MikeCapone writes "Slashdot had an article about the GNOME bounties a few days ago, but now, thanks to the Shuttleworth Foundation (created by Mark Shuttleworth, the guy who went into the ISS as a Soyuz cosmonaut a couple of years ago), the Mozilla project also has some monetary incentives. The budget for 2004 is USD$100,000."

Anonymous BillyGoat writes "According to the recently released GNOME summary, a number of number of country specific lists have come up for GNOME advocacy/development/marketing. Countries represented include Australia, France, India and Malaysia.
These lists are a part of the newly created GNOME Marketing project."

Sam Hiser writes "This article intends to clear up some misconceptions about open source software development practices. It can help developers, IT and business managers transition from a closed development environment to an open one characterized by shorter time-to-market and lower costs. The author, Tom Adelstein -- an experienced CPA, code developer, project manager and consultant -- makes clear the notion that Open Source Software bears a mark of professionalism."

nileshch writes "The ongoing community-driven Linux Bangalore 2003 is upto a record of sorts. There are, hold your breath, 96 scheduled talks. That's about 96 hours of open-source talk in three days! The first day with 30 talks is already over with star speakers like Nat Friedman, Miguel De Icaza and Sirtaj Singh Kang enthralling the audience with their refreshing perspectives on Linux and Open Source. Rasmus Lerdorf and Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! Inc, amongst others, are also scheduled to talk at the event."

An anonymous reader writes "A recent article at Ask Tog raised the common argument about how much security is good. Tog says: 'I've been watching security people for years as they've slowly increased the security of everything they can get their hands on until any idiot can wander in.' Is this the case? Are we increasing security too much, so that the users circumvent it? Should we be allowing simple passwords?"

Reader writes "OSNews has the first in-depth review of Sun's Java Desktop System based on the final code. The article discusses the good (stability, Star Office 7, good Java integration) and the bad (no KDE, buggy RealTek driver, shaky Samba) and it includes a number of screenshots. It seems that Sun has put all its attention on Gnome and while this is good for cosistency across their desktop (some of their Java apps use the native GTK+ themeing), it also limits its users from an out-of-the-box KDE and its thousands of apps choice."

John Valenti writes "Philip Greenspun's Blog had an interesting entry for December 1: 'It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India...'"

mbanck writes "The cause of the recent Debian Project server compromise has been published by the Debian security team: 'Forensics revealed a burneye encrypted exploit. Robert van der Meulen managed to decrypt the binary which revealed a kernel exploit. Study of the exploit by the RedHat and SuSE kernel and security teams quickly revealed that the exploit used an integer overflow in the brk system call. Using this bug it is possible for a userland program to trick the kernel into giving access to the full kernel address space'. This issue has been fixed in 2.4.23. Thus, the Linux kernel compromise was not Debian specific."

Andy Lester writes "CPAN is a treasure trove of submitted code from across the Perl community, and is one of the reasons for Perl's great popularity. There are hundreds of active contributors, and over 2500 modules in the module list. With so many modules, it can be daunting for a Perl beginner to know what's worth noting. Plus, since so many modules are built on other modules, it's important for module authors to know which modules are best-of-breed. One source for direction is Mark Fowler's Perl Advent Calendar. Each day in the month of December, Mark reveals a new module in his calendar, including an overview and mini-tutorial in its use."

Dan writes "Based on Sam Leffer's suggestion, Bruce Simpson has been working on refactoring ifconfig(8). ifconfig is a FreeBSD unix utility used to assign an address to a network interface and/or configure network interface parameters. Bruce says that ifconfig has grown increasingly large and become unwieldy. Part of the effort has been to get a handle on all of the options that are currently supported so he has written a YACC grammar for it. He has uploaded some grammer, created a design document and also generated a PDF file you can view which shows you syntax diagrams for each part of the parse tree."

The Computing Research Association recently invited 50 of the top scientists, educators, business people, and futurists in cyber security to an executive retreat in Virginia and locked them away for three days until they identified a set of "Grand Challenges" in information security research -- ideas that should "shape the research agenda in the field over the next few decades." The conference participants identified four: eliminate epidemic-style attacks (viruses, worms, email spam) within 10 years; develop tools and principles that allow construction of large-scale systems for important societal applications -- such as medical records systems -- that are highly trustworthy despite being attractive targets; develop quantitative information-systems risk management to be at least as good as quantitative financial risk management within the next decade; and give end-users security controls they can understand and privacy they can control for the dynamic, pervasive computing environments of the future. They haven't written the final report yet (due in early 2004), but they've already told Congress about it. Sounds like they've got a lot of work to do.

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices reports that Wind River, the world's #1 embedded software company, moved two steps closer to Linux today, with a pair of announcements that it has joined two key organizations. Wind River has joined the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and says it plans to contribute to the OSDL's Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) working group. Wind River also announced that it has joined the Eclipse Consortium, an industry group devoted to an open cross-vendor platform for development tools integration, and that it is committed to the Eclipse platform 'to enable global enterprises to standardize embedded development on a single, open standards-based integrated development environment (IDE).' This follows an October Linux tools announcement which it called 'just the first step.'" We had also covered the initial announcement.

An anonymous reader submits "Trolltech has quietly discontinued their non-commercial version of Qt for Windows. This eliminates Qt as a choice for those wanting to develop free multi-platform software." Actually, according to the linked page, "if you write Free software (Open Source software covered by the GPL) you are welcome to download and use the Free Edition of Qt," and Trolltech points out that one can buy the current edition of Qt -- seems fair enough.

giantsfan89 writes "The OpenZaurus group announced that version 3.3.5 has been released, featuring Opie version 1.03 and kernel 2.4.18-embedix. From the new newsletter: 'As one of the few people participating on all the three above mentioned projects I recently volunteered to write regular newsletters from the inside - to keep you people informed (also to stop you from saying our projects are dead or on hibernation ;-)). We're seeking contributors, that's true - but we're aliving and kicking!' The newsletter talked about kernel improvement including 'speedups, cleanups and better power management'. Of course, OpenZaurus runs on other PDAs including the HP iPAQ, the SIEMENS SIMpad, and the M&N Ramses."

Flu writes "Finally, a free (as in speech and beer) and official GUI designer has been released for Eclipse! Just a few days before the Eclipse 3.0 M5 build was released, a complete plugin for creating GUI's was released as well, as one of the Eclipse tools projects. Check it all out on the official site for the Visual Editor Project. At last, the (probably) best free IDE for Java (and C) contains a GUI editor! Personally, I intend to put up an IBM logo to worship next to my desk, as a thank you for the Eclipse! :-)"

thedj_sd writes "As the true slashdot reader you just love ascii art of course. You have toyed around with aalib or maybe you use it all the time to watch your pr0n :) Well VLC media player's senior developer sam was bored some time ago and created libcaca. The Colour AsCii Art library of which he himself says: 'I am perfectly aware that libcaca is the waste of time it looks to be. No need to tell me about that.' But you just can't help looking at that beautiful picture of Stitch, and Doom in coloured ascii is da bomb. It works on dos/windows, Linux and Mac OS X and there is a VLC plugin and SDL backend available."

smarquard writes "Open source has arrived in Africa in a big way. Idlelo: First African Conference on the Digital Commons, in almost-the-southern-tip-of-Africa Cape Town from 11-15 Jan 04, has attracted a strong lineup of African OSS advocates, as well as international OSS and IPR figures like Richard Stallman (FSF), Loic Dachary (FSF France), Rishab Ghosh (Infonomics), Wendy Seltzer (EFF) and Dimo Calovski (UNCTAD). Could this be the turning point for a continent that least needs to be locked into paying inflated license fees to US corporations ? The conference is co-hosted by African OSS lobby group FOSSFA and the University of the Western Cape."

hungryfrog writes "After a few years in a typical office environment, I began working from home full-time as an independent contractor (web programmer) a couple months ago. My former employer is throwing me enough jobs that finding work is not an issue. Many people would consider this a dream work situation, but I'm starting to have my doubts. I like the relative freedom it gives me, but I'm finding myself rather starved for human interaction. Being in the same apartment to sleep, eat, AND work every day definitely leads to cabin fever. Have other people experienced this? What have you done to deal with the situation? Does dividing working/living spaces help (my apartment's small, anyway...)? I know of a few folks who have actually rented office space just to get out of the house. Is the cost worth it?"

An anonymous reader writes "Linus Torvalds has released his final 2.6.0-test kernel, calling it the 'Beaver In Detox'. Following this release, Linus says that 2.6 development will be led by Andrew Morton. The kernel's name refers in jest to the previous release, which Linus had named "Stoned Beaver". It contains a fix for the aic7xxx driver, proper error handling in do_fork(), some firewire fixes, and correction of a few skbuff leakage points. Download it from a kernel.org mirror."

Martin Berger writes "Turing Award (1991) winner Robin Milner is one of the most influential computer scientists. He may not be as well-known as he deserves to be, but his research contributions are ubiquitous: he developed the first mathematically sound yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction. This research has been continued successfully and led to many useful proof assistants such as HOL, Coq or Isabelle that are being used heavily for verification purposes today." Read on for more information about Milner, and a link to Berger's excellent interview with him.