On the open source implications of Dell's rodent abuse
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Hamster meet penguin Radio Reg Does Dell making hamsters cry have anything at all to do with open source software? Not really. Still, the Open Season crew gathered for Episode 11 to draw any connection between Dell, rodent torture and open source code that we could.â¦
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A serious flaw in Google's desktop software could be used to wreak havoc on a victim's PC.
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Researchers warn that a number of critical holes have been found in Microsoft Windows XP which could be exploited. Symantec acted after security researchers published the details of the heap overflow vulnerabilities
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New .mobi and .jobs, a shift in the ownership of .net
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What happens to open source in a cloud-based computing world?  Or when the enterprise runs dry?
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Plus: File sharing growing like a Weed. [News.com Extra]
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Hewlett-Packard has launched the FOSSology Project, a tool for tracking and monitoring the use of free and open-source software within an IT environment.The project stems from governance work done in-house at HP, according to the Web site set up for the project.&quot;We needed a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open-source project was licensed,&quot; a statement on the site reads. &quot;Rather than simply collecting a project&#39;s advertised license (as given at their website or in their documentation), this tool needed to analyze all of the source code for a given project and intelligently report all of the licenses being used based on the license declarations and tell-tale phrases that identify software licensing.&quot;FOSSology is available under the terms of the GPL (GNU General Public License) version 2 and currently has support on most GNU/Linux platforms, according to the site.It is not clear from the site how HP plans to make money through the initiative. A company spokeswoman declined comment and said Friday that more details will be announced next week.Companies like Black Duck Software are already in the FOSS-tracking business.HP&#39;s entry brought a warm welcome from Black Duck CEO Doug Levin. Levin may feel HP&#39;s involvement will help the market expand overall. &quot;We can now officially welcome HP to our market,&quot; Levin wrote on his blog . &quot;FOSSology is a nice tool for developers. It will result in software developers being better informed about their use of GPL. That makes it a very worthy tool.&quot;Right now, the FOSSology project has modules for license analysis, MIME type identification and for extracting metadata, according to the site.The site said the tool already generates detailed results: &quot;More than simply reporting, &#39;Package X uses license Y,&#39; the FOSSology tool attempts to analyze every file within the package to determine its license. The license report is thus an aggregate of all of the different licenses found to be in use by a package.&quot;FOSSology&#39;s analyses aren&#39;t foolproof, however, a statement on the site concedes: &quot;In general, the analysis results are very good guesses but should not be considered authoritative. (Or to say it simply: We&#39;re not lawyers. The code tries its best, but leave the legal decisions up to your own attorneys.)&quot;Over time, FOSSology is meant to be far more than an open-source license tracker, according to the site. Future capabilities could address bug fixes and patches, security alerts, and code reuse, as well as analysis of all types of software.The effort prompted praise on Friday from Michael Cote, an analyst with Redmonk. &quot;It&#39;s free and open source, which is nice,&quot; Cote said. &quot;So if the data is reliable and well-fed, it could be of help for people who don&#39;t want to work with Black Duck ... and others who have commercial ways to scan for open-source licenses.&quot;&quot;The interesting thing will be to see how open the resulting data is and how much reporting people do with it,&quot; he added. &quot;There&#39;s a sort of cloudy idea of how much open source is used in the enterprise, and having more accurate, free numbers would be great for the community, and more importantly, enterprises that want to get a feel for how widely used open source software is.&quot;The availability of free open-source usage data &quot;will help people make much better -- and affordable -- decisions about what open source to use and not use,&quot; Cote said.
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New line of attack? Security professionals warned developers on Thursday that they need to be aware that their open-source repositories can now be easily mined, allowing attackers to target programs that are likely to be flawed. While Google could previously be used to look for specific strings, now the search engine riffles through code that much better.â¦
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Like many, I was pretty shocked by the recent Microsoft-EU deal to settle the long-running investigation into interoperability issues.  This was not so much because of the way Microsoft has used every kind of delaying tactic it could before eventually agreeing (for the nth time) to try harder in the future.  My real dismay was provoked by the gap between appearance and reality â a chasm that I think bodes ill for the future of open source. read more
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Eat your Meat Casts Site News I have an apology for all the hardware geniuses and open source software experts out there.â¦
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Marten Mickos knows the role open source software can play in business and personal computing.
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The code for the first open source "intimate interface" to connect sex toy hardware to Second Life is posted by qDot Bunnyhug. Have at it. In Sex Drive Daily.
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There is something rather antiquated about many of the server clusters used today by engineers, scientists and media fiends. Their high-powered computing machines are often cobbled together over many days
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Blog: Open source applications will drive a hefty load of infrastructure purchases in the future.  Proprietary vendors who hide their heads in the sand and try to avoid this trend or make it difficult for would-be open source partners to work with them will fin
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Is open source becoming the dumping ground for no-longer-wanted software, sort of like a Salvation Army dropoff point for programs instead of old clothes?
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This article discusses the discovery of compromised machines in large enterprise environments, and offers some suggestions on correlating NIDS and HIPS logs to avoid false positives.
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Gone are the days when free software could blithely ignore what was happening in the world of proprietary code.  The two approaches are now inextricably intertwined as more and more users and companies choose to run both.  One paradoxical consequence of this is that as free software becomes more widely deployed, Microsoft's impact on it becomes greater.  Against this background, a recent shift in Microsoft's public statements about open source assumes a particular importance.