An anonymous reader tells us about an ZDNet story about an internal struggle between Microsoft’s Office team and the NetDocs team. “Microsoft’s powers-that-be have come down on the side of proprietary platforms, instead of standards-based ones.”

The Register has a story saying, “Foot and Mouth, BSE and the Hatfield rail crash could all have been avoided if the
British government had the right approach to information sharing, at least according
to Richard Stallman. He reckons that all three disasters were largely to do with bad
attitudes to data, and that if ministers understood how free software works then they
would not be in such a mess now.”

CNet reports that the cure may hurt worse than the disease. “Responding to the rash of e-mail viruses that started with Melissa and I Love You, the Redmond,
Wash.-based company is clamping down on the types of file attachments that will work with the
newest version of its Outlook e-mail software.”

A ZDNet column features the Linux Standard Base. The column says the LSB has been slow to produce a full specification, but the wait’s been worth it.

LinuxGram has a way with words in this pumped up press release: “LinuxForce Inc, the little US company that Corel bought a third of back in December of 1999 thinking to use it to
service its desktop Linux accounts, has spun out an outsourcing operation to monitor Linux servers.

Corel’s failure to make any progress in the Linux market threw LinuxForce back on its own devices and the company
says its experience consulting for customers such as the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia and the
Fortune 50 insurance cartel American International Group (AIG) persuaded it to package up the Debian operating
system and the Debian administration, monitoring and reporting technology as a family of commercial products that
the spin-off, AdminForce Remote LLC, will peddle to its customers.”

From net-security.org: The Linux-based kernel in the Watchguard Firebox has
problems handling certain types of malformed packets. If
the firewall is subjected to a burst of around 10.000 of
these packets, it will cause a kernel fault and either
crash or reboot.

Both TCP and ICMP are affected by this and the burstrate
needed to achieve a kernel fault was about one megabit in
our testlab, which isn’t that uncommon these days.

LinuxGram has this story: “An angel-funded start-up by the name of Cylant Technology in Bend, Oregon has been quietly beta testing a new non-signature security schema at Cisco and IBM Global Services for the last few months. An angel-funded start-up by the name of Cylant Technology in Bend, Oregon has been quietly beta testing a new
non-signature security schema at Cisco and IBM Global Services for the last few months … Internally it’s called BARS, reflecting the fact that it’s a behavior anomaly response system. For public consumption
it’s called CylantSecure and works on Linux initially.”

LinuxGram has this story: “An angel-funded start-up by the name of Cylant Technology in Bend, Oregon has been quietly beta testing a new non-signature security schema at Cisco and IBM Global Services for the last few months. An angel-funded start-up by the name of Cylant Technology in Bend, Oregon has been quietly beta testing a new
non-signature security schema at Cisco and IBM Global Services for the last few months … Internally it’s called BARS, reflecting the fact that it’s a behavior anomaly response system. For public consumption
it’s called CylantSecure and works on Linux initially.”

From CNet: “If Conectiva were designed only to provide strong regional support in South America, it would serve that market extremely well. But
Conectiva’s ease of installation and impressive collection of software and features make it a first-class choice for anyone using Linux in
English-speaking countries as well.”

LinuxGram has a short story about Ben Collins, the newly elected Debian project leader. It’s his third time running for the post, and he ran for the first time two months after starting work on Debian, so says LinuxGram.