Sensei writes “This is a tutorial on sharing your Internet connection by configuring a Linux machine as your gateway/firewall. I’ve made this tutorial as easy as possible so that the average newbie can have a running and secure mini-home network. I’m sure you’ve probably been told that setting up firewall rules and IP masquerading can be difficult. Not so, as you will find out. In fact, we won’t even be learning a single firewall rule.
Check it out at LinuxNewbie.org“

From LinuxFocus.org: “This article is the first one in a series about the main security holes that can usually to appear within an application.
Along these articles, we’ll show the ways to avoid them by changing a little the development habits.”

The Standard: “Do Oracle (ORCL) stockholders really want Bill Clinton to
participate in board decisions? More importantly, can members
of the press restrain themselves from dishing the rumor that
Clinton might join Oracle’s board?”

Saint writes, “LinuxMedNews reports on Brainiac Thomas Beale’s latest (HTML draft here, PDF draft http://www.deepthought.com.au/it/archetypes/archet ypes.pdf>here, Introduction here) of his take on ‘Future Proof Information Systems’: ‘…the usual legacy IS systems…have a limited lifespan and are expensive to modify and extend in order to accommodate changing needs…The approach proposed here is a rigorous knowledge-modelling one, and is founded on a basic tenet: the separation of domain and technical concerns in information systems. In real terms, this translates to:

• The removal of domain concepts from concrete software and database models, into independently managed, standardised vocabularies and domain-specific models.
• Re-engineering the software and database as a knowledge representation (KR) system architecture, designed to process information by using externally supplied domain definitions…’

Beal is project leader of the Good Electronic Health Record (GEHR)”

From InfoWorld.com: “Sharp will being selling a Linux operating system-based personal digital
assistant (PDA) in the U.S. from the third quarter this year, according to a report in
the Saturday morning edition of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun.

The new Zaurus PDA, which will also support Java and will be the first from Sharp
that doesn’t use the company’s proprietary operating system, will go on sale in
Japan from the second quarter and hit Europe around the end of the year and the
remainder of Asia in early 2002, said the report.”

According to a report at ZDNET, “Developers of the world’s most popular mobile phone standard will
design their next set of security specifications in public, setting the
stage for what experts predicted will be an effectively snoop-proof
cell phone.”

MSNBC.com: “…enter the Stinger and
the Stirling – those are the code names Microsoft has given to
its first series of smart phones and the platform that runs them.
These devices will be ready for the next generation of
cellular service in this country (called 2.5G) and in Europe
(3G).
Stinger will be 30 percent smaller than an average phone in
Europe or the United States; will weigh less than 100 grams;
have a color or gray-scale display (up to 208 by 240 pixels);
and provide up to 100 hours of standby time with the screen
and PIM (personal information management) functions
running, four hours of talk time, selectable ring tones,
foreign-language support, 8MB of built-in memory and
support for a wide range of expansion options including Secure
Digital, Solid State Floppy Disk Cards and even memory sticks.”

ZDNET: “The program is called the Berkeley Internet Name Domain. It’s open
source code that links a name, such as ComeToUs.com, to a numeric
Internet Protocol address on a Domain Name System server, which
directs users to the right place. With a few exceptions, Web sites have
such a server in front of them running BIND and directing traffic. The
DNS server is typically outside the corporate firewall with minimal
protection and, thus, is a frequent target for hackers. Hernan said 80
percent to 90 percent of the copies of BIND in use contain one of a
dozen known vulnerabilities.”

Here’s a short and sweet how-to from O’Reilly: “In today’s article, I’d like to take a look at utmp, wtmp, and lastlog. These
three files are read and updated whenever a user logs in to your FreeBSD
system. However, you can’t read these files directly, so we’ll also look at the
various utilities you can use to garner the information contained within these files.
We’ll then finish off the article with some utilities that deal with logins and
terminals.”

“In a previous column, Reviewing the Others: Darwin, I briefly examined Apple’s ambitious Darwin project. The article was the first in an
intermittent series on large open-source projects; the series as a whole is meant to provide insight for the OpenOffice.org. community. The
below interview provides a lead developer’s perspective on the issue of Open Source.” Story is at OpenOffice.org.