Slashdot Mirror

Dan Kaminsky writes "We may not know what the Conficker authors have in store for us on April 1st, but I doubt many network administrators want to find out. Maybe they don't have to: I've been working with the Honeynet Project'sTillmann Werner and Felix Leder, who have been digging into Conficker's profile on the network. What we've found is pretty cool: Conficker actually changes what Windows looks like on the network, and this change can be detected remotely, anonymously, and very, very quickly. You can literally ask a server if it's infected with Conficker, and it will give you an honest answer. Tillmann and Felix have their own proof of concept scanner, and with the help of Securosis' Rich Mogull and the multivendor Conficker Working Group, enterprise-class scanners should already be out from Tenable (Nessus), McAfee/Foundstone, nmap, ncircle, and Qualys. We figured this out on Friday, and got code put together for Monday. It's been one heck of a weekend."

An anonymous reader writes "Ankylosaurs were the most heavily armored dinosaurs. Researchers thought their protective plates were a lot like modern crocodiles. But a new study by a University of Bonn grad student Torsten Scheyer found that fibers in the plates were woven for strength and lightness much like Kevlar or fiberglass. Good thing, as ankylosaurs had to contend with T. rex."

An anonymous reader writes "The Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum) produces the world's largest flower and is currently in bud at the University Botanic Gardens Bonn (Germany). As of Thursday, 12 a.m. it is set to break the old world record established in 1932. The old record was 267 cm while the new bud is now 273 cm and still growing."

python writes " A new article, Open Source's First Six Months, is in Linux Gazette, written by Eric Raymond. "
Read it, boys and girls, ESR (as we know) is one smart cookie, and his anthro-history writings of OpenSource are going to be very interesting documents to examine later.

Bob Bell was the first to write in and let us all know KDE has finally hit the big 1.0! Something that a lot of you have been waiting for a long time, I'm sure. Markus Fleck (aka python) wrote in to tell us that Red Hat has hired Preston Brown, the author of KOrganizer, and a recent volunteer to the Harmony Project. Harmony is the project to provide a free and superior Qt replacement. An interesting turn of events, indeed...

A lot of people have sent me various links related to the shortcomings on the NPL. Netscape has been working really hard to try to make the license good for everyone, and is listening to everyones feedback for the final revision. Markus Fleck wrote in to give us this link (or try this one where you can read RMSs criticisms on the NPL. There is also a discussion going on at gnu.misc.discuss if you're interested.

Remember Operating Systems that Suck? Well now you can check out the Language Sucks Rules-O-Meter. Same comical premise, different comical topic. It ain't science but it sure is fun. Thanks to Markus Fleck (aka python) for pointing this our way.

Markus Fleck (aka python) dropped us 2 bits to say that Open-source.org has opened its doors. Note that they apparently registered both 'open-source' and 'opensource'.

Markus Fleck (aka python) wrote in to say "John Ousterhout, author of the Tcl language and the Tk toolkit, also of Spring OS fame, has left SunScript to form his own company, called Scriptics, to promote the use and further development of Tcl. - I suppose that Sun didn't find paying for Tcl development worthwhile any more, because there has hardly been any revenue from it yet (even the source for the Tcl Plugin for web browsers was made freely available when a poll showed that too few people would be willing to pay for being able to execute "Tclets" in their browsers)."