Microsoft Seeks to Quash Lindows in Canada, Feb 20, 2004

After suing in the U.S. and several European countries, Microsoft is taking its trademark infringement case against Linux vendor Lindows.com to Canada.

The software giant has filed suit against Lindows.com in a Canadian court, says Stacy Drake, a Microsoft spokesperson. As in the cases in the other countries, Microsoft is asking the court to bar the company from using the Lindows name, arguing it is too close to "Windows" and might confuse customers.

The rumors just won't die: Someone, somewhere is working on porting Microsoft Office to Linux. This week's version making the rounds online: IBM Corp. is extending its Linux commitment with a Linux version of the productivity suite.

On Thursday, however, Microsoft Corp. poured cold water on the reports. "Microsoft has no plans to work with IBM on porting Microsoft Office to Linux," a Microsoft spokeswoman told eWEEK.com. As for porting Office to Linux in general, she said, "It's not happening."

SCO Group Inc's deadline for Linux users to respond to accusations they have infringed the company's copyright has come and gone, while Red Hat Inc has supplemented its legal challenge to SCO with letters indicating that SCO is targeting Red Hat customer Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

This is the most common request from OEMs looking for a cost-effective solution to offer their customers, and to satisfy that demand, CentrinoTM laptops pre-loaded with LindowsOS Laptop Edition will hit the market in 30-45 days.

"We're happy to give OEMs the support they have been asking for in order to offer their consumers better prices," said Michael Robertson, chief executive officer of Lindows.com, Inc. "Centrino laptops are currently one of the most popular computer systems available, and pre-loading LindowsOS Laptop Edition will narrow the digital divide, making them more affordable than ever before."

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the code that looks after memory management in the Linux kernel.

The vulnerability is the second in recent months that affects the same internal kernel function code. A third vulnerability that also gives a local user root access was discovered and patched in January.

Paul Staretz of iSEC Security Research, who discovered the vulnerability, said proper exploitation would lead to an escalation of local privileges, giving an attacker the privileges of root or super-user

Linux Networx is building a new, high-performance 2,132-CPU Linux cluster supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Defense as part of an IT modernization program being undertaken by the agency.

In an announcement today, Salt Lake City-based Linux Networx said the Evolocity II cluster will be used by the Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) as part of the Defense Department's High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

Linux advocates often pride the operating system to be more secure than Windows but this claim could have attracted the unwanted attention of the hacking community.

An analysis of hacker attacks on online servers in January by U.K.-based security consultancy mi2g found that Linux servers were most frequently hit, accounting for 13,654 successful attacks, or 80 percent of the survey total. Windows came in a distant second with 2,005 attacks.

A detailed analysis of government servers also found Linux to be more susceptible, accounting for 57 percent of all security breaches.

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