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Verizon Joins Linux Mobile Foundation
From the Flavors of Lock In dept.:
Sometime next year, Verizon will roll out a Linux OS as the "preferred operating system" for phones on its US wireless network. And that Linux OS is not Google Android.
But the big-name telco says it has no objections to selling Android phones as well. "This is not an either/or proposition," company spokesman Jeffrey Nelson told us. "We do believe that we will also offer devices with the Android OS - that our customers will want them and that we will be delighted to offer them."
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Air Force Aims for Control of 'Any and All' Computers
From the 0wzign j00! dept.:
...On Monday, the Air Force Research Laboratory introduced a two-year, $11 million effort to put together hardware and software tools for "Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement." "Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root level access," a request for proposals notes, "to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms... any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware." This isn't just some computer science study, mind you; "research efforts under this program are expected to result in complete functional capabilities."
...But, in the end, the Air Force wants to see all kinds of "techniques and technologies" to "Deceive, Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, [or] Destroy" hostile systems. And "in addition to these main concepts," the Research Lab would like to see studies into "Proactive Botnet Defense Technology Development," the "reinvent[ion of] the network protocol stack" and new antennas, based on carbon nanotubes.
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Catch a Glimpse of Mozilla's E-Mail Future in Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1
From the New Mail! dept.:
It's alive! Mozilla has released the first alpha version of its upcoming Thunderbird 3.0, the company's next-generation e-mail application. We don't suggest you rush out and download it unless you're a true early adopter; this release isn't stable and lacks many of the features planned for Thunderbird 3's final release.
This alpha release is primarily intended to let Thunderbird fans know that the project is alive and well and the team is working hard on the next version of the open source e-mail client. It's also the first product to emerge from the newest entity within the Mozilla organization, Mozilla Messaging. The company was spun off this past winter in order to give more attention to the Thunderbird project, which had long lived under the shadow of the much more successful Firefox browser.
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MoonLight: Open Source Silverlight
From the Miguel dept.:
Today we are making the first public release of Moonlight, supporting the Silverlight 1.0 profile for Linux. The release comes in two forms:
* No-media codecs supported, but easy to install: head to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight and click on the cute installer for Moonlight. This currently hosts builds for Linux x86 and x86-64 for Firefox.
* Source-code compilation, but you can optionally compile FFMpeg codecs yourself. To do this, download our moon-0.6.tar.bz2. And follow the build instructions.
Although Moonlight works on Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, recent changes in Firefox 3 prevent Silverlight and Moonlight from working (For details see #432371, #430965). There is a user contributed Greasemonkey script that will work around this bug for some sites (requires Greasemonkey).
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How to rescue Java from the men in suits
From the Suits Still Control Java dept.:
Members of a JavaOne panel on the JCP, open source and standards have expressed their frustrations with a process they believe puts corporate interests first when it comes to Java. For once, it wasn't just Spring Framework creator and evangelist Rod Johnson calling for change.
Joining him was Sun Microsystems' own, recently recruited, "free and open source software ambassador" Dalibor Topic and representatives from one of the industry's newest Java user group - the Paris JUG - plus one of the largest - Brazil's SouJava. Brazil is a country Sun repeatedly champions when discussing uptake of Java and open source.
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Brute-Force SSH Server Attacks Surge
From the Button down the hatches dept.:
The number of brute-force SSH attacks is rising, the SANS Internet Storm Center warned on Monday.
"[T]here has been a significant amount of brute force scanning reported by some of our readers and on other mailing lists," said Internet Storm Center handler Scott Fendley in a blog post. "... From the most recent reports I have seen, the attackers have been using either 'low and slow' style attacks to avoid locking out accounts and/or being detected by IDS/IPS systems. Some attackers seem to be using botnets to do a distributed style attack which also is not likely to exceed thresholds common on the network."
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EU Won't Seek New Antitrust Complaint Against Microsoft
From the We Don't Need No Stinkin' Standards! dept.:
The European Commission confirmed it has received a complaint about Microsoft's business practices from a British government agency Tuesday, but isn't following it up as it normally would with an antitrust complaint, according to a press officer.
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Fedora 9 Released
From the Brand New Hat dept.:
Hello Fedora community -- I wanted to take the occasion of my first release as Fedora Project Leader to say a few -- OK, not so few -- words to everyone about what this release means to me, and what I hope you see in it too.
...It's hard to believe all of the amazing new features in Fedora 9 came together so quickly. Thanks to the tireless work of hundreds of FOSS developers, and the watchful eye of our Feature Wrangler, John Poelstra, we were able to get a huge number of cool, shiny things into the distribution.
LiveUSB, PackageKit, PolicyKit, FreeIPA, easy partition resizing, one-click encryption, RandR support and a faster X, TeXLive, Firefox 3, GVFS, ext4, GCC 4.3, and so much more.... There are far too many improvements to list them all, but certainly even to the naked eye there are worlds of difference between our present and our past -- and the change is overwhelmingly for the better! Go check out the full list at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/FeatureList on the wiki.
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Skype Gives Up Anti-GPL Appeal
From the FTW dept.:
...In the end, the court hinted twice that if it was to judge about the case, Skype would not have very high chances. After a short break, Skype decided to revoke their appeals case and accept the previous judgement of the lower court (Landgericht Muenchen I, the decision was in my favor) as the final judgement. This means that the previous court decision is legally binding to Skype, and we have successfully won what has probably been the most lengthy and time consuming case so far.
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GPL vs. Skype Back In Court
From the Enforcement dept.:
Tomorrow at 10:30am at the Oberlandesgericht Muenchen (higher regional court of Munich) there will be an oral hearing in the "Welte vs. Skype Technologies SA" case. The hearing is to be held in room E.06.
This case is about a GPL violation of Skype, related to their sales of Wifi Skype phones based on the Linux operating system kernel.
I'm fighting as part of the gpl-violations.org project in enforcing the GPL against Skype since February 2007. Initially Skype didn't respond, we then applied for a preliminary injunction. That injunction was granted by the court in June 2007, but Skype chose to file an appeals case against it.
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