Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "The Jem Report is running a story about the recent controversy surrounding the hardware used in OLPC laptops. Some devices require NDA's to write drivers, and some parts require firmware that cannot be freely redistributed. Richard Stallmann and Theo de Raadt oppose the use of such devices. Jim Getty defends OLPC's choice (de Raadts response). Jem Matzan has interviewed all sides and published the answers."

An anonymous reader writes "The Jem Report is running a story about the recent controversy surrounding the hardware used in OLPC laptops. Some devices require NDA's to write drivers, and some parts require firmware that cannot be freely redistributed. Richard Stallmann and Theo de Raadt oppose the use of such devices. Jim Getty defends OLPC's choice (de Raadts response). Jem Matzan has interviewed all sides and published the answers."

rvale writes "Gentoo has announced a new project called Seeds. Aiming to provide out of the box images for various common tasks, it could be the answer to the common complaint that installing and customizing Gentoo takes too long. However, with other developers and Council members complaining that the project was improperly set up and those backing the project refusing to back off, lending weight to recent claims that Gentoo is suffering from management problems, will what could be a massive step forward degenerate into a repeat of the Sunrise disaster?"

rvale writes "Gentoo has announced a new project called Seeds. Aiming to provide out of the box images for various common tasks, it could be the answer to the common complaint that installing and customizing Gentoo takes too long. However, with other developers and Council members complaining that the project was improperly set up and those backing the project refusing to back off, lending weight to recent claims that Gentoo is suffering from management problems, will what could be a massive step forward degenerate into a repeat of the Sunrise disaster?"

rvale writes "Gentoo has announced a new project called Seeds. Aiming to provide out of the box images for various common tasks, it could be the answer to the common complaint that installing and customizing Gentoo takes too long. However, with other developers and Council members complaining that the project was improperly set up and those backing the project refusing to back off, lending weight to recent claims that Gentoo is suffering from management problems, will what could be a massive step forward degenerate into a repeat of the Sunrise disaster?"

Mhrmnhrm writes "After totally closing off public access to documentation for their chips roughly five years ago, Hifn is again offering them, but with an invasive registration requirement. Needless to say, Theo de Raadt and the rest of the OpenBSD team were not amused, and following a Hifn manager's missive, the gauntlet has been thrown. Either open the docs fully, or be removed from the system. This wouldn't be the first time... the same thing happened to both Adaptec and Intel following similar spats."

Mhrmnhrm writes "After totally closing off public access to documentation for their chips roughly five years ago, Hifn is again offering them, but with an invasive registration requirement. Needless to say, Theo de Raadt and the rest of the OpenBSD team were not amused, and following a Hifn manager's missive, the gauntlet has been thrown. Either open the docs fully, or be removed from the system. This wouldn't be the first time... the same thing happened to both Adaptec and Intel following similar spats."

deeptrout asks: "The LPRng distribution hasn't been updated since mid-2004, the LPRng project website hasn't been updated since late 2004, and the LPRng mailing list has been dead since the April of 2005. What's going on? Is the project unofficially dead? Has anyone heard any news from Patric Powell, the author of LPRng? It'd be a shame if that is true. I really like LPRng's simple and yet robust reimplementation of the LPD model that allows to keep the configuration for an entire site with hundreds of hosts and dozens of printers in a fairly simple text file. What are we supposed to do now? Switch to CUPS? Something else?"

BSDForums writes "OpenSSH 4.2 has been released. OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support. Changes since OpenSSH 4.1 include security bug fixes relating to GatewayPorts, and GSSAPI, which eliminates the risk of credentials being inadvertently exposed to an untrusted user/host. A new compression method, proactive changes for signed vs. unsigned integer bugs, and many additional bugfixes and improvements highlight this release."

nosig writes "PCMagazine is running a story around the latest AV-TEST response time and proactive detection test for the latest MS05-039 vulnerability related attacks. The test results were announced by the author to the focus-virus discussion list. What's really impresive, besides the huge difference between response times among antivirus companies, is that two products succeeded to proactively detect all 6 attacks without any signature update. "

Nimrangul writes "Hours ago Theo de Raadt put out a call for an Alpha CS20, because as of last night OpenBSD no longer has one. The CS20 that died was a build machine and without it further support for the Alpha platform would be nearly impossible. If you have a C320 or other 1U Alpha machine that you would be willing to donate to the project, please respond to the discussion on the misc mailing list."

An anonymous reader writes "The Linux Kernel is now getting automatically tested within 15 minutes of a new version being released, across a variety of hardware and the results are being published for all to see. Martin Bligh announced this yesterday, running on top of IBM's internal test automation system. Maybe this will enable the kernel developers to keep up with the 2.6 kernel's rapid pace of change. Looks like it caught one new problem with last night's build already ..."

pgilman writes "It's official: OpenBSD 3.7 has been released. There are oodles of new features, including tons of new and improved wireless drivers (covered here previously), new ports for the Sharp Zaurus and SGI, improvements to OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, CARP, PF, a new OSPF daemon, new functionality for the already-excellent ports & packages system, and lots more. As always, please support the project if you can by buying CDs and t-shirts, or grab the goodness from your local mirror."

Eh-Wire writes "Theo has announced the release of the lyrics to the OpenBSD 3.7 song "The Wizard of OS". Theo writes in the announcement, "Please be sure read the commentary I have written next to the lyrics of the song. The artwork and lyrics for each of our releases relate to something big we have been dealing with over the last 6 months of the release -- our fight to get programming documentation and redistributable firmwares.""

diegocgteleline.es writes "Larry McVoy, the owner of BitKeeper (also one of the guys behind LMbench) has posted a message to linux-kernel where he announces a open source client of BitKeeper, which would only allow synching against BK trees. It looks like it's licensed under the NWL (No Whining License) that will force you to 'not whine about this product or any other products from BitMover, Inc.'"

Sam writes "The OpenBSD cvs server has a failing RAID array. Users of the projects on that array: OpenBSD, OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, and the upcoming OpenCVS are all invited to contribute towards the $12,500 cost of a suitably high-spec replacement. OpenBSD Journal article, and original request (thread)."

Sam writes "The OpenBSD cvs server has a failing RAID array. Users of the projects on that array: OpenBSD, OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, and the upcoming OpenCVS are all invited to contribute towards the $12,500 cost of a suitably high-spec replacement. OpenBSD Journal article, and original request (thread)."

tagish writes "Roy Fielding writes on the Apache dev mailing list: 10 years ago today, the Apache Group decloaked with the creation of the new-httpd archive and initial accounts on hyperreal.org. I had the lucky timing of having the first message archived on the list, though we had actually been talking about what to do for at least a week before that (sadly, without any archives)." At the same time, Mike Porter simply writes "Yahoo celebrates its tenth anniversary on March 2nd." News about some other anniversaries available via an MSNBC article.

A reader writes:"According to this week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, Gentoo is planning a port to Sun's partially-announced OpenSolaris. Something interesting to look out for, or just more hype from a developer often criticized even by Gentoo people for not looking before he leaps?"

troop23 writes "A web worm that identifies potential victims by searching Google is spreading among online bulletin boards using a vulnerable version of the program phpBB, security professionals said on Tuesday. Almost 40,000 sites may have already been infected. In an odd twist if you use Microsoft's Search engine to scan for the phrase 'NeverEverNoSanity'-- part of the defacement text that the Santy worm uses to replace files on infected Web sites--returns nearly 39,000 hits." Reader pmf sent in a few more information links: F-Secure weblog and Bugtraq posting. Update: 12/22 03:34 GMT by T : ZephyrXero links to this news.com article that says Google is now squashing requests generated by the worm.

grey writes "The Age has a story up about how the OpenBSD community has been contacting wireless chipset vendors to license their firmware binaries under terms that would allow for free redistribution. This is important, because even with existing GPL and BSD licensed drivers for these chipsets, the drivers don't function without first loading onerously licensed firmware binaries which can only be acquired from the vendor, not shipped by an OSS provider." (Read more, below.)

grey continues "This means that currently, these wireless NIC's don't work out of the box on OSS install or boot media. In just the first 4 days, hundreds of users wrote and called vendors, and already 2 vendors freed their firmware, and several others are in discussions with Theo de Raadt about taking similar steps.

We need your help! TI has still not responded at all. You can call or write to Bill Carney, - Director of Business Development of TI's WNBU to add to the approximately 400 well written messages the OpenBSD community has already sent to TI. We hope that you'll help, and if you do please keep messages polite and to the point. Please remember, we are not asking for the vendors to open source their firmware under the GPL or BSD licenses (though we wouldn't complain if they did). Instead, ask if they would simply email Theo to open discussions on licensing their firmware binaries under terms that allow for free redistribution. If changed, these firmware binaries would then be able to be included with OSS software and function with existing BSD and GPL licensed device drivers from the start.

You can find other contacts for target vendors here, here, here, and here, and it can't hurt to sign this petition. These changes aide all OSS efforts, not just OpenBSD. As you can see from the OpenBSD community's results already, contacting these vendors really does make a difference. We're sure that with the numbers of OSS minded readers in the Slashdot community you can really help with the heavy lifting where fewer numbers of BSD users have already begun to succeed, and all Open Source Software users will benefit."

grey writes "The Age has a story up about how the OpenBSD community has been contacting wireless chipset vendors to license their firmware binaries under terms that would allow for free redistribution. This is important, because even with existing GPL and BSD licensed drivers for these chipsets, the drivers don't function without first loading onerously licensed firmware binaries which can only be acquired from the vendor, not shipped by an OSS provider." (Read more, below.)

grey continues "This means that currently, these wireless NIC's don't work out of the box on OSS install or boot media. In just the first 4 days, hundreds of users wrote and called vendors, and already 2 vendors freed their firmware, and several others are in discussions with Theo de Raadt about taking similar steps.

We need your help! TI has still not responded at all. You can call or write to Bill Carney, - Director of Business Development of TI's WNBU to add to the approximately 400 well written messages the OpenBSD community has already sent to TI. We hope that you'll help, and if you do please keep messages polite and to the point. Please remember, we are not asking for the vendors to open source their firmware under the GPL or BSD licenses (though we wouldn't complain if they did). Instead, ask if they would simply email Theo to open discussions on licensing their firmware binaries under terms that allow for free redistribution. If changed, these firmware binaries would then be able to be included with OSS software and function with existing BSD and GPL licensed device drivers from the start.

You can find other contacts for target vendors here, here, here, and here, and it can't hurt to sign this petition. These changes aide all OSS efforts, not just OpenBSD. As you can see from the OpenBSD community's results already, contacting these vendors really does make a difference. We're sure that with the numbers of OSS minded readers in the Slashdot community you can really help with the heavy lifting where fewer numbers of BSD users have already begun to succeed, and all Open Source Software users will benefit."

grey writes "The Age has a story up about how the OpenBSD community has been contacting wireless chipset vendors to license their firmware binaries under terms that would allow for free redistribution. This is important, because even with existing GPL and BSD licensed drivers for these chipsets, the drivers don't function without first loading onerously licensed firmware binaries which can only be acquired from the vendor, not shipped by an OSS provider." (Read more, below.)

grey continues "This means that currently, these wireless NIC's don't work out of the box on OSS install or boot media. In just the first 4 days, hundreds of users wrote and called vendors, and already 2 vendors freed their firmware, and several others are in discussions with Theo de Raadt about taking similar steps.

We need your help! TI has still not responded at all. You can call or write to Bill Carney, - Director of Business Development of TI's WNBU to add to the approximately 400 well written messages the OpenBSD community has already sent to TI. We hope that you'll help, and if you do please keep messages polite and to the point. Please remember, we are not asking for the vendors to open source their firmware under the GPL or BSD licenses (though we wouldn't complain if they did). Instead, ask if they would simply email Theo to open discussions on licensing their firmware binaries under terms that allow for free redistribution. If changed, these firmware binaries would then be able to be included with OSS software and function with existing BSD and GPL licensed device drivers from the start.

You can find other contacts for target vendors here, here, here, and here, and it can't hurt to sign this petition. These changes aide all OSS efforts, not just OpenBSD. As you can see from the OpenBSD community's results already, contacting these vendors really does make a difference. We're sure that with the numbers of OSS minded readers in the Slashdot community you can really help with the heavy lifting where fewer numbers of BSD users have already begun to succeed, and all Open Source Software users will benefit."

grey writes "The Age has a story up about how the OpenBSD community has been contacting wireless chipset vendors to license their firmware binaries under terms that would allow for free redistribution. This is important, because even with existing GPL and BSD licensed drivers for these chipsets, the drivers don't function without first loading onerously licensed firmware binaries which can only be acquired from the vendor, not shipped by an OSS provider." (Read more, below.)

grey continues "This means that currently, these wireless NIC's don't work out of the box on OSS install or boot media. In just the first 4 days, hundreds of users wrote and called vendors, and already 2 vendors freed their firmware, and several others are in discussions with Theo de Raadt about taking similar steps.

We need your help! TI has still not responded at all. You can call or write to Bill Carney, - Director of Business Development of TI's WNBU to add to the approximately 400 well written messages the OpenBSD community has already sent to TI. We hope that you'll help, and if you do please keep messages polite and to the point. Please remember, we are not asking for the vendors to open source their firmware under the GPL or BSD licenses (though we wouldn't complain if they did). Instead, ask if they would simply email Theo to open discussions on licensing their firmware binaries under terms that allow for free redistribution. If changed, these firmware binaries would then be able to be included with OSS software and function with existing BSD and GPL licensed device drivers from the start.

You can find other contacts for target vendors here, here, here, and here, and it can't hurt to sign this petition. These changes aide all OSS efforts, not just OpenBSD. As you can see from the OpenBSD community's results already, contacting these vendors really does make a difference. We're sure that with the numbers of OSS minded readers in the Slashdot community you can really help with the heavy lifting where fewer numbers of BSD users have already begun to succeed, and all Open Source Software users will benefit."

grey writes "The Age has a story up about how the OpenBSD community has been contacting wireless chipset vendors to license their firmware binaries under terms that would allow for free redistribution. This is important, because even with existing GPL and BSD licensed drivers for these chipsets, the drivers don't function without first loading onerously licensed firmware binaries which can only be acquired from the vendor, not shipped by an OSS provider." (Read more, below.)

grey continues "This means that currently, these wireless NIC's don't work out of the box on OSS install or boot media. In just the first 4 days, hundreds of users wrote and called vendors, and already 2 vendors freed their firmware, and several others are in discussions with Theo de Raadt about taking similar steps.

We need your help! TI has still not responded at all. You can call or write to Bill Carney, - Director of Business Development of TI's WNBU to add to the approximately 400 well written messages the OpenBSD community has already sent to TI. We hope that you'll help, and if you do please keep messages polite and to the point. Please remember, we are not asking for the vendors to open source their firmware under the GPL or BSD licenses (though we wouldn't complain if they did). Instead, ask if they would simply email Theo to open discussions on licensing their firmware binaries under terms that allow for free redistribution. If changed, these firmware binaries would then be able to be included with OSS software and function with existing BSD and GPL licensed device drivers from the start.

You can find other contacts for target vendors here, here, here, and here, and it can't hurt to sign this petition. These changes aide all OSS efforts, not just OpenBSD. As you can see from the OpenBSD community's results already, contacting these vendors really does make a difference. We're sure that with the numbers of OSS minded readers in the Slashdot community you can really help with the heavy lifting where fewer numbers of BSD users have already begun to succeed, and all Open Source Software users will benefit."

grey writes "The Age has a story up about how the OpenBSD community has been contacting wireless chipset vendors to license their firmware binaries under terms that would allow for free redistribution. This is important, because even with existing GPL and BSD licensed drivers for these chipsets, the drivers don't function without first loading onerously licensed firmware binaries which can only be acquired from the vendor, not shipped by an OSS provider." (Read more, below.)

grey continues "This means that currently, these wireless NIC's don't work out of the box on OSS install or boot media. In just the first 4 days, hundreds of users wrote and called vendors, and already 2 vendors freed their firmware, and several others are in discussions with Theo de Raadt about taking similar steps.

We need your help! TI has still not responded at all. You can call or write to Bill Carney, - Director of Business Development of TI's WNBU to add to the approximately 400 well written messages the OpenBSD community has already sent to TI. We hope that you'll help, and if you do please keep messages polite and to the point. Please remember, we are not asking for the vendors to open source their firmware under the GPL or BSD licenses (though we wouldn't complain if they did). Instead, ask if they would simply email Theo to open discussions on licensing their firmware binaries under terms that allow for free redistribution. If changed, these firmware binaries would then be able to be included with OSS software and function with existing BSD and GPL licensed device drivers from the start.

You can find other contacts for target vendors here, here, here, and here, and it can't hurt to sign this petition. These changes aide all OSS efforts, not just OpenBSD. As you can see from the OpenBSD community's results already, contacting these vendors really does make a difference. We're sure that with the numbers of OSS minded readers in the Slashdot community you can really help with the heavy lifting where fewer numbers of BSD users have already begun to succeed, and all Open Source Software users will benefit."

grey writes "The Age has a story up about how the OpenBSD community has been contacting wireless chipset vendors to license their firmware binaries under terms that would allow for free redistribution. This is important, because even with existing GPL and BSD licensed drivers for these chipsets, the drivers don't function without first loading onerously licensed firmware binaries which can only be acquired from the vendor, not shipped by an OSS provider." (Read more, below.)

grey continues "This means that currently, these wireless NIC's don't work out of the box on OSS install or boot media. In just the first 4 days, hundreds of users wrote and called vendors, and already 2 vendors freed their firmware, and several others are in discussions with Theo de Raadt about taking similar steps.

We need your help! TI has still not responded at all. You can call or write to Bill Carney, - Director of Business Development of TI's WNBU to add to the approximately 400 well written messages the OpenBSD community has already sent to TI. We hope that you'll help, and if you do please keep messages polite and to the point. Please remember, we are not asking for the vendors to open source their firmware under the GPL or BSD licenses (though we wouldn't complain if they did). Instead, ask if they would simply email Theo to open discussions on licensing their firmware binaries under terms that allow for free redistribution. If changed, these firmware binaries would then be able to be included with OSS software and function with existing BSD and GPL licensed device drivers from the start.

You can find other contacts for target vendors here, here, here, and here, and it can't hurt to sign this petition. These changes aide all OSS efforts, not just OpenBSD. As you can see from the OpenBSD community's results already, contacting these vendors really does make a difference. We're sure that with the numbers of OSS minded readers in the Slashdot community you can really help with the heavy lifting where fewer numbers of BSD users have already begun to succeed, and all Open Source Software users will benefit."

grey writes "The Age has a story up about how the OpenBSD community has been contacting wireless chipset vendors to license their firmware binaries under terms that would allow for free redistribution. This is important, because even with existing GPL and BSD licensed drivers for these chipsets, the drivers don't function without first loading onerously licensed firmware binaries which can only be acquired from the vendor, not shipped by an OSS provider." (Read more, below.)

grey continues "This means that currently, these wireless NIC's don't work out of the box on OSS install or boot media. In just the first 4 days, hundreds of users wrote and called vendors, and already 2 vendors freed their firmware, and several others are in discussions with Theo de Raadt about taking similar steps.

We need your help! TI has still not responded at all. You can call or write to Bill Carney, - Director of Business Development of TI's WNBU to add to the approximately 400 well written messages the OpenBSD community has already sent to TI. We hope that you'll help, and if you do please keep messages polite and to the point. Please remember, we are not asking for the vendors to open source their firmware under the GPL or BSD licenses (though we wouldn't complain if they did). Instead, ask if they would simply email Theo to open discussions on licensing their firmware binaries under terms that allow for free redistribution. If changed, these firmware binaries would then be able to be included with OSS software and function with existing BSD and GPL licensed device drivers from the start.

You can find other contacts for target vendors here, here, here, and here, and it can't hurt to sign this petition. These changes aide all OSS efforts, not just OpenBSD. As you can see from the OpenBSD community's results already, contacting these vendors really does make a difference. We're sure that with the numbers of OSS minded readers in the Slashdot community you can really help with the heavy lifting where fewer numbers of BSD users have already begun to succeed, and all Open Source Software users will benefit."

Dr.Milius writes "Henning Brauer of the OpenBSD project recently made an interesting post to the openbsd-tech mailing list about how a mountain bike ride helped him relate two baffling bugs in their new BGP and NTP daemons. It turns out they were both off-by-one errors that were easy to fix but notoriously difficult to spot. Always great when the experts show us how it's done."

joeldg writes "Since the release of PHP5 a lot of interest has reverberated down through the whole PHP community. In particular, there's a call for a PHP-GTK 2.0 which will utilize GTK2 and will have an entire rewrite of it from the ground up to make use of new features. Additionally there is an open call to help add to the documentation and to help with the website, post to and join the php-gtk-general mailing list to follow along with the activity. The forthcoming PHP-GTK version 2.0 will bind GTK+ 2 to PHP 5. Until then, PHP-GTK 1.0.0 works only with PHP 4."

Triumph The Insult C writes "Aside from some stealth developers, the annual OpenBSD Hackathon, held in Calgary, is underway, according to Theo. They've been doing some recent work on SMP, and have some impressive AMD SMP gear there that they've got to hack around with. A few years ago, it was PF. Who knows what they'll come up with this time that knocks our socks off."

Triumph The Insult C writes "Aside from some stealth developers, the annual OpenBSD Hackathon, held in Calgary, is underway, according to Theo. They've been doing some recent work on SMP, and have some impressive AMD SMP gear there that they've got to hack around with. A few years ago, it was PF. Who knows what they'll come up with this time that knocks our socks off."

Triumph The Insult C writes "Aside from some stealth developers, the annual OpenBSD Hackathon, held in Calgary, is underway, according to Theo. They've been doing some recent work on SMP, and have some impressive AMD SMP gear there that they've got to hack around with. A few years ago, it was PF. Who knows what they'll come up with this time that knocks our socks off."

A number of people dropped e-mails this morning saying that OpenBSD has now got SMP, according to a post from Niklas Hallqvist.

jon787 writes "An email to LKML about the Linuxant's HSF Modem drivers lying to the kernel about their license has prompted some interesting replies. Lots of talk about how to effectively blacklist these kind of things; a patch is here. One of the more interesting is this one. Linus as always has his $0.02."

jon787 writes "An email to LKML about the Linuxant's HSF Modem drivers lying to the kernel about their license has prompted some interesting replies. Lots of talk about how to effectively blacklist these kind of things; a patch is here. One of the more interesting is this one. Linus as always has his $0.02."

jon787 writes "An email to LKML about the Linuxant's HSF Modem drivers lying to the kernel about their license has prompted some interesting replies. Lots of talk about how to effectively blacklist these kind of things; a patch is here. One of the more interesting is this one. Linus as always has his $0.02."

jon787 writes "An email to LKML about the Linuxant's HSF Modem drivers lying to the kernel about their license has prompted some interesting replies. Lots of talk about how to effectively blacklist these kind of things; a patch is here. One of the more interesting is this one. Linus as always has his $0.02."

Lord of the OpenBSD writes "At long last, SMP development on OpenBSD looks to be gearing up. One person is now doing full-time funded development on SMP. Project leader Theo de Raadt is now asking for funding for a second developer. Theo has announced that SMP support for i386 is planned for the OpenBSD 3.6 or 3.7 release, the first of which is due in 8 months."

Bootsy Collins writes "Yesterday, we discussed Mandrake's decision to revert their release-in-development from XFree86 version 4.4 back to version 4.3 because of issues with the new XFree86 license. To update this, the list of OS distributors opting out of XF86 Version 4.4, and future releases, based on licensing concerns continues to grow. While Fedora seems to be "preparing to support multiple X11 implementations", Red Hat has explicitly stated that they have no plans to ship XFree86 v4.4 under its current license. Also add to the growing list list Debian, Gentoo, and OpenBSD."

In a recent email, Theo de Raadt announced support in -current for power management on the Pentium M series of processors. This allows the CPU to be throttled and therefore power saved. Additionally, dhclient was modified so that it is not necessary to find the process of the already-running dhclient and kill it before running dhclient again. This is useful for laptops that spend time roaming between different wireless networks, when dhclient is used fairly often.

jnf writes "And so he said it is released, and then jumped on a plane to Australia. Linus announced the release of 2.6.1 a few minutes ago, fixes include AGPGART, a fork() bugfix, and misc changes to XFS, and those are just the patches applied since v2.6.1-rc3. Full changelog is avialable, kernel at the usual places, i held off posting this until kernel.org was updated." 2.6.0 is now in Debian unstable...

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux Kernel 2.4.24 has been released and is available on kernel.org. It seems there's a bug in the mremap(2) system call, where a local user can get root privileges.The new version has been released only with the most important bugs fixed - the rest of the changes have been postponed (those changes include the XFS filesystem)."

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux Kernel 2.4.24 has been released and is available on kernel.org. It seems there's a bug in the mremap(2) system call, where a local user can get root privileges.The new version has been released only with the most important bugs fixed - the rest of the changes have been postponed (those changes include the XFS filesystem)."

Alphix writes "As noted on KernelTrap Marcelo has merged XFS into 2.4 after a code review by Christoph Hellwig. The mail from Marcelo on LKML is here. Apparently it touched very little VFS code so people not using XFS shouldn't see any ill effects from this (it's even supposed to fix some VFS bugs). XFS is described by SGI as '...a journalling filesystem developed by SGI and used in SGI's IRIX operating system. It is now also available under GPL for linux. It is extremely scalable, using btrees extensively to support large and/or sparse files, and extremely large directories. The journalling capability means no more waiting for fsck's or worrying about meta-data corruption.' Let the stability vs. new-features flamewar begin."

ocipio writes "FreeBSD 5.2 is scheduled to be released by Christmas. Recently marked 5.2-BETA, the ports tree is in a freeze and developers are asking for testing. A TODO list is available for those interested."

BSD Forums writes "The Apache Axis team is proud to announce the release of Apache Axis C++ v1.0 (Alpha). This implementation of a C++ SOAP engine provides a stable platform for developing Web services using C/C++ as well as a client side library for developing C/C++ client applications. New features include SOAP engine with both client and server support; partial support for both SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2; WSDD based deployment with dynamic deployment tools and more. Both binary and source are available at Apache mirror sites."

tedu writes "We just couldn't wait another 2 days, so now you can enjoy OpenBSD 3.4 a little early and protect yourself from ghosts and goblins. More details at the OpenBSD website and official announcement. Remember to please use a mirror."

keesh writes "Linux kernel 2.6.0-test9 is now out. Changes include SATA support and XFS and CIFS fixes. Because of the change freeze, this is a fairly minor update. In the announcement, Linus suggests that -test10 will be the final release before 2.6.0-final. Don't forget to use a mirror."

An anonymous reader writes "After .COM and .NET started using a wildcard, the internet community busily started creating patches to various pieces of software to circumvent this. It was said that this was a grave problem to the internet. Several official BIND patches were announced over the next few days. However, it turns out they weren't necessarily too well thought through. Usage of the patch unexpectedly broke at least 7 Top Level Domains, ISC announced 3 weeks later, after users started having problems. The .NAME registry has sent a formal letter to ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Comittee to warn against using the BIND patch, which they will look into in their next meeting. The intention may have been good, but... Stability? Anyone?"