Slashdot: “capt.Hij submitted this interesting story about the growing amount of corporate-sponsored
research at public universities. The Bayh-Dole Act (see here too), passed in 1980, allowed
research performed with public money to be patented by private companies, so we’re
paying most of the bills, the companies are reaping all the profits and in the process,
corrupting the research as well.”

More information on Red Hat’s planned database services? Sources tell eWEEK that the company will start offering PostgreSQL relational database services through a $199 annual subscription via its Red Hat Network, possibly as early as next Monday. The company announced its intention to offer an Open Source database yesterday, but did not provide any other details at that time.

–By Dan Berkes–
Will Word and Wine work well with each other? How about Half-Life and Wine? Photoshop? The answers are just a few mouse-clicks away at CodeWeaver’s shiny, new Wine Application Database — and it can only get better with your help.As the Wine list of frequently asked questions helpfully points out, Wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator — it provides native code for the function calls in Windows libraries so that Windows applications may function in Linux. That makes Wine quite different from emulators, which would have to mimic the entire operating system in order to provide many of the same functions and features that Wine offers.

Wine includes the all-important libraries — the native code — that maps Windows function calls to their Linux equivalents, and the program loader, which loads and executes Windows programs. Through Wine, a Linux user can use just about any Windows software available without actually having to bother with using the Windows operating system.

Well, sort of.

Wine is a work in progress, and not everything will work with Wine the way it does with Windows, and in some cases, it may not work at all. The Wine user and developer communities see this as a challenge, not an obstacle, and in some cases have devised creative workarounds to whip a Windows program into shape for use via Wine.

Everyone can now benefit from the shared experiences and frustrations of their fellow Wine-tasters by paying a visit to the CodeWeaver Wine Application Database. The site has been online for about two weeks now, undergoing testing and receiving feedback from the Wine community. The database extends the original concept of Doug Ridgeway’s excellent WineHQ Apps Database.

“The key thing we wanted with the new database was a moderated database,” says CodeWeaver CEO and founder Jeremy White. “The WineHQ database had a lot of garbage in/garbage out that made it just a little difficult to navigate. It wasn’t uncommon to see up to 40 different entries for a single title [in the WineHQ database].”

Because the CodeWeaver Wine Application Database is moderated, multiple entries are eliminated. This consolidates the information into a particular version of each software title, allowing users to find the resources they’re looking for in a much faster and easier manner.

Applications are broken down into several main categories, such as games, multimedia, networking, productivity, and so forth. From there, users can browse information on specific Windows software titles and versions. Each title is rated twice on a five-star system, with one star denoting “crashes on load,” and five stars indicating the program runs flawlessly. Each program receives a dual rating — “with Windows” indicates how the application runs when Wine is configured to use a Windows partition, “without Windows” sizes up how that program runs when using Wine’s own internal Fake Windows system.

Each version of the program listed has its own comments system, enabling registered users to swap ideas and opinions about a particular program or its method of working with Wine. The system running the new database allows for a high degree of individual customization, and White said there’s a chance it may be released as Open Source code in the near future, to allow others to create their own application tracking database services.

The information offered in the new database is a little on the light side at the moment, with just 76 applications listed at the time this report was filed. This can be attributed to the fact that the site is still new — it’s been online for two weeks, but today was the first day its existence was announced outside of the Wine developer community.

The moderation aspects of the new database might cause some users to initially approach this new resource with skepticism. White makes it perfectly clear that CodeWeavers is merely providing the infrastructure to disseminate information that it believes is vital to the success and adoption of Wine. The company exerts no editorial control over the content of the site, and considers it a non-revenue contribution to the community.

To that end, White has issued a volunteer “call-to-arms” of sorts, spreading the word that the only way for the CodeWeavers Wine Application Database to improve is for the community to get involved.

“This is an all volunteer-driven site, and we want people who can step up and own an entry in the database; someone who can take responsibility for a specific title, moderate submissions for that title, or maybe even write up a mini-FAQ for that title,” says White.

And what do volunteers get in return, aside from knowing that they’ve made Wine easier to use and understand for the masses? White says there’s a chance that those dedicated experts could get a first look at the latest versions of CodeWeavers Wine.

“This is a great opportunity to volunteer and help Wine,” says White.

Anyone interested in becoming an “application owner,” taking screenshots of Windows programs running via Wine, or willing to write application HOWTOs for the new database should drop a line to: appdb@codeweavers.com.

– By Joab Jackson –


Cyberpunk –

I dig Steve Gibson. Not only is this renegade computer security
consultant a great storyteller, but he’s one of the best Net advocates out there, a
regular Abbie Hoffman of the binary age. Still, his latest crusade has
me wondering if he isn’t starting to value Microsoft-bashing over basic
honesty.Here’s the story in case you haven’t been following it:

On May 4,
the Web site for Gibson’s company, Gibson
Research Corp., suddenly dropped off the Internet. It was being
subjected to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack — the same
kind that temporarily crippled Yahoo! and CNN.com early last year — in which a site’s server is crushed by a
huge number of phony requests coming from all over the Net. Fortunately
for GRC, this kind of attack can easily be thwarted with a bit of
smarts. Gibson knew that all his service provider had to do was have its
routers read the packet headers of the phony requests to identify the return
addresses, then filter out everything arriving with those addresses.
Once he got the right engineer on the phone, GRC.com was back in business.

Gibson didn’t stop there, though. Examining the packets, he found that
his site had been bombed by 474 computers, all running Windows, and all
unwitting slaves to a remotely installed “zombie” program, unbeknownst
to the PCs’ owners. GRC.com suffered from five more attacks that month,
and Gibson eventually tracked down the vandal (by getting a copy of the
zombie program from one of the folks whose computer had been enslaved).

Gibson wrote up his adventures in the adolescent-hacker underground in
an essay, The Strange Tale
of Denial of Service Attacks Against GRC.Com. It’s one of those
irresistible, take-an-afternoon-off-to-read essays on computer culture
that appear on the Web from time to time, in the same league as Eric
Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Neal Stephenson’s In the
Beginning
There Was the Command Line, the Son of Gomez’s The
Xenix Chainsaw Massacre, and the anonymously penned
cyberpunk-goes-to-Oz parody The Guru of News .

But if Gibson initially shared his ordeal for entertainment’s sake, he
has since directed his energies into a tirade against Microsoft’s new
operating system, Windows XP, which won’t even be out until the fall.
In a subsequent essay, Why Windows
XP will be the Denial of Service Exploitation Tool of Choice for Internet
Hackers Everywhere, Gibson asserts that once XP
hits the streets, it’ll be even easier for hackers to wreak serious
havoc.

“Windows XP is the malicious hacker’s dream come true,” Gibson writes.
He was only able to tell where his attacks were coming from because, with
current Windows systems, it is impossible to forge a computer’s
Internet address, making it easy to filter out packets with those addresses. XP,
however, will come with “raw sockets” support, which can be used to
forge phony Internet addresses. Once XP is in widespread use, Gibson
predicts, the zombie programs hackers plant via the Internet — the kind that
attacked his company — won’t be as easily identified, and thus will be nearly
impossible to filter out. Without that filtering capability, the victim
site can’t start heading off the attacks as they’re occurring; it’s out
of commission for the duration of the bombardment.

Or so Gibson argues. Microsoft itself posted a rebuttal,
pointing out a few pretty good reasons why XP may not be the risk Gibson claims
(“Hostile Code, Not the Windows XP Socket Implementation, Is the Real Security
Threat”. For one, if hackers really want Internet-address-spoofing
machines, they don’t have to wait for XP; Unix and Linux and the new
Mac OS X already offer such raw-socket capability. Gibson counters that the
sheer number of XP machines that will be out there (with, perhaps more
importantly, their non-security-savvy owners) will provide far more
firepower for hackers. Gibson is correct and Microsoft is indeed
offering a bit of a red herring, but Microsoft also rebuts that XP machines will
have far stronger security features than earlier versions of Windows.
XP will be better equipped for broadband use, meaning it will be harder
for hackers to break into. Well, maybe. But then Gibson goes and shoots
himself in the foot anyway by admitting that DDoS packets can be
filtered after all, namely by using egress filtering, a
procedure that has actually been recommended in at least two Internet RFCs, a
feature that Cisco offers on its routers and that Gibson himself wrote
software to do!

Like I said, Gibson has educated a lot of users about the dangers of
cyberspace. His Web site offers the popular free service Shield’s UP, a test that
checks broadband-connected computers to see how vulnerable they are to
intrusion. Many Windows users were first alerted to the dangers of
broadband when they saw their machines’ profiles staring back at them
after taking this test. And Gibson’s exposure of how Real Networks
implanted spy software onto copies
of its free-downloading program alerted many that their privacy was being
compromised. Gibson also was the one to look behind EarthLink’s
suspicious-looking (though ultimately innocuous) custom browser tokens.

Still, as Microsoft-bashing has turned into a favorite sport of
journalists everywhere, from ZD Net to Slashdot, it’s a bit
disheartening to see Gibson needlessly indulge in it as well, however entertaining
the story that prompted his fulminating.

As for Microsoft, well, let’s just hope XP will be as secure as the
company claims.

Slashdotters talk about a LinuxGram story saying Compaq has nearly
completed the Solaris Threading Library (STL), a set of tools that
help Solaris developers port their applications to Linux.

tjhanson writes, “Nothing new here, but it’s interesting to see how non-techies see our favorite OS: “Microsoft is competing against a faceless enemy,’ says Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat, which resells Linux with services.” The
story’s at USAToday.com.

From InternetWire: Evans Data Corp announced
today that one-quarter of development managers at companies with more than 2000 employees,
interviewed in the latest Enterprise Development Management Issues, believe that the biggest
obstacle to open source development is the lack of standards. This however has declined over
the last 6 months when over one-third of development managers saw that as their biggest
problem.

From the humor site, Segfault: “Linus Torvalds announced today that he is retiring from Transmeta and will be moving to Belfast and taking up a job with Guinness Breweries. In an unusual press conference, the creator of the popular Linux computer operating system was cheered by members of the press when he explained his reasons.”

Christoph Wille writes, “One day after Microsoft released Beta 2 of the .NET SDK, Mike Krüger released a rewrite of his GPL’ed SharpDevelop IDE. SharpDevelop is written entirely in C#, and it can compile C# as well as VB.NET projects out of the box – if you care, you can plug in any compiler you want, and you can supply your personal syntax hightlighting definitions. It sports a collapsible editor, some neat UI tweaks, as well as four different languages. Though SharpDevelop is itself Beta, working with it has the benefit of working on open source.”

Anonymous Reader writes, “Here is some behind-the-scenes information. This whole GNOME saga exploded because of a misunderstanding between Red Hat and Ximian. Red Hat wrote a research
paper on something called the Hub. Ximian read this paper in private and went into a panic because it seemed to them that (1) Red Hat was continuing GNOME development despite having promised to leave it to Ximian, and (2) Red Hat was challenging Bonobo and CORBA as being too heavy weight for GNOME and was presenting Hub as a lightweight alternative.

All hell broke loose when Ximian tried to sneak bonobo-config into CVS and ensure Bonobo’s future survival. This was essentially a fight for whose technology would go into GNOME.

Here are the links you should read,
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2001 -June/msg00306.htmlhttp://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2001 -June/msg00309.htmlhttp://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2001 -June/msg00311.html.”