In comments made during a London visit on Wednesday, Intel CEO Craig Barrett said “The role of Linux is not so much in the
desktop but in the server or back office,” he said. “It is not made for
the general purpose PC.” ZDNet reports.

ZDNet UK: “Researchers have discovered a bug that could give hackers unlimited access to any machine
running Sun’s Unix operating system, Solaris.

The bug, discovered by security consultancy ISS X-Force, affects a utility designed to give remote
users access to a local printer. The line printer daemon (in.lpd), as it is called, contains a flaw in the
“transfer job” routine that could allow hackers to overflow an unchecked buffer, a common means of
gaining unauthorised access to a computer.”

Salon: “The CIA cannot predict computer attacks on U.S. systems before they happen, as
the agency is expected to do with political and military events, a top CIA official
told Congress on Thursday.

Despite a major increase in intelligence efforts dedicated to computer security,
attackers still develop new tools and techniques faster than the CIA can keep up,
Lawrence K. Gershwin said.”

LinuxSecurity.com: “Recently, Caldera found that when webmin starts a system daemon from
the web frontend it does not clear its environment variables. Since
these variables contain the authorization of the administrator, any
daemon would also get these variables.”

uLinuxSecurity.com: “w3m, a text file/Web browser which is similar to lynx, has
a buffer overflow vulnerability in a routine to parse MIME header.
If a user retrieves/downloads a malformed Web page with w3m,
a malicious Web server administrator may gain an escalated
privilege from the w3m user, which is run by w3m remotely.”

Linux Journal: “This article is an introduction to making your own Debian packages, both fake and real ones. For complete documentation, look at the Resources
section. The next (and last) article in this series will examine building a more complex Debian archive with debconf and debhelper.”

Linux Journal’s Phil Hughes reviews Fredick Lundh’s Python Standard Library: “Rather than the dry manual I expected, this book is filled with useful examples. It is comprehensive, with the exception of not covering Tkinter. This seems like a
reasonable decision considering that the majority of Python users will not use Tkinter, and it would take a lot of space to document. In fact, Fredrik is working on
a separate book on Tkinter.”

Grant Johnson writes “Infoworld: MS has announce a new plan that basically mirrors Sourceforge in many ways. Expect them to claim to have invented (innovated) collaborative development any day now, file for a patent on it, the sue then pants off everyone on the Kernel Developers list.

Once again proof that not only are actions stronger than words, but mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery, or is it jealousy?”

On June 14, Slashdot asked its readers to submit questions to IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky; the highest-moderated questions were submitted. Read on for Kusnetzky’s replies to questions about BSD, corporate-sponsored research, and what, exactly, constitutes a Linux server.

The Register: “Mac OS X’s Finder: love it or loathe it, the two points that unite almost everyone
who has used Apple’s next-generation operating system are that it’s not up to
scratch and that Apple’s reason to write it using OS X’s Carbon API is the chief
reason why.”