Sophos have released their “top ten” most widespread virus list for the first six months of this year. The top ten looks like this:

1. Sasser
2. NetSky-P
3. NetSky-B
4. NetSky-D
5. MyDoom-A
6. Zafi-B
7. NetSky-Z
8. NetSky-C
9. Sober-C
10. Bagle-A

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Music from the net is becoming big business, and you can always tell when something has reached that point when the lawsuits between the big boys begin. We’ve just reached that point.

Right now the biggest player on the legal online music industry is Apple, they have the vast majority of online sales, and back that up with their own iPod hardware player.
The problem is that Apple are using DRM (Digital Rights Management) as a means to lock anybody with an iPod into using the iTunes online music service. So if you are a competing music supplier, and you want to cater to the massive number of iPod owners out there, your out of luck. Likewise, if you can’t find what you’re looking for at iTunes, you’re not able to look anywhere else because the iPod won’t play any other companies DRM music files.

That is just like what many people are worried that Microsoft was/is trying to do with Palladium, make PC hardware that really only works to its full potential when its running Windows.
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This is proof that the stability of Linux has reached the point where it is useful in extremely error intolerant situations.

First off, NASA has just asked SGI (Silicon Graphics) to supply them with a 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 Processor Supercomputer running the “Space Exploration Simulator” on Linux. The new system will be used to chart space, help spacecraft designers and chart human effects on weather patterns.
See The Inquirer and The Register for more.

In other news, several departments of the University of New South Wales (in Australia) have been working together for several years on a 10 kilogram satellite that looks like it will be running a cut down version of an embedded Linux operating system. Linux is perfect for such uses as being open source, they can review the source code, make improvements and modifications and remove anything unneeded for the tasks at hand. TechWorld has the story. I wonder how long it will be before somebody creates a logo of Tux the Linux mascot penguin in a spacesuit (if they haven’t already).

Regards

Franki

I first found this story on Netcaft about 2 weeks ago and couldn’t decide if it was worth a mention here. I’ve just made a decision in that regard, mostly due to the evidence that RSS is becoming the “new email newsletter”.

Basically, an RSS reader is a program that when installed and configured, will fetch RSS documents from the websites it has been set to visit. The RSS itself is usually story titles, links and story summaries. Now RSS is just starting to get very popular, and RSS readers sometimes fetch stories on the hour, by the hour. The result of 10,000 RSS readers all trying to fetch an XML file (which is what RSS really is) from one site at the same time, could be compared to a DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attack, like those attacks that have been in the news over the last few years against companies like Amazon and Yahoo, where the server is answering so many requests that it can’t handle any new ones and the site goes down.

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As much as Microsoft hate to admit it, most of the Internets email runs on Open Source software, in fact, based on this MTA statistics site, Open Source software accounts for over 56.5 percent of mail server software in use on the Internet. (Compared to around 20% for Microsoft )

Now comes the interesting part of the story. The only real worldwide effort to tackle the SPAM problem thus far is MADRID an ITEF standards group. MADRID stands for “MTA Authorization Records in DNS” and it’s basically a way of making sure that email from a specific domain comes only from a server authorised to send mail for that domain. (Most SPAM nowadays comes from desktop PC’s with their own spamming MTA software, bypassing the ISP’s authorised mail server. The other half of the worlds SPAM comes from desktop PC’s infected with Virus and Trojan horse programs.) Anyway, if all of the worlds mail servers were using this technology, it would be extremely difficult for a spammer to use normal desktop PC’s to send SPAM. That, is a noble and worthy aspiration, and it has to happen before email becomes useless as a communication medium.

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A new version of the “Windows only” Trojan horse that last week proclaimed that Bin Laden had committed suicide is now luring hapless victims to run it by promising the suicide photographs of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Usenet newsgroups postings contains a link to a website promising the photographs, and directs them to download a file that is instead the Hackarmy Trojan horse. The purpose of this program is to give control of your Windows PC’s to the crackers who can use it for any purpose they choose, including selling it to spammers to be used as a spam relay, or to attack any company they choose with all the other captured PC’s.

As a general rule, you should treat files you get from an unknown source online the same as you’d trust food given to you by shady sorts in a back alley. In other words not at all, always throw it away. As usual, this Trojan only affects Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP/2003, Linux and Macintosh are totally unaffected.

For information and removal instructions, see Sophos Hackarmy.

If Arnie had offed himself, you’d here about it on the news within minutes or hours, so toss these things where they belong, into the trash.

regards

Franki

Finally, an article about something directly related to web design.

Open Source software is not just for Linux, there is a growing amount of multi-platform and Windows open source software showing up all over the net. (Even Microsoft is getting into the act as a PR campaign.)

Based on a very recent Mozilla platform, Nvu (pronounced N-View) has produced versions for Windows and Linux. The goal for this program is pretty simple, to make an open source program for web developers that has the best features of both Frontpage and Dreamweaver in a small and easy to use package.

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