CNET: “Gone are the days when a librarian’s worst offense was hushing patrons one too
many times.

In this digital age, the custodians of published works are at the center of a global copyright
controversy that casts them as villains simply for doing their job: letting people borrow books
for free.

Their leading opponents are the very people who supply
the books that fill their shelves–the publishers. And now
that the high-stakes battle over copyrights has moved
beyond music and movies to books, librarians are finding
themselves the subject of rhetoric usually reserved for
terrorists or revolutionaries.”

NetFlood: “Session hijacking. What a powerful name. For me personally, the name conjures up mental pictures of airplanes with masked gunmen and bomb-laden buses. In actuality, session
hijacking is far less physically dangerous and way more financially rewarding. The risk of a SWAT team shooting you while you are hijacking a session is also extremely low as
opposed to hijacking airplanes. When people complain about the problems with the TCP/IP protocol suite, this attack method is one of the reasons. This attack is also one of the
reasons client/server (host-to-host) communication encryption schemes should be used even in internal network communications. Session Hijacking is nothing new. In fact, the
attack itself was first conceived and discussed in 1989 but unfortunately it is an attack that is just as dangerous now as it was back then. Without further ado (or sensationalism); here’s the story.”

DallasNews: “Acknowledging that it must change its business practices, Microsoft Corp. announced Wednesday that it would give personal computer makers more freedom to choose what software and services they offer on the machines they sell.”

AntiOffline.com: “Halting denial of service attacks: a quick and dirty primer on settings and commands
to stop or slow down most Denial of Service attacks when you’re under the gun. Some of
the commands were gathered around the net, others I have implemented and tested along
the way in the midst of attacks as well as in labs. This is not a document that will
describe attacks, what they do, nor how they work. Its merely a doc for the sysadmin
or security admin to implement along their networks for better protection.”

PostNuke: “You may be wondering why on Earth do we need a fork from PHP-Nuke? There are
several reasons behind our insanity. The time is right for a developers version of
PHP-Nuke. It wasn’t a simple decision, but so far it has been very rewarding.

There were many factors in our decision for forking off. Below are some of the more
rational reason, and some of the more irrational ones as well.”

LinuxSecurity: “The gnupg port, versions prior to gnupg-1.0.6, contains a format
string vulnerability. If gnupg attempts to decrypt a file whose
filename does not end in ‘.gpg’, the filename is copied to the
prompt string, allowing a user-supplied format string. This may allow
a malicious user to cause arbitrary code to be executed as the user
running gnupg.”

LWN: The newest issue of Linux Weekly News is now online for your reading enjoyment.

PCWorld has a cheerleader type story about the upcoming XP: “Windows XP, Microsoft’s next operating system, is shaping up as one of the
most exciting–and controversial–products ever put out by the Redmond,
Washington, technology behemoth.

The controversy over the OS formerly code-named Whistler, and now in Beta
version 2, stems from Windows Product Activation, a new and stringent copy
protection scheme that requires upgrade customers to contact Microsoft for an
ID number (a procedure separate from the usual registration process). This
feature, which could hinder some installations, isn’t the only potential upgrade hurdle. Microsoft already
anticipates that XP may conflict with some system BIOSs, hardware, and applications. As a result,
installing the new OS could be a real hassle for people who don’t have state-of-the-art PCs. You’ll also
need a gigabyte of free disk space.”

Kelly McNeill of OSOpinion writes: “Apple Computer’s 1984 Super Bowl advertisement has been routinely hailed as the greatest television commercial of all time. It was successful primarily because it dramatically portrayed how the Macintosh broke away from conformity and liberated users from the stifling environment imposed by “Big Brother” IBM. Ever since Apple’s sledgehammer plowed into that big blue telescreen, Mac users have identified themselves as nonconformists who insist on doing things their own way.”

Kelly McNeill writes “There is a war going on, whether we in the open-source community want to admit it or not. In the last couple weeks, Microsoft has fired several warning shots across the bow of the free software and open-source communities. First, it has modified the license for a software toolkit, which disallows all use of open-source software (with the exception of software under a BSD license). Second, Microsoft has chosen FreeBSD, for migrating and developing Windows software (specifically .NET issues) because of its more lenient open-source license. And, lastly, the slanderous claims about open source, Linux and the GPL (General Public License) from Microsoft executives make it clear that the company has declared war upon the open-source community.”