about Linux security. This guy writes for something called Focus … yet he cannot focus for a whole article, he rambles. I guess the point is solid: you need a central way to report a security flaw. If we do anything with such a flaw, use our contact form.

The European Union has shown that it is capable of listening to it’s members today when it shelved the current software patent directive after Poland and Denmark made clear their displeasure about it.
So now the directive will start from scratch, and this time it is unlikely they will be able to sneak it though without full discussion and disclosure. I’ll bet there are some big software companies that are not happy campers this morning. The story can be found at Groklaw.

Sun recently got some exposure by claiming to give away 1600 patents for use by Open Source programmers. It took a couple of weeks, but the catch has finailly been revealed. It isn’t all Open Source programmers that get to use the patents. Only programmers that sign up to use Suns new CCDL license are protected. Any GPL licenced programmers are out in the cold. As Dan Ravicher of PubPat.org said:

“My advice is that developers should ask themselves if they really want to work on software distributed by a company that has expressly retained the right to sue them for patent infringement if they don’t give their improvements back to the company.”

This isn’t about helping Open Source, this is about Sun losing Solaris market share to Linux and deciding to try and steal some of the OSS programmers by promising them the world. This is hardly a fair move from a company that sells and uses much Open Source GPL code as part of their enterprise desktop and indeed their server product also includes some GPL code. The response by the OSS community has so far not been good. Read more at Groklaw.

A new exploit is available that takes advantage of flaws in Internet Explorer and Realplayer. Basically the exploit can be used to load local files into the browser using Realplayer .rm files. Read more at TheInquirer.

A lot has been happening in the last few days. For one thing HP has created what they think will replace the transistor and revolutionize the entire chip industry. Microsoft appear to have taken a leaf out of Mozilla’s XUL platform (the basis for Firefox, Thunderbird with their extensions, NVU and Sunbird), and is touting the benefits of developing for the MS Office “platform”. Be wary though, as the anti-virus and anti-spyware companies are just finding out now, and many other companies found out earlier, if you come up with anything innovative, you will eventually find yourself competing with Microsoft themselves. In other Microsoft news, MSN search is out, using their own kit for once, and they are marketing it for all it is worth. They are also suddenly co-operating with governments on the issue of security, meaning that they will now share with governments information about exploits and patches that they have previously kept to themselves. Don’t get all warm as fuzzy about it though, it looks like they are only doing it because governments around the world have been doing some hard looking at Linux and Open Source, and Microsoft is looking increasingly bad in comparison. This is an apparent effort to try and stem that tide. Good luck to them, even with this they still look bad, so I doubt it will alter anything.

There is a new Open Source organization called “The Software Freedom Law Center” who’s task is to help Open Source programmers defend their rights, and they are getting support and money from many sources in the OSS world. Their task will be to stop corporations from using potentially invalid patents and copyright cases from putting OSS developers out of business just because they have deeper pockets then their targets. Read more here.
In other news, it has been reported that every spyware infected machine on the Internet earns the crackers about $3 dollars, and that it is an industry worth over a billion dollars. Since the vast majority of that spyware uses Internet Explorer to get onto peoples machines, the guys doing this must really hate Firefox which blocks pretty much all of it.

It must be admitted that I am a newbie when it comes to some of the new blog terminology out there. After writing the snippet about TheRegisters interview of an unnamed link spammer, I wanted to know more about the “traceback” feature of blogs, what it means, how it works, that sort of thing.

I found my answers and figured I’d share them here so other people can get an answer in Google to the What is a traceback? question. A traceback (also called a “trackback” by some) is used as an alternative to posting a big comment on someone else’s blog. Instead, you post about the subject on your own blog, and then put a traceback URL in pointing to the post on the other blog your post is referring to. The blog with the story you were posting about receives the traceback and can include a link to your blog article in their own system. It is basically a form of content aggregation between web sites.

The talk about traceback spamming is I presume when some nasty type posts tracebacks to your blog that link back to spammers blogs trying to flog all manner of stuff you usually read about in spam. (or try not to read about as is most likely the case.) So there you have it, a traceback/trackback is a method of automatically cross linking articles of similiar subject matter between blogs. There is a pretty good explaination of traceback/trackback at the movable type blog site here.

Microsoft have been playing around with their own search technology for ages now, and had a working beta that I’ve mentioned here a couple of times before. Well, now they have rolled it out in place of their previous Yahoo results. It will be interesting to see how that affects our hits from MSN, as their new system seems to produce results more like Google’s then Yahoo’s. And we fair pretty well with Google. I’d say it will be years before they have a service as clean as Google, but one thing Microsoft has in big heaped piles, is money, they can simply throw money at their search engine until it’s good. (They already have it seems) And Microsoft have one of the best marketing departments in the IT industry. Even the truth can’t stop a good marketing campaign over there. Google is in for a fight, because you can bet MSN search will be built into everything in the next version of Windows due out in 2006/2007. Think I’ll stick with Google, I just trust them more.

Read more at Eweek.