Information freedom for open source users.

coondoggie writes “Boeing today released the first public glimpse of the commercial spacecraft it is working on under an $18 million contract with NASA. Boeing’s Crew Space Transportation (CST)-100 can hold seven crew and will be bigger than Apollo but smaller than NASA’s Orion, and be able to launch on a variety of different rockets, including Atlas, Delta and Falcon.The company envisions the spacecraft supporting the International Space Station and future Bigelow Aerospace Orbital Space Complex systems. Bigelow is building what it calls ‘expandable habitats,’ that which are inflatable spacecraft would act as large, less costly space stations.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Free Software Magazine: “One of the great advantages of using a free license for a work is that you can re-use a growing body of free-licensed source material to help you do it. But it can seem a little daunting to find the material that you both want and can legally use.”

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 22, 2010 is available.

Blog platform shut down following FBI investigation is in negotiations with Web host. EFF wants to know FBI’s role in service’s closure.

LinuxSecurity.com: New mozilla-thunderbird packages are available for Slackware 13.1 and -current to fix security issues. [More Info...]

LinuxSecurity.com: New seamonkey packages are available for Slackware 12.2, 13.0, 13.1, and -current to fix security issues. [More Info...]

The freeware encryption program TrueCrypt updates to version 7, gaining hardware acceleration powers, auto-mounting, and the ability to encrypt hibernation and crash dump files.

Posted by security-alert on Jul 21

SUPPORT COMMUNICATION – SECURITY BULLETIN

Document ID: c02290344
Version: 2

HPSBMA02558 SSRT100158 rev.2 – HP OpenView Network Node Manager (OV NNM), Remote Execution of Arbitrary Code

NOTICE: The information in this Security Bulletin should be acted upon as soon as possible.

Release Date: 2010-07-20
Last Updated: 2010-07-21

Potential Security Impact: Remote execution of arbitrary code

Source: Hewlett-Packard Company, HP Software Security…

Six releases in 18 months. Is it too much? With six releases in just a year and a half is Android risking extreme fragmentation? Or is this just the way Google does business?

The PC-BSD Team has announced the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5
Version 8.1 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:

FreeBSD 8.1-Release
KDE 4.4.5
Numerous fixes to the installation backend
Support for creating dedicated disk GPT partitioning
Improved [...]

Click here for access to a reliable and friendly Free-BSD based hosting company

The Bordeaux Technology Group has announced a one month sale on Bordeaux for Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, PC-BSD and OpenSolaris. With the release of Wine 1.2 it marks the first stable Wine release in nearly two years. And with this release they’d like to celebrate and show their appreciation for all the hard work that has gone [...]

Click here for access to a reliable and friendly Free-BSD based hosting company

Diana Harrelson, an anthropology graduate student, spent several months
surveying the Fedora community; a draft version of her
report is now available. It looks at contributors’ motivations and
problems they have encountered, and makes a number of recommendations on
how to make the project easier to contribute to. “The key here, and
the large difference between FLOSS development processes and traditional
ones, is that it’s not the act of doing something that needs approval;
instead it’s the result of the action and quality of the work that must be
approved. Again, this is where not only having a mentor program for new
contributors is useful, but also making such a program highly visible,
transparent, and accessible is important.”

GSmartControl is a really useful Linux app to check the health of your hard disk drive. GSmartControl is basically a graphical user interface for smartctl, which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. Only ATA drives including both PATA and SATA are supported for now.

Computerworld UK: “It’s an old joke by now that this year will be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop just like last year, and the year before that. But now there’s a new twist: that this year will be the year of the GNU/Linux smartphone with the difference that it’s really happening.”

Debian has updated mlmmj (directory
traversal) and
ncompress (code execution via crafted
archive).

Fedora has updated libpng10 (F12, F13: code execution and denial of service),
python-cjson (F12, F13: buffer overflow), and
w3m (F12: certificate spoofing).

Red Hat has updated thunderbird (RHEL4, RHEL5:
multiple vulnerabilities),
seamonkey (RHEL3-4: multiple
vulnerabilities),
firefox (RHEL4-5: multiple
vulnerabilities), and
java-1.6.0-ibm (RHEL4-5:
“Unspecified vulnerability… allows remote attackers to affect
confidentiality, integrity, and availability via unknown vectors”).

Ubuntu has updated krb5 (denial of
service).

Features of the new beta include integration with Internet Explorer, a new and more robust antimalware engine, and protection against network-based threats.

Still talking to Oracle

Commercial Linux distributor Canonical has won the buzzword bingo for the week by putting Ubuntu, cloud, and appliance in the same sentence in announcing a partnership with IBM. It’s meant to bring the latter company’s DB2 databases to the latest Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition Linux.…

In light of the recent GPL compliance complaint made by the Free Software
Foundation against Apple’s App Store, which sells and distributes software
for Apple gadgets, it was probably inevitable that other problem
applications would surface.
While there are various opinions on whether the App Store can legally
distribute GPL-covered binaries—along with diverging opinions on what
benefits, if any, the App Store provides to free software projects—it
is clear that some people object to their GPL-licensed code appearing in
the App Store. So it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that the
port of the The Battle for Wesnoth
for the iPhone/iPad, which was released
last November, has
run into some resistance.

Red Hat has a big portfolio of cloud computing tools, as our Dan Kusnetzky is quick to note, but it lacks the enterprise credibility of an IBM or Microsoft.

Maybe alliances will help.

HP is a good name to throw out there, alongside IBM, and if things like the  x64 migration center, which is aimed squarely at Oracle’s Solaris, mainly benefit HP it’s no big deal. Just as an alliance with AMD may sell some chip sets — it also sells Red Hat as a big player.

While we’re big fans of Red Hat here at ZDNet Open Source, the enterprise cloud space is The Show, and right now BTC Logic has Red Hat listed as “just” a heavyweight, behind IBM and (surprising to casual observers) Amazon.

That’s the same level as Google and Microsoft, but it’s not enough to impress the stock pickers at Capstone, who have put a “sell” on the stock and expect it to shed 25% of its financial skin. (Commenters disagree.)

What’s most interesting is that, in the cloud, Red Hat is going head-to-head against Microsoft, not a fair fight financially, but a virtualized world is lining up in pro-and-anti Microsoft camps, so if Red Hat is heading the anti-Microsoft camp it has a pretty good position.

So can the open source leader win the Big Game? We report, you decide. If they fail, maybe they can get by selling these nifty Amish pot holders. At just $8 each, and with proprietary advantages galore!

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