IBM just announced [PDF] that they will allow free use of 500 of their patents in Open Source programming with no strings attached.

This is fantastic news, patents were set to be the next battleground that MS and co may drag Linux and OSS (Open Source Software) into, in order to potentially create more uncertainty about OSS . This move of donating free patent usage for OSS is likely to spread to other companies as they will not wish to be overshadowed by IBM’s support of Linux and OSS in general. IBM is actually in support of the EU software patent initiative, which makes sense because they have more IT patents then pretty much anybody. We can only hope that once they are making most of their money from OSS support contracts, they will see the light and join the fight to stop the big boys using patents to fight off the little boys. In the mean time, their large investment in OSS, and their massive patent portfolio might make people looking for a quick bit of cash think twice about picking OSS as a target. (SCO appears to be learning this lesson the hard way.)

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The recent Can-Spam laws in the US that require that spammers not use fake from addresses has backfired to some extent in that the spammers are now sending bulk mailings out several hours before registering the domain they were sent from. The result is that thousands of messages get stuck in mail queues waiting for DNS resolution that never comes, and all those mail servers send out DNS queries over and over trying to find out where to bounce the messages to. The result is excessive load on DNS servers all over, sometimes with DNS failure as the result.

This may ultimately backfire on the spammers in the long run as if the can spam’s no spoofing rule doesn’t work, they may end up with “opt in only” rules, where they can only spam people that indicate they want to receive the spam. In the meantime, ISP’s and hosting companies will have to set-up redundant DNS servers and up their bandwidth to cope with the deluge.

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In what must be a big surprise to everyone (not), another big flaw in IE has been found that effects even XP SP2 systems that can have you infected just by looking at a malicious web site. Secunia have upgraded its advisory to “extremely critical”, which is their strongest warning.
Read more about this nasty flaw at Techworld.

Also recently discovered are a couple of security flaws for older versions of Firefox, Mozilla and Thunderbird, so if your not running the most recent releases, you should update. The current versions of all apps are apparently unaffected by the flaws.

This article on TheRegister details the recent release of the MS anti-spyware software that Microsoft just bought from Giant and released as their own. As the Register guys point out, and as I have previously done here, it is somewhat ironic that MS might be planning to profit from a solution to a problem they mostly created in the first place.

A good read.

I saw a neat tip the other day in an article by David Leffler. If you click on start/run on a Windows machine, and type a web address you have been to recently it ties into your history and will offer a drop down list of pages on that site. Pretty handy for those times when the browser isn’t up and running. You can also do it for sites you have not been to, but in that case you need to use the http:// string when you enter the address. I found this faster than starting the browser, and using bookmarks or history to get going. Hope this is helpful to you.

MySQL, one of the worlds most popular open source databases, is about to release the first beta of MySQL 5. This new version has many new features that have traditionally been the staple of enterprise class databases from the likes of Oracle and IBM.

When the beta of MySQL 5 is released, you’ll be able to get it here, however at present only the alpha release is available.

Beginning in January of 2005, Firefox has been added to WC3 Web Browser Statistics. We have been seeing the growing trend for quite some time now and this is a big step forward for the Firefox movement. Mainstream has been achieved and it already surpasses all Netscape and Mozilla browsers.

Don’t be left out in the cold unsecure world of Internet Explo(der), get your copy of Firefox Browser today and see why all the growth! It is free.