Microsoft acts on swastika font flap, Dec 12, 2003

Webmaster's note: I couldn't resist. It's Friday

Microsoft Corp. said Friday that its latest version of Office software inadvertently contained a font featuring two swastikas, and said it would offer tools to remove and replace the offending characters from the program.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved Congress' final version of the Can Spam Act of 2003 Monday, sending the landmark anti-spam legislation to the White House for President Bush's promised signature.

The bill establishes the first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail and charges the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with enforcing the Act. The FTC is required to report back to Congress within two years on the effectiveness of the Act and the need, if any, for modifications.

Even as SCO Group's primary Web site tumbled to the cyber-canvas for a second day on Thursday, critics scorned the Utah software company's claims the crash was the work of hackers.

SCO, which has enraged the so-called "open source" community with its claims to the freely distributed Linux operating system, on Wednesday claimed a massive, "cyber-terrorist" inspired Denial of Service (DoS) attack had knocked its http://www.sco.com site off-line.

DoS attacks vary in style and scope, but generally involve overwhelming the target with requests for data. SCO officials claim at least three other such attacks against their corporate site since March, when the Lindon software company sued IBM for alleged misappropriation of SCO-owned Unix code in the latest versions of Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 may not be replacing Advanced Server 2.1 installations in record numbers, but it has reached a landmark certification status that no other Linux distribution has.

The Free Standards Group has certified RHEL 3.0 across all platforms that the organization has judged to be Linux Standard Base (LSB) runtime environments, including all x86-compatible architectures, like Itanium and IBM's iSeries, S/390 and zSeries platforms. RHEL 3.0 is the first to be LSB certified on the iSeries, S/390, pSeries and zSeries platforms.

According to a survey of 200 small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the UK, conducted in September this year by Vanson Bourne on behalf of IBM, the use of Linux is growing in the UK SMB market. Indeed the survey indicates that 26 percent of small businesses already deploy Linux. Of those not yet using Linux, 15 percent said they are likely to use it in the future while a further 26 percent were undecided, and the remaining 59 percent had no current intention to adopt it.

Bob Young: I'd been going out of my way not to say anything, because McBride was really going after Red Hat. If this latest Open letter had actually been about Red Hat... I would not have said anything because I do not want to confuse (Red Hat CEO) Matthew Szulik's messaging.

But this letter was actually an attack on alternative forms of copyright, and that's what worried me. If McBride and all the fellow travelers -- the Recording Industry Association of America, and the various publishing industry associations -- if they are successful convincing our legislators that anything but the official copyright legislation that has been passed through the U.S. Congress is somehow un-American and should be legislated against, that would do serious damage to the authors who are trying to bring their works to market through Lulu. As far as I'm concerned, McBride's latest open letter was an attack on the authors who I'm trying to empower.

A recent SG Cowen survey of more than 500 North American IT users found that more than 80% of respondents were currently using Linux and that more than half planned to increase their use of the open source operating system within the next two years.

The survey, which also found a growing interest in other open source software in areas such as application servers, e-mail and database systems, concluded that Linux will change the landscape in corporate data centers as it steals workload share away from both Unix and Windows systems.

Security experts said that previous attacks in May and August should have been adequate warning for the company to have taken steps to protect its connection to the Internet.

"There are definitely things out there that they can buy, or services that solve this problem," said David Moore, assistant director and researcher at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) and an expert on denial-of-service attacks. "It is just a question of how important your Web site is to you and how much you are willing to spend."

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