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Baystar exec says MSFT behind high-burn-rate funding of SCO

By on October 10, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

OSNews is pointing to the story that Microsoft's SCO Involvement Revealed. “A declaration by SCO's backer, BayStar has revealed that the software Giant Microsoft had more links to the anti-Linux bad-boy. The declaration made by from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb has turned up as part of IBM's evidence to the court. Goldfarb says that Baystar had been chucking USD 50 million at SCO despite concerns that it had a high cash burn rate. He also claims that former Microsoft senior VP for corporate development and strategy Richard Emerson discussed “a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop', or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment”.

I don't think it's really a surprise that MSFT and SUN are behind the funding of SCO to take a poke at IBM and slow the adoption of Linux through FUD. If you'd like to learn more about this incredibly complex case, GrokLaw is the place to visit. But be warned: it's easy to be dragged into all the fascinating nooks and crannies of the case.

The real question for me is whether MSFT and SUN succeeded in their ventures. SUN has done a turn-around and is re-inventing themselves as the green company with better price/power/performance for the internet. MSFT has… almost shipped Vista. Linux, meanwhile, has moved, up, out and around, scaling to greater multi-CPU architectures, developing a better virtualization story, making huge progress in hardware compatibility, and fielding several worthy desktop competitors. LAMP is not a risky choice for IT; it's a question of which commercially-supported distributions and stacks to choose and ensuring the eager technicians in house get the training they need. If the SCO case cooled enthusiasm and take-up any, it gave FOSS advocates time to get their act together and pay a little closer attention to governance and provenance and licensing terms, cleaning up their houses and getting their story straight. Meanwhile, Microsoft… almost shipped Vista.

If SCO/Baystar/Microsoft/SUN thought that IBM would roll over and settle out of court, they badly miscalculated.

Is your mail server part of the problem?

By on October 9, 2006 in Security, Technology

SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green is discussing Spam Backscatter, (Mon, Oct 9th). “Over the weekend I dealt with the rather massive after effects of a spam campaign spoofing a domain” …(more)

I'll second that! As the article goes on to indicate, many innocent mail administrators are a part of the problem by not changing naive settings of their servers. We need to encourage all the mail server software authors to change their default behaviors to fail to deliver mail silently: bounces from non-existant mail addresses are clogging the internet's pipes with replies to spoofed senders. “No such postbox” and “mailbox filled” are courteous, but since your server likely doesn't really know the sender, it's not just a waste of effort, but a an imposition on others to read your counter-spam. Let's all be a little quieter and learn more from listening than responding.

MS6-053 an Internet Explorer Cross-Site Scripting exploit?

By on October 5, 2006 in Microsoft, Security

Swa Frantzen is manning the SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green desk today, and struggles to work out the exploit Microsoft documents without admitting in MS06-053 revisited ?, (Thu, Oct 5th). “When we first read MS06-053 we ended up discussing and not fully understanding what Microsoft was…” (more)… The article explores what appears to be an IE cross-site scripting exploit but with the character set UTF-7 (yes, seven! – who knew!) and some advice to webmasters to help avoid spreading the problem by echoing a bad URL back to the user.

Fonality acquires TrixBox

By on October 4, 2006 in Technology

Slashdot post: Fonality Acquires Trixbox. An anonymous reader writes “MySQL's Brian Aker has a good commentary on the big news in acquisitions today that Fonality has acquired Trixbox, the Linux Telephony distribution.” From the article: “So why is this big news? Trixbox is the distribution for telephony on Linux today. They have put together a vertical Linux distribution dedicated to telephony. It combines Asterisk with a web based interface backed by MySQL, integrated into the SugarCRM solution. As Redhat today is the LAMP of the IT Enterprise and Web Framework, (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP), Trixbox is the LAMP stack of the Telephony market, Linux , Asterisk, MySQL, Perl/PHP.”

Good news. I saw TrixBox (nee Asterisk @ Home) demonstrated at the MonadLUG group by Tim Lind, who's gone on to do a couple of very successful Asterisk installs, and it's on my “I'd really like to try that out if only I had more time” list.

Making the Switch

By on October 3, 2006 in Technology

I had hoped to exclaim “Microsoft-Free in 2003!” but I’ve been a little busy.

Interoperable is not just the slogan of the blog, but a philosophy that all tools work better than any single one; a group of minds is greater than their sum. So, this is no abandonment of anything, rather an expansion of possibilities.

I’ve had several dual-boot machines for years, and have learned to work on them pretty interchangeably.

At the end of September 2006, I booted into the Ubuntu 6.06 distribution I had on the laptop and three days later I’m still working there. There are things I need other OSes for, but the transition is getting easier each time.

Ubuntu print to PDF

By on October 3, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource

Working on a new install of Ubuntu 6.06 and needed the functionality of printing to PDF out of a variety of applications. OpenOffice.org has it built-in, but other apps don't. There's lots of support in Linux for PostScript as the preferred output format, but the magic of invoking pstopdf is magick to me. Enter cups-pdf, a printer driver that generates PDF files. Following the instructions here (especially the hint in comment 15), I was up and running and generating PDFs in ten minutes. Way cool!

DLSLUG, October 5th, 7 PM: Protecting a Windows Server with a $50 Linux Box from Staples

By on October 3, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Security

Bill McGonigle announces Thursday's Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group: “Protecting a Windows Server with a $50 Linux Box from Staples” presented by Lloyd Kvam:

“Lloyd will talk about OpenWRT, the open source linux distribution that targets small routers such as the Linksys WRT45GL. He recently used one to make a bridging firewall, where a Windows computer needed protection, but there was no access to the router.”

“Lloyd will talk about hardware organization, installing packages, the layout of the default configuration, and how to customize the routing and firewall operations… Lloyd works at software development, preferably in Python.”

Should be a fun meeting. Hope to see you there!

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