Proprietary vendors are using "anti-features", features that no user would ever want, to protect intellectual property, Benjamin “Mako” Hill, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the linux.conf.au open source conference last month. But IP protection is only one of several reasons vendors introduce such features into their products.

The problem itself appear to be in the kernel from version 6.06, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10. 7.xx versions are not affected . This is a serious problem because it could allow full system access among others.

I received quite a few comments this past week following the publishing of California IT Policy Letter 10-01 which formally establishes "the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in California state government as an acceptable practice." While many of my security colleagues offered words of caution following the announcement (and even a couple of "are you crazy" comments), most were pretty enthusiastic with remarks like, "Finally, enlightenment" and "It's about time government joined the 21st century." As a security guy, I've been on both sides of the OSS fence at different times but I've come to the conclusion that anyone who doesn't think OSS has a place in today's business or government simply hasn't been paying attention.

Monday, February 08, 2010 When Linux Nerds Choose Mates from the Windows Herd. Look...let's face this together. Dating can suck. Now when you are young, it's an adventure. One has relatively little "baggage", the emotional scars are few and the dating world is your oyster...so to speak. And you haven't even begun to think about their therapeutic value yet. Ah, youth... But then you find yourself at midlife, choosing from a large pool of potential crisis'. So many to choose from. Maybe there is a divorce or two under your belt, some strong political or religious beliefs that are deeply ingrained, and oh yeah, there's that messy incident with the hacking conviction... Those tend to narrow down the potential list of candidates for life-long bliss. Throw your use/obsession of Linux into the mix and what do you get? More than likely a room at your mom's house and a NASA-level computer bank in her basement.

Sun used to boast that it was one of the largest contributors to open source. That's being demonstrated now that Oracle has acquired the company. Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and subsequent layoffs, are having ripple effects on the open source community. The cuts are also hitting the GNOME accessibility (a11y) team and leading the project to think about the future of a11y efforts in GNOME.

InfoWorld - Why choose between Windows 7 and Snow Leopard when you can have both? A Mac with virtualization software is a great platform for running Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, or other Intel-based operating systems, all at the same time. There's also Mac OS X's native Boot Camp, but it only supports Windows and doesn't give you access to Mac OS X without rebooting.

PC World - Microsoft will no longer offer Linux or Unix versions of its enterprise search products after a wave of releases set to ship in the first half of this year, the company announced in an official blog post Thursday.

InfoWorld - Moonlight 3.0, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet plug-in software on Linux and Unix platforms, is now being offered in an alpha release, according to Web pages from the Mono project, which has jurisdiction over Moonlight.