Stories about: OpenBSD

An OpenBSD developer has discovered and fixed a bug in the software that has been traced back to an AT&T version of Unix from 1975.

Rakesh Kumar, an analyst at Gartner. "There is an argument that users [of open source] gain access to a larger skill set than with other platforms," he says, referring to the notion that many eyes debug and look at open-source code.

With more than 30 years of history behind it, AUUG, the organization for Unix, Linux and open source professionals, faces its toughest challenge to stay in tact as members at the 2007 AGM decide its future this week.

The phreaks are already phishing the Web 2.0 waters of 2008, and the catch will be new Vista users, P2P users and social networkers.

After several years of debate and more than 18 months of sometimes passionate public comments and revisions, the latest GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3) software license will officially be released Friday by the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Core Security Technologies says it's discovered an IPv6-related buffer-overflow vulnerability in several versions of the OpenBSD operating system that would allow an attacker to knock a server offline or take control at the kernel level. The OpenBSD project, the group which makes the free operating system available, has issued a software patch to plug the hole.

Two companies that distribute the Asterisk VOIP platform released products last week aimed at getting small and midsize businesses up and running quickly with the open source IP PBX.

The open-source movement, which has long made inroads into corporations via Linux and other enterprise-level software, now has a potentially bigger target in its cross hairs: the PBXs and network routers from companies such as Cisco Systems that form the basis of networking infrastructure.

An underground community of Australia's "elite" will meet in Sydney for the fourth annual hacker conference, Ruxcon, this weekend. The two day conference kicks off on Saturday at the University of Technology, Sydney.

There's a reason nearly every security appliance vendor uses open source tools, and it has little to do with licensing. The vast majority of these devices -- ranging from spam and spyware filters to network scanners to intrusion detection and prevention systems -- are not only built on an open source platform such as Linux or FreeBSD, but they also actively use other open source products to accomplish their given tasks.

Ever since Dan Geer was fired in 2003 from @stake.com for being an author of a paper on negatives of a computing monoculture, I've seen article after article recommending that administrators do away with their computer monocultures as a way of minimizing or defeating malware and hackers. A computer monoculture is a paradigm that says if all your computers are of one type or OS platform, you are more at risk for malicious attack due to all the commonalities the attacker can use.