Customers of BTopenworld can breathe a little easier tonight. The British broadband Internet provider announced that will provide all of its users with free security software from Internet Security Systems. Called Online Scanner, the software alerts customers to security hazards including out of date virus programs and Trojan horse programs. The deal was announced Wednesday at ISS Connect 2001 Security Summit in Atlanta. Full story at ZDNet UK.

From Network World Fusion: “OpenReach and Penguin announced last week a turnkey Linux VPN package consisting of OpenReach software and services, and Penguin PCs. The package lets users easily and quickly install and configure a VPN in remote locations that may not have IS support. The package is a follow-on to an agreement announced last month that OpenReach would to distribute its software on Penguin computers. The VPN package could help Penguin further differentiate itself from its larger, better-known rival VA Linux Systems.”

If you really want to be the first kid on your block with a copy of Mac OS X in your hot little hands, hop on a flight to New Zealand. That is where Computerworld says the first copy of Apple’s next-generation operating system will be sold. The PR opportunity isn’t lost on the local Apple sub; they’re planning to take full advantage of New Zealand’s time zone difference and stage a midnight opening at a Mac-centric Auckland shop.

ZDNet News is reporting that Compaq Computer has made an investment in German Linux concern SuSE. The amount invested was not disclosed, but if paired with an earlier announcement, part of the deal would seem to include a seat on SuSE’s Linux Supervisory Board.

From Linux Journal: “By now, nearly everyone who has been using Linux for some time and had their system connected to the Internet has seen attempts to compromise their security. The question that often comes up is what to do about it. Unless it’s a financial or safety issue, it’s probably going to get laughed at by the legal authorities, but it’s worth reporting.”

Napster may be going, going, and almost gone, but it looks like the peer to peer “revolution” is here to stay, at least for a little longer. The Dallas Morning News takes a look at the P2P industry, and the projects waiting to take over wherever it is that Napster leaves off.

In this latest installment of Linux Journal’s system administration series, Marcel Gagne covers Samba, the Linux/Windows file and print services program.

Anti-aliased fonts, a computer graphics tweak that many users believe gives more life and realism to the electronic printed word, are available for Linux. Getting anti-aliasing working on your system may not be the easiest thing in the world, but following Dennis E. Powell’s trials, tribulations, and informal walkthrough might do the trick. More at LinuxPlanet.

– by Tina Gasperson –
Brian Croll, the v.p. of marketing for Eazel, is going to be making his own coffee for the time being. He was pretty much the only marketing person standing after Tuesday’s carnage, which left the company “in startup mode.”
“We have a couple of people who can fill in and help out” with marketing and sales duties. Croll said remaining staff members will be performing above and beyond their normal responsibilities while the company puts itself back together and goes forward.

Croll says that, contrary to rumors, the company will continue development of new products. “One of the things we did is that we kept the key development teams,” so that Eazel could continue innovation.

He added that his job will not change much, even without the thirty odd former colleagues. “As we bring out new things we’ll still have to talk to the press, for example.”

Croll comes from a 14-year-long background in marketing at Sun Microsystems, where, he says, he pushed for projects to come out as Open Source — though he adds that his stint with Eazel has constituted his entire involvement with Open Source. Croll says he is a happy Red Hat user — but of course.

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–
By Tony Smith –
– The Register –
Coder Charles M Hannum has created the smallest program capable of decoding a
Content Scrambling System (CSS) DVD file, beating last week’s seven-line Perl
shell script 442 bytes to 472 (excluding newline bytes). Hannum’s C program, called efdtt, is no slouch, either. The programmer claims it
can “descramble in excess of 21.5MBps” – faster than the DVD spec. allows for.
The speed comes “without even particularly trying to optimise the I/O. This makes it
pretty insignificant compared to the rest of the decoding process” = in other words,
it’s quick enough not to impede the MPEG 2 decode operation which turns the data
into a moving image.

Apparently, the latter may be a problem with qrpff, the Perl CSS descrambler written
by Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz, and posted on Carnegie Mellon University
professor David Touretzky’s DSS Descrambler Gallery Web site. Winstein and
Horowitz’ code was capable of supporting realtime decode and playback, but we’re
told the output was occasionally jerky.

Hannum’s code should allow smooth playback.

Both scripts do what the controversial DVD-on-Linux utility DeCSS does – and
demonstrate how simple CSS, the DVD standard’s copyright protection mechanism,
is to decode. The Motion Picture Association of America has been pretty
successful in repressing the distribution of DeCSS, viewing it as a threat to movie
industry copyright – and movie industry profits.

“So what’s the MPAA gonna do now?” Touretzky asks. “This code is small enough
to put on a cocktail napkin. Commit to memory. Knit into a scarf. Whatever. It cannot
be suppressed.”

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