What do you get when you put a stable operating system, an innovative desktop manager and plenty of eye candies together? You get nothing short of a beautiful and functional OS. Elive is a Debian-based Linux distro, customized with Enlightenment e17 desktop manager. It is designed with the aim of providing a stable, fully functional and beautiful operating system that can run with minimal hardware requirement.

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Mobile workers are especially vulnerable because they operate outside corporate security systems, and often return home to unload nasties into the company network. Paul Rubens finds seven excellent Firefox plugins to help protect the mobile worker.

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Webmin is a browser based program that you can use to manage a Linux server, from a remote location. It is an excellent tool for those who are making the transition from a GUI based system to the Linux command line. However, if you are going to use Webmin take a few security precautions first.

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ZoneMinder is a suite of applications intended for use in video camera security applications, including theft prevention and child or family member monitoring. It supports capture, analysis, recording, and monitoring of video data coming from one or more cameras attached to a Linux system. It also features a user-friendly Web interface which allows viewing, archival, review, and deletion of images and movies captured by the cameras. The image analysis system is highly configurable, permitting retention of specific events, while eliminating false positives. ZoneMinder supports both directly connected and network cameras and is built around the definition of a set of individual ‘zones’ of varying sensitivity and functionality for each camera. This allows the elimination of regions which should be ignored or the definition of areas which will alarm if various thresholds are exceeded in conjunction with other zones. All management, control, and other functions are supported through the Web interface.

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In March (3-8, 2009), CeBIT will once again be opening its gates in Hannover, Germany. The world’s largest and most renowned trade fair for the world of IT and telecommunications will be featuring Open Source topics in hall 6. The CeBIT Open Source Forum 2009 will be the venue of daily lectures on the use of Linux and free software – and you can watch them online, live and for free!

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Last week, we began the migration from Outlook in Windows to Thunderbird in Linux. We transferred over the basic data to the open source email client. Now we’ll install a calendar, task manager, and note feature. We’ll also figure out how to export our existing Outlook data and import it into Thunderbird. Lastly, we’ll set up auto signatures. Let’s get started!

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The realtime preemption project is a longstanding effort to provide deterministic response times in a general-purpose kernel. Much code resulting from this work has been merged into the mainline kernel over the last few years, and a number of vendors are shipping commercial products based upon it. But, for the last year or so, progress toward getting the rest of the realtime work into the mainline has slowed.

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First the bad news: There’s still a lot of Downadup (Conficker) infections out there.

Our February 5th post noted 1.9 million unique IP addresses connecting to our sinkhole. We’re now logging something around 2.1 to 2.5 million. The log files are huge and can be very time consuming…

Here’s the good news: Despite the ongoing infections, progress was made against the worm.

Domains monitored by our sinkhole can no longer be registered. The worm’s ability to phone home has been crippled. This is due to a collaborative effort within the industry.

On February 12, 2009, Microsoft announced a $250,000 USD reward for information. Microsoft’s Conficker Worm page has details. Bounties have been successful in the past, e.g. Netsky’s author, Sven Jaschen.

Our January 30th post provided a Downadup domain blocklist for the month of February. While the domains no longer need to be blocked, such a list can still be useful to monitor for infected machines within your own network.

You can download a ZIP file with domains in use until June 30th from the Microsoft Security Response Center.

Our Removal Tool is called f-downadup.

On 27/02/09 At 06:59 PM

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Mandriva Linux Security Advisory 2009-060 – A security vulnerability has been identified and fixed in nfs-utils, which caused TCP Wrappers to ignore netgroups and allows remote attackers to bypass intended access restrictions. The updated packages have been patched to prevent this.

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The team behind the the Tweet-a-Watt/Wattcher just won first prize at the Greener Gadgets design competition. The device is a hacked Kill A Watt that transmits power consumption using an XBee. After checking out DVICE’s preview of the competitors yesterday, we’re happy to see a prototype win instead of just a concept sketch.
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Having recently constructed the BoxeeBox, DeviceGuru blogger Rick Lehrbaum naturally was eager to check out Neuros Technology’s somewhat similar IP-TV set-top box. Though currently at a “gamma” release, the $300 Neuros “Link” — which runs a stripped-down Ubuntu 8.10-based OS — shows great promise.

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In 1999, Mr. McEwen attended a seminar for young presidents at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He listened to the story of Linus Torvalds and how he had assembled a world-class computer system over the Internet by using the “open source” technique. At its heart was Mr. Torvalds’s willingness to reveal his computer code to the world and invite thousands of anonymous programmers to vet and improve it. Open-source problem solving! Expose your goal, your problems and all your data on the Internet. Invite proposals from anyone. Offer clear guidelines and substantial financial incentives to induce quality responses, and act on the best proposals received.

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Slashdot: Why Japan Hates the iPhone

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The Register: BT reprograms biz customers as hotspots "BT claims the OpenZone users are securely separated from local users"

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