IDG: “Officials at Sprint Corp. confirmed late yesterday that what they described as a “very low impact” denial-of-service attack
occurred on the Sprint network Tuesday around 11 p.m.”

The latest version of Sarien, an Open Source implementation of of the Sierra On-Line Adventure Game Interpreter, is now available. From the Sarien news page: “Sarien 0.6.0 has been released. It uses a new sprite manager algorithm
and a redesigned interpreter core, and is expected to be much more
accurate than the previous versions. i386 and PowerPC Linux, Intel
BeOS and Win32 pre-built binaries are already availailable in the
download page, FreeBSD and Debian packages should be available
soon.”

GNU Bug Tracking System at sources.redhat.com: “In Gnatsweb 2.7 beta, a new help system was introduced. The standard help text was provided in a separate file named ‘gnatsweb.html’. For some reason it was
decided to allow the name of the help file to be customized, and it was possible to specify this filename by providing a value to the help_file parameter in a
request URL. By judicious use of special characters in the value of the help_file parameter, an attacker would be able to read the contents of any file or execute any
command to which the web server process user had access.”

LinuxSecurity.com: “A problem exists with the kdesu component of kdelibs. It created a
world-readable temporary file to exchange authentication information
and delete it shortly after. This can be abused by a local user to
gain access to the X server and could result in a compromise of the
account that kdesu would access.”

Slashdot contributor Andy Murren reviews Richard Blun’s new book Postfix. Postfix is a mail transfer agent designed at IBM, released under the IBM Public License, and intended as a replacement for Sendmail. Murren: “Overall I have found this to be a well-written book that addressed several questions that I had about
configuring and using Postfix (such as the SOHO section). It is clear, direct and covers each topic to a level
that I found comfortable. For some people this book will be too advanced but that should not be anyone who
has a working knowledge of mail servers or of Unix. I would recommend this book for someone who has
started to use or wants to migrate to using Postfix.”

Slashdot: “In a victory for all Linux users, Linus Torvalds declared jihad on
annoying ‘informational’ kernel boot messages. I’m sure we’ll all miss the inspirational
‘spewtron driver 0.09 installed (C)2000 by Wardwick
Extrusion’ messages in our dmesgs.”

TheStandard.com reports that Microsoft has dropped its “smart tag” plan from its new IE browser.
“As a result of smart tags in beta versions of
Windows XP and IE, we received lots of
feedback, and have realized that there is a
need to better balance the user experience
with the legitimate concerns of content
providers and web sites,” Microsoft
Thursday said in a statement. Slashdotters discuss the news.

LinuxDevices.com takes a look at the Intrinsyc CerfCube for Linux — a Linux
system that takes up just 0.015 cubic feet. “Intrinsyc has put together a very nice package with their
Linux distribution for the CerfCube. With the exception of
the chaotic and currently hard-to-reverse installation
process, the package is well designed, with helpful
scripts and good documentation allowing you to focus on
your application rather than the environment. The software
is also structured in a simple and intuitive way, so you
can easily figure out how to accomplish anything that is
not covered by the generally complete documentation.”

From InternetWire: YesSoftware, Inc today
announced the launch of www.GotoCode.com, a new portal website designed to showcase its
open source applications and function as a community web site for web developers and users of
its code generation software — CodeCharge. Featured on the website is a selection of database
driven web applications and examples with source code that can be downloaded at no charge in
variety of scripting languages. Beginning with 15 free applications, the offering is projected to
increase based on user demand and contribution from community members.

From the humor site, Segfault: “Five people were hospitalized and over a hundred suffered scrapes and bruises when the
World Unix Editor Contest, held yesterday in Finland, ended in an all-out slugfest … As the judges considered the two finalists, wordless tension mounted in the audience. The
tension finally broke in an incident following an observation by judge unixhacker@cs.unl.edu
that emacs includes better mouse support. Judge backslash@orb.freesoft.org quickly
retorted, ‘But would a hard-core Unix user even want mouse support?’ At this point, an
unidentified member of the audience shouted, ‘You tell ’em! I would throw my mouse away
if it would save me from using emacs!’ “