Bill McGonigle, over at Resigned to the Bittersweet Truth, blogs, “Automatic updates are the only rational approach for most businesses in today’s world of 24/7 Internet connectivity, malware and 0-day vulnerabilities…” read the entire post here.
Tag Archives | PHP
Shipping no WINE before it’s time, twelve years to beta
OSNews notes After 12 Years of Work, WINE is Going Beta. “After roughly 12 years of work, the Wine Project is about to take its widely used Windows translation layer to a place it has not been in all that time: beta. Wine Project leader Alexandre Julliard, who has worked on the software nearly since its beginning in 1993 and maintained it since 1994, said in an interview yesterday that the beta release is “a matter of days away.” He has since updated that forecast and said it would be released on Tuesday, October 25th.”
A remarkable platform, WINE Is Not an Emulator, but rather a thin layer that maps Win32 calls to matching Linux calls, running some applications even faster than on their native OS. Note that Visual FoxPro is a popular item in the Application Database, named to the Top 10 Silver List.
FireFox Logs One Hundred Million Downloads
Last OSNews post for the morning, I promise! They report Firefox Sees 100 Millionth Download. “Just shy of Firefox’s first birthday party, the Mozilla Foundation celebrated the 100 millionth download of its Web browser Wednesday. “This is a great milestone. Our massive, worldwide community of grassroots marketers and users – not to mention the developers – have helped to put out a product that’s really kicking butt,” said Asa Dotzler, the Mozilla liaison to the SpreadFirefox community.”
Ubuntu 5.10 Server Released
OSNews notes Ubuntu 5.10 Server Released. “The Ubuntu team is proud to announce Ubuntu 5.10 Server, the first release of Ubuntu designed especially for server environments. Like the standard desktop Ubuntu, it occupies a single CD. However, it is distinguished by the following features: Includes server-oriented kernels with out-of-the-box automatic support for multiprocessor systems; Includes a wide variety of popular server applications such as apache, mysql, postgresql, php, zope, openldap, bind, samba, and more.” Visit the OSNews site for links to download the CD image for PowerPC, i386 and AMD64.
Ubuntu has taken the world by storm, recently highlighted as the Desktop OS of choice in Linux Journal poll. I’ve been impressed with the Debian-based distribution. It will be interesting to see what innovations they bring to their server version.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 released!
OSNews reports OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released to Servers. “OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been silently released to servers. It can be found here. OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.”
UPDATED: BitTorrent links here
If you evaluated OpenOffice.org 1.1.x and felt it wasn’t ready just yet, give this new version a try. They improvements are remarkable. This is an office suite suitable for 95% of home and office workers. (I have used OpenOffice exclusively for over a year.)
If you offer custom applications to your clients that integrate or automate MS Office or WordPerfect, take a look at what would be involved in bringing in OpenOffice.org as another alternative. Your clients can obtain OO.o for free, and your application can offer many powerful new features.
Here it comes again: a new Bagle trojan horse attack (Windows only)
Alex Feldstein blogs New Bagle worm is making rounds?. SANS Internet Storm Center reports that a new Bagle worm variant is making rounds. Make sure that your antivirus is up-to-date and enabled.
Preliminary information is:
- The file arrives as a zipped attachment with a filename including
the word “price” (price.zip, price2.zip newprice.zip, 09_price.zip,
etc…). - Creates two files: C:\WINDOWS\system32\winshost.exe and C:\WINDOWS\system32\wiwshost.exe
- Launches winshost.exe from the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run key
- This has been classified (by at least one AV vendor) as: TROJ/BAGLEDL-U
Be aware.
My Inbox (running on a Mac) is already filling up with these. One more time, let’s remember the rules: NEVER open an attachment from an untrusted source. There are no trusted sources. NEVER EVER open an unexpected attachment without verifying with the sender that they did intend to send you that attachment. If you have some confidence you know what you’re doing, save it to disk, scan it and test it. If you aren’t confident of your abilities to detect a problem, contact your IT support person. Don’t have any of those? Don’t open the attachment.
Lies, damned lies, statistics
OSNews posts Firefox vs. IE security: Is Two Greater Than Five?. “A recent blog post on ZDNet contends that Firefox is not as secure as promised by counting exploits. Joseph Huang contends that severity and the number of unpatched vulnerabilites matters, not just the number of exploits discovered.”
Lies, damned lies and statistics, indeed! Here’s Joseph’s portrayal:
| IE | FireFox | |
| Extremely Critical | 10 | Zero |
| Highly Critical | 20 | 3 |
| Moderately Critical | 14 | 4 |
| Less / Not Critical | 25 | 15 |
Farewall, MacWorld Boston, we hardly knew ye
OSNews notes IDG Pulls Plug on Macworld Boston. “Two years after the East Coast version of the Macworld Expo made a controversial move to Boston, IDG World Expo is pulling the plug on the event. IDG announced plans in October 2002 to move the show from New York to Boston, with Apple Computer immediately announcing that it would not join IDG in the move. With Apple gone, attendance dropped substantially, prompting a move this year to the smaller Hynes Convention Center.”
As I posted back in July, charging $15 to tour the Expo floor and let vendors try out their pitch on you is not going to boost attendance, either. Apple’s decision to not support IDG cut of its oxygen, but this doesn’t help, either. Less attendees means vendors won’t be inclined to pay the exorbitant costs of exhibiting. Less exhibitors means attendees pay more, driving them away. Death Spiral.
Note that CMP’s Software Development conference in Boston is doing something similar: “Unlimited access to two days (Sept 27-28, 2005) of the SD Best Practices Expo. Plus attend all Keynotes, Tech Sessions, the Expo floor party and selected special events (as noted online and in program guide)… Register online by Sept 22, 2005, 4:00pm for your complimentary Expo Pass. A fee of $50 will be charged after this date.” Fifty bucks! That will drive casual visitors away! Get those registrations in soon!
Beware the Ghost…
of Windows Future!
Linux on desktops? Why not?
Over at OSNews, Thom Holwerda posts Getting serious about the Linux Desktop. “In his latest column, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that Microsoft Vista is going to be so expensive that it’s going to make users think hard about switching to Linux instead. [S.J.V-N says:] “Desktop Linux is never going to have a better chance than it will in the next eighteen months,” he says. [Thom says:] My take: He forgets two important factors: Vista can run with all the flashy graphics turned off, and seven editions of Vista? How many Linux distributions are there to choose from?”
Choice is Good, not bad, Thom. Many distributions serve many different audiences. We have choice in our appliances, in our automobiles, in our TV shows.
Vaughn-Nichols cites some interesting numbers about W2K being more popular than XP, despite not being officially “supported.” I have a lot of clients who have clerical staff who would be well-served with Linux as the OS, Thunderbird for mail, FireFox for browsing and OpenOffice.org for office documents. The Microsoft Vista launch could start the “Year of the Linux Desktop.”