Information freedom for open source users.

Made some improvements and found some new bugs in gnetscan; the tiny C network scanner that could. Cut an interim release; I am using the tradition of odd numbered releases are testing/unstable while even numbered ones are stable. This release has some bug fixes, better input handling and still has some unresolved issues. In any case for those tracking it enjoy.

Half-pint HAL tips news of UK prosecution lawyers who are instructing police to study information on Wikipedia when preparing to give expert testimony in court. “Mike Finn, a weaponry specialist and expert witness in more than 100 cases, told industry magazine Police Review: ‘There was one case in a Midlands force where police officers asked me to write a report about a martial art weapon. The material they gave me had been printed out from Wikipedia. The officer in charge told me he was advised by the CPS to use the website to find out about the weapon and he was about to present it in court. I looked at the information and some of it had substance and some of it was completely made up.’ Mr. Finn, a former Metropolitan Police and City of London officer and Home Office adviser, added that he has heard of at least three other cases where officers from around the country have been advised by the CPS to look up evidence on Wikipedia.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeginLinux: “This course will help you understand the benefits of LDAP as well as implementation of LDAP. The OpenLDAP Project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, fully featured, and open source LDAP suite of applications and development tools. The project is managed by a worldwide community of volunteers that use the Internet to communicate, plan, and develop the OpenLDAP Suite and its related documentation.”

LinuxSecurity.com: =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
Multiple vulnerabilities in the Apache Portable Runtime Utility Library
might enable remote attackers to cause a Denial of Service or disclose
sensitive information.

Posted by Steffen Joeris on Jul 4

————————————————————————

Debian Security Advisory DSA-1826-1 security_at_debian.org

http://www.debian.org/security/ Steffen Joeris

July 04, 2009 http://www.debian.org/security/faq

…

movesguy sends us to The Daily Galaxy for comments by Stephen Hawking about how humans are evolving in a different way than any species before us. Quoting: “‘At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information. I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race,’ Hawking said. In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, ‘an external transmission phase,’ where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. ‘But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage,’ Hawking says, ‘has grown enormously. Some people would use the term evolution only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This tutorial will demonstrate how to set up a Squid Proxy server on Ubuntu 9.04 Server with DansGuardian (for content filtering) and ClamAV (for Virus scanning); in addition, we will set up Web Proxy AutoDetection (WPAD) through DHCP (in this case, the Windows Server 2003 DHCP server) or DNS so that the only configuration necessary on the client side is to check “Auto-detect proxy settings for this network” in Firefox or Internet Explorer. At the end of the tutorial, users will have a fully functional and secure proxy for HTTP access.

Recently on our forums, Frank Earl (who goes by the synonym Svartalf), has been seeking the input of Linux gamers as to what games they would like to see ported to Linux. Frank has been working for Linux Game Publishing for a few years porting various titles to Linux and has done work independently on bringing new software from Windows to Linux. Frank was overwhelmed by the response on our forums and it has even led to new Linux games with many other possible ports being looked into. To get his view as where Linux gaming is currently at, he has answered a few of our questions about Linux game porting, Linux gaming in general, and other questions that may be of interest to gamers and Linux enthusiasts.

Alex on Linux: “This series of articles is a summary of things that I had to learn to know Bazaar and to convert some of my projects from Subversion.”

theodp writes “Three Amazon inventors set out to correct what they felt was a real problem: that ‘out-of-print or rare books … typically do not include advertisements … the content is fixed and, therefore, has not been adapted to modern marketing.’ Their solution is spelled out in newly-disclosed Amazon patent applications for On-Demand Generating E-Book Content with Advertising and Incorporating Advertising in On-Demand Generated Content. From the patent apps, here’s what the future of reading may look like: ‘For instance, if a restaurant is described on page 12, [then the advertising page], either on page 11 or page 13, may include advertisements about restaurants, wine, food, etc., which are related to restaurants and dining.’ So, what would a delightfully-tacky-yet-unrefined Hooters ad do for your Hemingway experience?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to their entry on GNOME Live, Project Hamster is “time tracking for [the] masses.” It aims to be a tool which enables users to quickly and accurately keep track of the amount of time they spend on their activities over time. Project Hamster is a relatively new module for GNOME, having been brought into GNOME officially for the 2.24 release. Now that GNOME 2.26 is upon us, it is an ideal time to take a closer look at this interesting project.

cin62 writes “The number of Internet scammers offering fake versions of the anti-swine flu drug Tamiflu has surpassed those selling counterfeit Viagra, reports CNN. Since the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, was declared a global pandemic last month, there has been an increase in the number of Web sites and junk emails offering Tamiflu for sale. ‘Every Web site that used to sell Viagra is now selling Tamiflu. We are pretty sure that the same people are making the Tamiflu as are making the Viagra,’ said Director of Policy for the UK’s Royal Pharmaceutical Society.” This news fits in nicely with a report Wired ran a couple weeks ago about the hysteria behind H1N1.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LinuxSecurity.com:

When AV attacks

IT admins across the globe are letting out a collective groan after servers and PCs running McAfee VirusScan were brought down when the anti-virus program attacked their core system files. In some cases, this caused the machines to display the dreaded blue screen of death.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

The elusive *nix. Nobody knows about it yet it is one of the most widely used server operating systems. The wikipedia entry mentions it as the unknown giant of the internet. Huge internet portals like Yahoo! run on it. Why is it that no one knows about this widely used OS?

jadoon88 writes to share a series of old Atari 7800 games that have been unofficially open sourced. “Remember Dig Dug or Centipede or Robotron? They used to be favorites when Atari’s 7800 series was still around. Since the era of those consoles is over, and a different world of interactive reality gaming has taken over, Atari has unofficially released source code of over 15 games for the coders and enthusiasts to admire the state-of-the-art (because this is what it was back then). During those times, nobody would have imagined in their wildest dreams the games that Atari’s developers floated into the gaming thirsty market and instantly swept across continental boundaries. But things changed soon after that and a company once regarded as one of the most successful gaming console manufacturers and developers faded away in the pages of our technology’s hall-of-fame.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The PostgreSQL project has released version 8.4 of the open source database management software, with more than 290 additions and changes to features. The most numerous updates are for administrators, with new or tweaked administration and monitoring tools and commands, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group said in its launch statement on Tuesday. The project spent 16 months working on the new version of the database software.

one-man orchestra writes “I’m the sole programmer of a small, multi-platform, commercial audio program (a spectrogram editor). After over 6 months on the market, I realized that the program would never just sell itself, and that I need some real marketing done for it. Being a one-man orchestra is becoming increasingly difficult; I only can devote so much time to marketing, my skills in that department are lacking, and I’d much rather spend more time coding. Despite my lackluster part-time marketing effort, I still manage to make a modest living out of the sales. My logical assumption is that with someone competent taking care of that part, revenue could greatly scale up. But what’s the right way to go about doing this? What type of people/company do I need to contact? What to expect? What to look out for?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samples of documents used in carefully prepared targeted attacks make clear that while a suspicious eye is a great security tool, some especially dangerous attacks might slide right by you.

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