Slashdot Mirror

harryjohnston alerts us to a story picked up by a few bloggers in the security space. A Russian security research company, Gleg, has discovered a zero-day in the latest version of RealPlayer 11. But they won't reveal details to Real, or to CERT, despite repeated requests. Details are available only to their clients who pay a lot of money for early access to such knowledge. To describe Gleg's business model Daniweb rather cautiously puts forward the word "blackmail." The story was first exposed in Ryan Nariane's Securitywach blog.

Martin Soto writes "This article by two user interaction researchers, discusses many of the usability problems in current open source projects. The nice part is that, unlike many /. readers, it doesn't stop there, but goes into suggesting novel (at least for the OSS community) approaches to cope with those problems in an open source compatible way. Worth a read to those that, like me, still think that OSS should find its way to every desktop computer."

David McWha writes "The cover story of the May issue of IEEE Spectrum is on open source systems, and gives a good balanced view of the competition between Windows NT and various Unices (including Linux). There is a nice unbiased review of the pros and cons of each. The whole story from the history through to the commercial model of open source is there. The article is available online, but you have to be an IEEE member to get in, so join! "