Breaking news… it appears that Symantec firewalls with DNS caching enabled have been exploited and are being used in a DNS cache poisoning scheme to redirect users to malicious sites where their machines are being exploited with ActiveX-containing toolbars. My suggestions:
Details, sketchy as they are, at: http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?date=2005-03-04
OSNews points to a useful review on NewsForge: Open source XML editors examined. “The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) provides a flexible and efficient way to store, transmit, and express data. The open source community has produced an impressive lineup of XML editing utilities. In this article Ryan Paul takes a look at some of the most useful.”
I’ve used several editors on the Windows platform, like XML and Stylus Studio, and I’m looking forward to trying out a couple of the products mentioned in the article, starting with Quanta.
Dave Winer blogs on Scripting News the sad news that 
Jef Raskin died last night. “Via Kottke. He struggled to see his vision implemented, and in the end it was a compromise. Raskin wanted computers to be radically simpler, not just evolutionarily simpler. The Macintosh, a project which he started at Apple, morphed when Steve Jobs took it over to become the evolutionary computer it is. Not sure who was right, but Raskin didn’t live to see his vision implemented. To me it’s a poignant moment, Raskin is a contemporary. The edge is moving through my generation. No way we’re going to die before we get old.”
RIP, Jef. Thanks for making Apple happen.
Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc. points to The Gannon Scandal, Not Continued.
Salon: See no Gannon, hear no Gannon, speak no Gannon. “It’s stunning to me that there are questions about the independent press being undermined and the mainstream press doesn’t seem that interested in it,” says Joe Lockhart, who served as press secretary during President Clinton’s second term. “People in the mainstream press have shrugged their shoulders and said, ‘It’s a whole lot of nothing.'”
I still find it weird that for two years this guy walked into the White House with Press Corps credentials and asked questions of the President of the United States. Who thought up this crazy idea? Who checked out this guy’s background? What were they thinking?
And… where is the media? Laura and I again heard Emily Rooney and John Carroll roast this guy on WGBH’s Greater Boston. Where’s the network coverage? Where is the outrage?
OSNews reports Firefox 1.0.1 Released. Firefox 1.0.1 is a security update for the 27 million users who have already downloaded the free browser. The Mozilla Foundation encourages all users to download the update.
David Berube, our fearless leader, posts: Monday, March 7th – Webrick and Linux World. CentraLUG is having another great meeting on Monday March 7th, and this time, we’ll be covering Webrick, a powerful system for easily creating custom webservers in Ruby. With Webrick, it’s easy to drop a full webserver into any application. We’ll also have a brief recap of LinuxWorld. Per usual, there will be copius amounts of free caffeine.
It’s at the NHTI. You can get directions on the NHTI site: http://www.nhti.net/frames_Map.html. It’s in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, marked as “I” on that map. The room is 146, and it starts at 7:00.
Slashdot: reports “Broadcast Flag in Trouble.” I hope they are right. Laura and I enjoy our fair use of broadcast shows by timeshifting them to our convenience, and if that privilege is taken away, we will watch less, not more. Vinyl record companies bemoaned that the cassette tape was the end of the recording industry; movie makers said that VHS and Betamax would crush them. It’s evolution, folks. Deal with it.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation suggests “Fight the Broadcast Flag from your Armchair” with the publication of their HD PVR Cookbook (High-Definition Personal Video Recorder) and sponsorships of “Build-Ins” across the country.
Computerworld News reports “New Sober worm moving fast, security company warns. W32.Sober-K-mm, a new variant of the Sober worm, is a mass-mailer that today began attacking computers in Europe and in the United States.”
Meanwhile, OSNews reports that Gartner takes Microsoft to task. “Microsoft should be concentrating on securing Windows instead of trying to challenge security software companies, according to research firm Gartner.”
“Gartner’s MacDonald also rapped Microsoft’s decision to create an updated version of Internet Explorer (7.0) for Windows XP only, hinting that motive for the decision could be to push corporate customers into upgrade their systems from Windows 2000.”
If that’s true, I think it is a risky move. By announcing IE 7.0, supposedly in beta this summer, Microsoft is admitting that their current offerings are insufficient and that patching will not solve the problem. It’s February. Any CIO that wants to be employed this fall ought to be looking at alternatives today: FireFox, Opera, Safari. The option to “upgrade” to Windows XP, a major change management move involving an OS upgrade followed by innumerable patches, is a huge obstacle compared to downloading another browser and installing it.
I’m pleased to announce that I will again be one of the teachers at the LAMP course at the New Hampshire Technical Institute‘s Center for Training and Business Development. We start teaching on Tuesday night, and will be teaching ten evenings Tuesday and Thursday, 6 PM to 9:30 at the Concord campus. There’s till time to sign up and catch the first class — details are available at the CTBD site. We taught this class in the fall semester and it was a great success. At the end of the course, the students have a simple interactive database-backed web site running on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
Friday was spent at the client’s delivering the final beta of the first phase of a five-phase LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL=PHP) project. Client was ecstatic! But, of course, I came home with a list of small adjustments to punch through. Hope to tell more as it unfolds. Briefly, it’s a simple data entry and reporting system: 20 tables, 40 web pages, used by an inhouse staff to manage their workflow. This first piece got rid of the worst of their manual labors. Later phases will produce documents to present in a customer-facing web site, and tighten up the workflow tracking. Phase I was 40 hours of analysis and design with customer interviews, document review and resulted in a design document of workflow, prototyped web forms and an ERD (data model). The model was dead-on, requiring just a couple adjustments. Eighty hours of coding produced the forms and got us through the beta testing and demonstrations. Client goes live with a pilot test next week.