Linux in the news

Rogue Nodes Turn Tor Anonymizer Into Eavesdropper's Paradise (Wired)

As should probably be obvious to anyone who thinks about it, Tor (aka The Onion Router) exit nodes can see unencrypted traffic sent through that network. A Swedish security researcher signed up five servers as exit nodes and analyzed the the traffic that passed through them. Wired has coverage of the kinds of information he was able to see. "Victims of Egerstad's research project included embassies belonging to Australia, Japan, Iran, India and Russia. Egerstad also found accounts belonging to the foreign ministry of Iran, the United Kingdom's visa office in Nepal and the Defence Research and Development Organization in India's Ministry of Defence."

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Red Hat lands big customers (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch covers Red Hat's latest business deals. "Red Hat is continuing to land big, fat contracts for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux server. This week saw major deals with the French Ministry for Education and the Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry. In the first deal, the French Ministry for Education migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to RHEL. This decision was in line with the Ministry's strategy to invest in open-source solutions to free itself from proprietary software and vendor lock-in."

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Stallman on free software, Torvalds and Microsoft (LinuxWorld)

LinuxWorld interviews Richard Stallman, covering mostly familiar ground. "I wrote the GNU GPL to defend freedom for all users of all versions of a program. I developed version 3 to do that job better and protect against new threats. [Linus] Torvalds says he rejects this goal; that's probably why he doesn't appreciate GPL version 3. I respect his right to express his views, even though I think they are foolish. However, if you don't want to lose your freedom, you had better not follow him."

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Charming Pythonistas (O'ReillyNet)

This article from O'Reilly's Women in Technology series looks at Python as a female friendly programming language. "Studies have shown that women tend to have low self-efficacy, to underrate their ability with computers, and even to view CS as more difficult than surgery! To combat this, we need to incorporate programming earlier and more extensively in middle school and high school curricula, using a language such as Python. Most programming languages require a great amount of abstract or technical detail and knowledge to do even the simplest tasks. Python strips away the cruft and allows you to program the way you think. A task you could assign a second grader, such as "print 'hello world'," is just as simple as it sounds when you use Python."

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Configuring your webcam to work under Linux (Linux.com)

Bruce Byfield works with web cameras on Linux.com. "If you want the old-time GNU/Linux experience, try configuring a Web camera. Unlike most peripherals, webcams are generally not configured during installation. Moreover, where printers have the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) and its interfaces, with webcams you are generally thrown back on whatever resources you can find on the Internet and your own knowledge of kernel modules and drivers. These obstacles means that configuring webcams can be a challenge -- but with determination and thoroughness, and maybe a little luck, you can get your webcam running in less than an afternoon. The best scenario for configuring a webcam is when you buy an external one."

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Linux-based SLUG spawns highly hackable NAS (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices covers a successor to the Linux-based NSLU2 (aka "SLUG"). "As delivered out of the box, the NAS200 appears to be a very simple consumer device aimed at Windows PC users, or at least users with SMB-based networks. However, a nicely organized source code tree and a system-on-chip processor executing applications built for the 486 architecture could ultimately make the NAS200 even more popular with hackers than the NSLU2, for which multiple alternative firmware builds have cropped up."

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Breathe easily: protect your Linux box with Snort (iTWire)

iTWire has an overview of Snort, the free intrusion detection system (IDS). "Snort's third operating mode – network intrusion detection – is when the magic happens. Here, Snort actually pays attention to the network traffic passing its electronic eyes and matches what it sees according to a database of updatable signatures as well as any custom user-defined rules. In this mode, Snort does for networks what anti-virus tools do for filesystems."

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Getting Started with the Trolltech Greenphone SDK (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal takes a look at the Trolltech Greenphone SDK. "Trolltech recently released many smartphone developers' dream combination-the Linux-based Greenphone and its open-source Qtopia Phone SDK. The Trolltech Greenphone is a full-featured tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900MHz) mobile phone with a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera. Like many other modern smartphones, it features a QVGA touchscreen, Bluetooth, client USB, mini-SD Flash and stereo audio connectors."

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Working for Standards (O'ReillyNet)

Lauren Wood talks about standards in this O'ReillyNet Women in Technology article. "Standards have been an important part of my career for some years now. I've served on--and chaired--technical committees in a number of industry consortia (W3C, OASIS, IETF, and Liberty Alliance). Standards are important in technology: using them brings benefits to go along with the costs, even though, as the old cliché says, "The good thing about standards is there are so many from which to choose.""

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