ve convinced the software company that was supposedly wronged to back off. They’ve made their case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The groups advocating the release of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have seemingly done everything they can, yet he remains in a U.S. jail. So what’s next?

Although the next big move is uncertain, one thing’s for sure: The loose-knit group of civil libertarians, Open-Sourcers, programmers and opponents of Digital Millennium Copyright Act who have worked together on the Free Sklyarov campaign are not giving up.

Robin Gross, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says protests from the U.S. public, in addition to growing pressure on the U.S. government from Russia, can still be effective. Sklyarov was arrested by the FBI in July after speaking at Def Con in Las Vegas. He’s accused of violating the DMCA, only a law in the United States, for creating a program that allows users to back up Adobe’s eBook format, or open eBooks in unsupported operating systems such as Linux.

“We are calling for stepped-up public pressure on the [U.S. Department of Justice] to dismiss the case — now that Adobe, the purported ‘injured’ party, is calling for his
release and to drop all charges against him,” says Gross. “The will of the public
is to release this computer programmer for writing software that can compete
with Adobe’s eBook viewing software.”

Both Paul Holman, founder of the now-inactive BoycottAdobe site, and C. Scott Ananian, organizer of the Boston protests and spokesman for FreeSklyarov.org promise to continue the protests.

“There are more protests this week scheduled for (among other places) Salt Lake
City and London,” Ananian says. “Many groups are setting their next protest date two weeks from now, to give them a little more planning time; we will continue to
be involved.”

Ananian’s Boston crew is planning another protest for Aug. 6, and the group is working on a petition campaign, with the results to be delivered to U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, who voted for the DMCA in 1998. “This campaign will probably culminate in a march on Kennedy’s office shortly after the current congressional term ends, returning
Kennedy to Boston,” Ananian says.

Since the EFF convinced Adobe to back away from the prosecution of Sklyarov, Holman has been working on protests against the U.S. Department of Justice, instead of Adobe. “More protests are being planned to draw attention to the fact that Dmitry
Sklyarov still is not free, and that the federal prosecutors are
responsible for this,” he says. “There will continue to be protests of the DMCA
until it is repealed or modified to respect our First Amendment rights.”

The focus for most of the protesters is two-fold — the more immediate goal of getting Sklyarov released from jail and the repeal or wholesale change of the DMCA. Holman, a programmer/computer security expert from San Francisco, would be happy with the first goal, for now. “I want to get Dmitry out of jail so I can retire from activism,” he says. “Sadly, this is only the first of many battles in our war against the DMCA, but
the rest of the army of supporters can take it from here, I need a break!”

Michael “proclus” Love, who’s GNU-Darwin distribution project site has run “Free Dmitry” links and information, says he’s not sure what else can be done on the site.

“I have to admit that I’m somewhat at a loss, as far as Dmitry is
concerned,” Love says. ” I have been trying to decide if there is anything more that
the Distribution can do for him. We will keep the Free Dmitry banners
up until he goes home, and I want to continue our news coverage. The
incarceration of Dmitry is an outrage, and people who visit our news
links should be able to clearly see why we are outraged.”

Category:

  • Migration