Bounty offered for Vista, IE flaws

VeriSign's security arm iDefense announced this week that the company would pay independent flaw finders $8,000 for each remotely exploitable flaw found in Microsoft's Windows Vista or Internet Explorer 7.

"Both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows dominate their respective markets, and it is not surprising that the decision to update to the current release of Internet Explorer 7.0 and/or Windows Vista is fraught with uncertainty," the company said in the statement announcing the program. "Primary in the minds of IT security professionals is the question of vulnerabilities that may be present in these two groundbreaking products."

Anyone ?

Linux is Everywhere!

"FSMLabs (http://www.fsmlabs.com) announced today that its flagship RTLinux real-time software is now being used in Cablecam flying cameras used to film NFL and other sporting events. Cablecam is a provider of footage for NFL and NCAA football games as well as for the motion picture industry."

“Flying expensive cameras 12-50 feet in the air above football stars on live TV is a mission critical application” explained Cablecam founder Jim Rudnusky. “RTLinux was chosen for its reliability: it keeps personnel safe and ensures that the camera keeps flying when the game is on the air. The deterministic timing available from RTLinux is crucial to achieving smooth motor motion at high torque. The Cablecam application could not be achieved by anything less than a hard real-time OS.”

Full story can be read here.

So, starts the FSMLab newsletter I'm used to receive monthly. Reading the news in that letter was no surprise to me. I have worked with Linux for 14 (fourteen) years and, I have taken part in many interesting projects with Linux, from big to very small devices.Watching Linux reaching mission critical devices, such as NASA rover on Mars (http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1157697,00.html), gives me satisfaction and a feeling of accomplishment by taking part of the open source community.

Ubuntu: .bash_profile does not get run at startup in Graphical Mode Login

I installed the Sun JDK on my computer and, set up the JAVA_HOME environment in .bash_profile file. Then, I sourced the file:
source .bash_profile
Fine, the JAVA_HOME variable was there I could do my work. However, once I rebooted my computer I could not get my env variable again when I opned gnome terminal. However, if I turn to console mode (Alt+Crtl+F2, for instance) I could get the variable.
This happens because Ubuntu does not "source" the file ~/.bash_profile during Graphical login. The script /etc/gdm/Xsession is in charge of initializing variables for use by all sessions. However, this script does not "source" the ~/.bash_profile file as an interactive Bash login would do. The solution therefore is to edit the /etc/gdm/Xsession file and add source .bash_profile. Here is a snipet:

sudo vi /etc/gdm/Xsession

# First read /etc/profile and .profile
test -f /etc/profile && . /etc/profile
test -f "$HOME/.bash_profile" && . "$HOME/.bash_profile"
# Second read /etc/xprofile and .xprofile for X specific setup
test -f /etc/xprofile && . /etc/xprofile
test -f "$HOME/.xprofile" && . "$HOME/.xprofile"

The page http://www.linuks.mine.nu/debian-faq-wiki/DotFiles gives an interesting explanation of the way your Debian/Ubuntu systems behave with respect to the reading of "dot files" at login time, setting up aliases, setting up environment variables, and so on is all highly dependent on how you actually log in. It's worth reading.

glibc manpages in Ubuntu 6.06

After a long search finally I have found glibc documentation in Ubuntu 6.06 and, as expected it was not in glibc-doc package rather in manpages-dev. I have been searching for it already for a couple of weeks and, the "enlightment" came from https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel

Hopefully, glibc documentation will come back into glibc-doc package where it belongs.

Thus, don't forget for now:

sudo aptitude install manpages-dev

Itzhak