Wired.com reports that “team of four Polish coders has security company Argus eating crow. The group uses a hole known by hackers to win the $48,000 prize from the company that claimed it was impenetrable.” Argus is the maker of the Pit Bull security products.

It’s at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4. Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.

Alan Cox writes, “This isn’t a proper release as such, it should just deal with most of
the
compile failure/symbol failure problems.”2.4.3-ac13
o Switch to NOVERS symbols for rwsem (me)
| Called from asm blocks so they can’t be versioned
o Fix gcc 2.95 building on rwsem (Niels Jensen)
o Fix cmsfs build (Andrzej Krzysztofowicz)
o Fix rio build/HZ setup (Andrzej Krzysztofowicz)
o Fix PPP filtering dependancy in config (Andrzej Krzysztofowicz)

2.4.3-ac12
o Rewrite the i2o post handling code to fix (me)
DMA memory scribbles
o Handle IOP constipation in the i2o_block layer (me)
o Fix bugs in the i2o table query causing reboots (me)
in i2o_proc on the DPT card
o Add quirks for i2o cards that handle large I/O (me)
queues badly [Promise supertrak100]
o Add cache heuristics to the I2O block driver (me)
| We don’t cache large writes (assume seq)
| We writeback small writes (random, metadata)
o Disable use of writeback caching if there is (me)
no battery backup
o Merge Linus 2.4.4pre6
o Further semaphore fixes (David Howells)
o Correct ‘void main’ to ‘int main’ in rtc doc (Jesper Juhl)
o Hopefully fix bugtraq reported netfilter ftp
flaw
o Fix unistd.h for ARM (Russell King)
o Fix pre-emption of rt tasks (Nigel Gamble)
o Fix revalidation bugs in cciss/cpqarray (Charles White)
when rereading partitions
o Acenic updates (Jes Sorensen)
o Fix MAINTAINERS sort order (David Woodhouse)
o Restore DVDRAM fix with cdrom init fix too (Jens Axboe)
o Fix irda disconnect timeout bug (Dag Brattli)
o Experimentally reap dead swap harder (Dave Miller)
o Remove dead low mtu checks from drivers (Arnaldo Carvalho de
Melo)
o Add missing sk_chk_filter export (Byeong-ryeol Kim)
o Quieten pci printks, send them to log (Arjan van de Ven)
o Hopefully fix fastrak oops (me)

From a press release at LWN.net: Today, SuSE Linux, the
international technology leader and provider of Open Source solutions,
announced the complete SuSE Linux 7.1 package is now available in Japanese
as a free download with full support in Japanese. As worldwide economies
tighten, interest in Linux continues to grow. SuSE’s highly reviewed
version 7.1 highlights the company’s enterprise initiatives.

EETimes.com has a story about Lexra Inc. releasing a 32-bit processor.

“Lexra is so confident of its forthcoming third-generation 32-bit processor
that it is planning to charge a premium over comparable 32-bit cores from
MIPS, an unusual tactic for a company that still considers itself an underdog … The LX4380 will be shielded from legal attacks by [rival] MIPS Technologies because
Lexra has removed the capability to do software emulation of unaligned loads and stores. Rather, Lexra
said it will use the open-source Linux operating system.”

From BusinessWire via Wide Open News: TeamQuest Corporation has announced that its performance
tools, TeamQuest View and TeamQuest On the Web, are now available on the SuSE Linux operating system.

TeamQuest View and TeamQuest On the Web are designed to help clients manage enterprise server performance.
TeamQuest View offers past and present performance analysis for help in determining the cause of system bottlenecks.
TeamQuest On the Web is an automated report publisher that delivers management and administrative level charts
through a standard Web browser.

eWeek has more on IBM’s release of AIX, which will allow users to manage and build both Unix and Linux applications.

KDE.org has another profile of a KDE developer, this time Stefan Westerfeld from Hamburg, Germany. Here’s part of what he had to say: “My goal is making KDE better with regard to multimedia applications. So I am working on
aRts, the basis for all sound support, sound server, multimedia application communication
and so on. Ultimately I’d like to see KDE becoming a solid base for various multimedia
applications in the style of sequencers like CuBase (VST) and AudioLogic, wave editors,
games, video editing and so on. I’d say that my main interest is really the music part of all
that.”

SecurityFocus.com has the article. “Over the past several years, the use of Linux as a firewall platform has grown significantly. Linux firewalling code has come a long way since the
time ipfwadm was introduced in kernel 1.2. Recent changes in linux firewalling code include netfilter architecture (controlled from the command
line by iptables utility), which was introduced in stable kernel 2.4. The newest version 2.4 of Linux kernel (first released in January 2001) presents
many new security enhancements such as: enhanced capabilities, better support for encryption (for VPN and encrypted file systems) and
netfilter architecture, which is a re-implementation of Linux’s firewalling code and which remains fully backward-compatible due to the use of
ipchains and ipfwadm loadable kernel modules.”

From a PR Newswire press release: The U.S. multiuser system market is on course to reach $34.6 billion by 2004.
According to IDC, revenues in this market will get a boost from an unexpected source, the government, agriculture/construction, and education industries –
sectors that historically don’t spend a lot on IT. Together, these industries will account for more than 16% of the market’s revenues.

Which operating environments benefit from the growth of the U.S. multiuser system market will significantly vary. Only Linux, Windows NT, and Unix will
increase their revenues in the overall market.

LATimes.com had a story this weekend about two senior officers in Credit Suisse First Boston’s Silicon Valley office being placed on administrative leave, raising concerns on Wall Street about the federal probe over the investment bank’s activities during recent tech IPOs. Among the tech companies that used CSFB: AvantGo
Inc., OmniSky Corp., Evolve Software Inc., Handspring Inc., Iprint Inc.,
Onvia.com Inc. and VA Linux Systems Inc. (NewsForge’s parent company.)