Information freedom for open source users.

A Chinese company that has created a massive database of malware found on Chinese Web sites opened up the information to other security organizations on Thursday.

The Triple Crown of Linux conferences — if there is one — is surely the Linux Symposium, the Linux Kongress, and linux.conf.au. It was just a month ago that we passed on the message to LinuxJournal.com readers that the time to get their name on the Kongress program was nigh, and now it is time to do the same for the southernmost jewel in the crown.

In June of 2007, after many months delay, the Free Software Software Foundation released GPLv3. Since that time, the license has been gaining an increased following, but without much threat to GPLv2 in first place.

PostgreSQL press release: “The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released version 8.4, continuing the rapid development of the world’s most advanced open source database. “

Radware AppWall Source Code Information Disclosure Vulnerability

Linux Kernel ‘inet6_hashtables.c’ NULL Pointer Dereference Denial of Service Vulnerability

X.Org XFS Init Script Insecure Temporary File Creation Vulnerability

Linux Kernel Frame Size Integer Overflow Remote Information Disclosure Vulnerability

KentuckyFC writes “One of the biggest puzzles of astrobiology is the origin of the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. One favored theory is that our water is the leftovers from a bombardment of comets early in Earth’s history. But the ratio of hydrogen and deuterium in the oceans doesn’t match the ratio in the four comets measured so far (Halley’s, Hyakutake, Hale-Bopp and C/2002 T7 LINEAR). Now a new analysis of the ratio of nitrogen-14 and 15 isotopes in these comets and on Earth places new limits on how much of our environment could have come from comets. On the one hand, the astronomers who did the work say that no more than a few percent of Earth’s water could have come from comets. But on the other, they say that the ratio of nitrogen isotopes in these comets almost exactly matches the ratio in Earth’s atmosphere. That suggests that while Earth’s oceans must have come from somewhere else, Earth’s early atmosphere was probably seeded by comets.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canonical has launched Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Services, an effort to help customers build and support cloud infrastructures that live behind corporate firewalls. The announcement, leveraging Ubuntu Server Edition, caught The VAR Guy’s attention for two key reasons.

Posted by linuxrootkit2008_at_gmail.com on Jul 2

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eAccelerator encoder files backup Vulnerability

1.Description

eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that…

“What ever happened to chunkfs?” This is a question I hear every few months, and I always answer the same way, “Chunkfs works, the overhead is reasonable, and it is only practical if it is part of the file system design from the beginning, not tacked on after the fact. I just need to write up the paper summarizing all the data.” Thanks to your benevolent LWN editor, you are now reading that paper.

Does the idea of “advocacy” make you nervous? It does sound a bit scary, doesn’t it, like those annoying door-to-door religious people. But it’s not that way. If you’re interested in helping people learn to speak Linux, here are a few easy, non-scary tips.

MakeTechEasier: “The only catch with Krun was that you had to know the exact name of the command you intended to launch. With the advent of KDE 4, that has all changed.”

Deag writes “A mega colony of one family of ants has spread all over the world. Previous mega colonies in California, Europe and Japan have been shown to be in fact one global colony. Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn’t get on with those from the Iberian colony. But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Red Hat today officially announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL), which in my view is a lot more than a typical point release. Sure we’re all waiting for the big RHEL 6 release, but there are some major changes in RHEL 5.4.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 2, 2009 is available.

Less than 24 hours since it was released, Firefox 3.5 has already been downloaded more than four million times. According to Mozilla’s Worldwide Firefox Downloads page, the major update to the open source Firefox web browser is currently being downloaded approximately 77 times every second all around the globe.

FrostWire is an open-source, free Java-based peer-to-peer client with support for the BitTorrent protocol, skins and iTunes. The latest release, 4.18.0, contains many improvements, bug fixes and several changes. See the official announcement here. Debian Lenny doesn’t come with FrostWire included in its repositories, but installing it is very easy if you follow the steps below.

Linux Today Blog: “Does the idea of “advocacy” make you nervous? It does sound a bit scary, doesn’t it, like those annoying door-to-door religious people. But it’s not that way. If you’re interested in helping people learn to speak Linux, here are a few easy, non-scary tips.”