Linux Solutions

Sun Microsystems has given 1,300 of its employees the chop yesterday. This is the first in what will be a slew of forced redundancies that will reduce the company’s manpower by around a fifth.

The company said that it has cut workers from multiple levels within the company including senior management positions.

They did not actually reveal any names of those now seeking alternative employment, but rumours abound that the departed include individuals that work on some of the company’s biggest open source projects; OpenJDK, desktop Java, and the Java 2 Standard Edition (JavaSE) interface.

Other individuals that work in marketing and on social media have also been removed from their positions. They were working to build a community around OpenSolaris – the open source version of Sun’s Unix operating system.

The news will be disappointing to those who will be enjoying daytime television for the next while, but those that survived this wave of cuts will be breathing a sigh of relief for the time being. However, they better start saving everything they can because with more cuts coming they could easily be next. In November Sun made the announcement that 6,000 of its 33,400 strong workforce would be going, and that’s on top of the 1,700 or so cuts announced in May.

Sun said in a statement yesterday that the number of people made redundant “when combined with the other cost cutting measures and organizational changes being implemented, will put the company on track for improved financial performance.”

Sun aren’t the only big fish trying to swim in an increasingly small pond these days - Microsoft have been forced to lay-off 5000 staff from its 95,000 strong workforce in response to the economic crisis that’s swallowing up companies left, right and centre.

Chief Executive Officer at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, said regarding the issue, “We’re certainly in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime set of economic conditions. The perspective I would bring is not one of recession. Rather, the economy is resetting to lower level of business and consumer spending based largely on the reduced leverage in economy.”

Jaunty Jackalope, the third alpha of Ubuntu’s 9.04 distro, has been released. The Alpha includes the Linux 2.3.28-3.4 kernel and comes pre-loaded with support for using the Ext4 file system – however the Ext4 is widely expected to remain as the default file system for Jaunty.

Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth spoke about a number of improved notifications on the desktop in quite some detail last year. The company as added a simple menu into the latest alpha version that sets preferences for notifications.

Ubuntu have said that the final version of Jaunty Jackalope will hit shelves, so-to-speak, on April 22nd.

The distro includes the use of X.org’s latest 1.6 server, which means there is no more support for proprietory nVidia drivers, which means users will have to wait fot an update from the chip maker or choose a suitable open source driver instead.

“In the short term, this will again cause increased instability for some users while the video drivers catch up,” said the Jaunty Jackalope press release.

Ubuntu has also warned those who use Intel i845 or i865 video chipset’s for the next while until they fix a glitch that is known to prevent the nouvea X driver from loading.

The company has also disabled the DontZap option so as to stop users from accidentally initiating the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace combination. Developers are currently working on a GUI Configurable option that they hope will be ready for the April 22nd release.

Mr Shuttleworth said that he wants the best experience for his users: “Experiments are also not something we should do lightly. The Ubuntu desktop is something I take very personally; I feel personally responsible for the productivity and happiness of every Ubuntu user, so when we bring new ideas and code to the desktop I believe we should do everything we can to make sure of success first time round. We should not inflict bad ideas on our users just because we’re curious or arrogant or stubborn or proud. Despite being occasionally curious, arrogant, stubborn and proud…”

In related news, Ubuntu has also released a bug fix for a problem that crept out of the shadows back in October 2007. Many users complained that the Distro forces drives to spin up and down at an unnatural rate due to power management features that were a little too aggressive.

When the problem first arose Ubuntu said it was a firmware/BIOS problem and nothing to do with the OS. The update is now available for versions 9.04, 8.10 and 8.04 (LTS).

Remember the film Tremors? You know that’s the one where these big worms slithered around eating people – well this is like that…expect its your PC that’s getting eaten this time.

Downadup, or Conficker as it’s also known, is a Superworm that has reportedly been attacking a patched vulnerability in Microsoft Windows, with a reported 6.5 million new infections in the past 4 days alone, bringing the total to an estimated 9 million machines infected.

The numbers are but an estimate, and security researchers say the numbers could be inflated by security company F-Secure, as it’s near impossible to ascertain the exact amount of infections.

“This thing has gotten way out of hand,” said Paul Ferguson, a security researcher for anti-virus provider Trend Micro who has spent the past several weeks tracking the worm’s progress. “It seems pretty spectacular to me that there could be that much growth.”

There are a number of factors contributing to the worm’s growth. The Windows vulnerability allows for self replicating attacks in 2000, XP and Server 2003 version of the software, and the virus has been designed to exploit flash and network drives allowing it to spread across a local network at worrying pace even if just one computer is affected.

A large factor that has allowed the worm to grow is because of stubborn data managers and administrators of Windows-based systems who failed to listen to the warnings and download a security update. Microsoft released a patch to combat the worm over three months ago, but nearly one in three machines have not downloaded it, according to security company Qualys.

If the 9 million infected machines sounds exaggerated, it probably is. According to Paul Royal, the chief scientist with Damballa, just 500,000 unique IP addresses have been linked with the Downadup master server - a far cry from the 9 million suggested by F-Secure.

So how did F-Secure come to that staggering figure? They say they infiltrated the Downadup’s control channel and analysed the log of machines that connected. Whilst looking around they discovered a counter that they believe shows the number of infected systems. They created a script to add all those numbers together (what happened to the good old fashioned calculator) and worked put that 8.97 million machines were infected.

The bizarre thing about this worm is its intentions. Researchers have determined that it has not committed fraudulent activity on a large scale. So far it has set up a domain that forces users to install fake anti-virus software at a cost, but once security experts shut down that domain, the worm has, pardon the pun, remained underground.

The worm uses a random domain name generator embedded in the software that causes machines to jump to a different domain every day, but security boffins have been registering predicted domain names ahead of the worm. They say they haven’t noticed any spam, banking detail or password fraud as of yet.

“Given that there are new domain names generated everyday, the botmasters have an infinite number of chances to actually claim control of the botnet and direct it to do whatever they want whenever they want,” said Royal. “Based on what we saw in the past, it seems likely they may try and push rogue anti-virus software on people’s systems in the future, but of course, there’s nothing that precludes them from doing something completely different.”

Although this story has nothing to do with Linux, I thought it was rather interesting all the same…

The Ministry of Defence said yesterday that they have suffered from a virus outbreak in their computer systems, causing a small number of the defence network’s systems to crash, leaving Royal Navy warships administration networks vulnerable.

The computer systems that have been affected are the NavyStar systems, which are based on a server cabinet and cable-networked PC’s on each warship. The systems are used primarily to keep supply records and act as an email server. NavyStar connects to large networks via shore-based connection when vessels are sitting in their docks, and use satellite communication while out on the open sea.

The company supplying the systems is Fujitsu, who supplied the systems in early 2000. NavyStar is to be used as part of the Defence Information Infrastructure that is currently being rolled out across the MoD.

The NavyStar hardware varies from ship to ship, as it depends when the systems were installed and at what point the vessel had its last dockyard maintenance. Each system is built with sturdiness and is battle ready – with the PC’s having hard cases and shock mounting. Each system is made to follow strict emissions guidelines to avoid complications with other systems.

In the last two weeks multiple MoD systems have been infected by viruses, including aircraft carrier the Ark Royal. The biggest damage to the men and women on the ships is the loss of email communication – the main way of keeping in touch with family and friends.

This statement was released by the MoD:

“Since 6 Jan 09 the performance of the MOD IT systems in a number of areas was affected by a virus. Immediate action was taken to isolate the problem to stop the virus from spreading. This meant that some people were without regular IT access (i.e. email, internet). There have been no infections detected on any networks with sensitive information.

“A solution to prevent re-infection has been tested and implemented. The majority of systems are working normally. This is an ongoing process which we are working urgently on so for those people who are still off line normal business will resume as quickly as possible.”

The MoD has says that none of its command or operational systems have been affected, but they do run on similar hardware so you can bet their security experts are working overtime to ensure they don’t have any further problems.

The MoD has also refused to comment on the details of the virus, and how it got into the systems but reassured its staff that “no classified or personal data has been or will be at risk of compromise” due to “pre-existing security measures”.

Newspaper reporters from the Sunday Times claimed that the results of a Harvard University study showed that two web searches – namely those on Google – used as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle. The generally well informed paper opened the story with:

“Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.”

What they failed to mention is that the physicist who did the study, Alex Wissner-Gross, never actually mentioned Google in his study. Online technology website TechNewsWorld spoke to Wissner-Gross:

“For some reason, in their story on the study, the Times had an ax to grind with Google…Our work has nothing to do with Google. Our focus was exclusively on the Web overall, and we found that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO2 per second to visit a Web site.”

Wissner-Gross also rubbished the newspapers claims that the searches caused as much carbon dioxide as a kettle: “I have no idea where they got those statistics,” he said.

Google have set loose the PR machine to ensure they don’t get damaged by the news. Company spokesman, Jamie Yood said that the co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are “really dedicated” to pursuing greener technologies.

Yood Acknowledges that the company is using energy and from a business perspective it, “makes sense to get this energy cost as low as possible”.

“They recognize that if we’re going to use energy, let’s try to figure out how to do this as minimally as possible”, he added.

The company does make an effort. Electric cars and bikes for employees are used on and around the company’s Californian headquarters, and they use recycled materials throughout their buildings. Yood adds that they have the most energy efficient data centres.

Google is none too please about the kettle allegations, claiming that a search uses the same amount of energy as the human body uses in around ten seconds. Google have requested a copy of the study from Wissner-Gross, who plans to send them one.

Yood says that the Times reporters interviewed a data centre manager, but never made use of the information he gave them, preferring a more sensationalist story over fact.

The technology Google’s search functions use allows any user to retrieve almost any information they require – so long as there is a web page on the subject. The energy required will differ depending on the depth of a search. For example if someone were to search for “Angelina Jolie” there will be millions of instantly available pages as its likely to be on multiple servers at the edge of the network, but if someone were to ask for something obscure like “Ben Afflecks career” then the search would use a deeper part of the network, causing higher energy usage.

Wissner-Gross has had the press hounding him since his study results were published by the Sunday Times. The paper correctly quoted Wissner-Gross as saying, “A Google search has a definite environmental impact” and “Google operates huge data centers around the world that consume a great deal of power.”

Defending what he said, Wisner-Gross said believes that people would not disagree with that statement. “Everything online has a definite environmental impact. I think everybody can agree on that, including Google”, he said

TechNewsWorld asked him why he reckons the Times focused on his study, and in particular Google.

“The short answer is, it’s a really easy way to sell papers. Google is a very successful company and it’s a very easy way to get readership by making grandiose claims about them,” he concluded

A number of Sun MySQL workers have been told they cannot enter the border of Australia because the Oz government fears that they want to steal local business.

The employees were due to attend a Linux conference in Hobart, Tasmania but have been denied short stay business visas.

Kaj Arno, vice president of the “database community” at Sun, appeared to be completely un-shocked as he blogged about the news, claiming that borders are one of the biggest hindrances to open source development.

“Open Source is global in nature. You can develop a database in, say, Finland or Sweden, and become known in, say, Ukraine or the United States. This would imply that Open Source knows no borders,” Arno mused. “In practice, borders hamper Open Source work a lot.”

He went on to describe how Russian and Ukranian based MySQLers have struggles to obtain visas for meetings in America and the European Union. And as a Finnish-born bloke he has also suffered the “hassle” of getting into Russia, and was once stopped from entering India – but he never thought Australia would shut the door on him.

He mentions that the country’s decision to barr the workers will “adversely affect” MySQL’s presence at the linux.conf.au at the end of January.

In other barely related, but interesting nonetheless news, Red Hat and Novell – the Linux distributors – have had a bit of a reshuffle in their respective board rooms.

As the try to battle the bite of the worlds economic meltdown Red Hat has brought in Greg Symon as vice president and general manager of its North American sales division – the biggest slice of the company’s cake.

Symon, who spent 22 years at Intel, will report directly to Red Hat’s president of global sales, services and marketing, Alex Pinchev.

Symon takes over the role from Ed Bovajian who worked at the company until June last year. He moved to EnterpriseDB as its president and CEO.

Novell have made a change too, promoting Javier Colado to president of EMEA operations. Novell have replaced Volker Smid, who has gone on to “pursue other interests”.

Colado has been at Novell since 2006 and has been an executive at McAfee and Lucent Technologies. Colado’s responsibilities for managing Novell’s channel partner relationships will be given to Jhon Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer for Novell.

The massive user generated encyclopedia Wikipedia will live on for another year thanks to $6.2 million in donations.

The record amount has surpassed the $6 million expectations of the non-profit organisation, the Wikipedia Foundation, after Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales led the charge with a personal appeal in December.

There were concerns that the foundation would be closing the book, so to speak, on the encyclopedia, as the $6m goals seemed pretty far away even nearing the end of 2008, so Wales made the plea on the website instead of the usual web donation banner to save Wikipedia.

Nine days after launching the appeal, the Foundation had raised over $2 million from 50,000 donations, and by January 2nd over 125,000 individual donors had raised a further $4.5 million to reach the final sum. Wikipedia’s founder labelled the donations as the “most ambitious and successful campaign in the history of the Foundation.”

When the fiscal year ends on June 30th, 2009, analysts predict that Wikipedia will need around $5,974,000 to survive. The cash will be used to ensure the companies technical infrastructure remains able to cope with demand, that the can maintain their 23 members of staff, and that they can keep running the Wikipedia Academies and in-person workshops.

Wales released a clearly heart felt thank you message to those that donated: “Your continued support will also serve as a much-needed financial safety net if economic conditions continue to worsen globally…You have proven that Wikipedia matters to you, and that you support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising. You’ve helped make and keep Wikipedia available for the whole world.

“I deeply appreciate your support.”

The Foundations website informs people of how exactly the money will be spent, and the financial report will automatically be sent to any one who donated to the Foundation.

Something that is very important for users is that the website remains ad-free. The open source nature of the website is appealing and Wikipedia is the fourth most visited website on the internet in terms of number of users, according to figures from ComScore.

It’s good to see that Wikipedia has won this battle, but sadly it has not won the war. With the world in financial ruin, money will be too tight to mention when the cash runs out. I for one hope that the website can remain, as it’s a great source of information, but with Jimmy Wales even have to get down and contact donors directly you have to say the future looks bleak.

Monetising a website that has no advertising will always be a problem. It’s down to ethics, but to be honest how many websites these days have advertisements that you ignore. I’ve seen so many these days that I don’t even notice ads. So maybe Wikipedia could have some advertising to solve there problems.

An interesting story has emerged today regarding one Russian man’s attempt to lay claim to emoticons – a series of punctuation marks used to convey an emotion in a text message.

The Russian, entrepreneur Oleg Teterin claims that he was granted the trademark for the [;-)] emoticon by the Russian federal patent agency, however critics have been keen to point out that emoticons have been used in the public domain for many years now, putting a dampener on Teterin’s claim.

Mr Teterin says he will chase down any firms that are using the emoticon without his permission. He ranted on Russian television channel NTV, frothing at the mouth presumably, “I want to highlight that this is only directed at corporations, companies that are trying to make a profit without the permission of the trademark holder.”

Local newspaper Kommersant wrote that he said that companies could legally use the emoticon after “buying an annual licence from us,” referring to his company Superfone, who currently sell advertising on mobile phones, but he also says that it won’t cost too much, just “tens of thousands of dollars”.

Luckily for you and me, we won’t have to worry about using the symbols in our texts as he’s only targeting large companies. He claims that other similar symbols that resemble the one he has trademarked fall under his ownership meaning that there will be none of this [:-)] none of this [:)] and most certainly none of this [;)]

Most observers have seen through his mad-cap plan, believing that it is just a gimmick or publicity stunt. For example, in one of the best quotes I’ve ever heard, Nikita Sherman, president of Russian social networking site odnoklassniki.ru exclaimed: “You’re not likely to find any retards in Russia who’ll pay Superfone for the use of emoticons”.

Some company directors have laughed Teterin’s claims off, saying that they will not pay for emoticons on principle, like Vvmpelkom director Alexander Malis who suggested jokingly that he should patent brackets.

According to the media in Russia, Mr Teterin is not the first person to try to stake a claim on the symbols. Kommersant said that in 2005 a St Petersburg court upheld an appeal from German outfit Siemens, who were ‘under threat’ from an equally as insane Russian over the [;-)] symbol.

The world, it would seem, has gone mad after all.

In October it was revealed by Windows chief Steven Sinofsky, that the next version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system was due “early next year”. Vague to say the least, and that was all we had heard…until now.

It seems, according to a Microsoft insider that Windows 7 Beta 1 will be publicly available on January 13th, 2009 according to a blog post by Keith Combs – much sooner than expected. Combs’ post relates to a promotional announcement for the MSD Developer Conference series that said that each registrant is to “receive a Windows 7 Beta 1 DVD”.

The first event of the MSDN series is on December 9th, in Houston, but according to kieth this will not be the public release date of the Window’s 7 Beta 1. Here’s an extract from his post:

“My understanding is that the DVD will not be ready for the first few show dates but will be mailed to each attendee…We are targeting to have the DVD’s in the materials from 1/13/2009 on…So I would imagine the folks attending the Houston, Orlando and Atlanta shows this month will receive their DVD’s around mid January as well. That’s an assumption on my part. Could be earlier or later, but they will get them.”

What this means is that the rumour mill is swirling around Microsoft that the Beta version of the software will be unveiled at CES by CEO Steve Ballmer who will be delivering his pre-CES keynote address on January 7th. Everything points to Ballmer bigging up the new Window’s at CES, ad it’s fair to assume that the company will be issuing a press release to stir up even more interest. As for a public release, I think we’ll be waiting till the 13th for the first Beta.

You’ve got to hand it to Microsoft in a way. They manage to build hype like no other computer company around at the moment, and with such a large base of customers, they can be sure of making their millions. I know that the Linux and open source mob will be intrigued to find out how the new operating system runs, and I’m sure there will be hundreds of damning articles flying around the blog-o-sphere the third week in January.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m actually looking forward to the new release. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of but I can’t help but be curious about the changes it could bring from the load of garbage that was Vista. Half of me wants to see Microsoft drop the ball again, and the other half of me says that it’s always good to have a bad guy in a movie, so we need a bad guy in the IT industry, otherwise all the little distro’s that exist happily together will turn in to snarling over protective beasts, close their code, and ruin it for everyone.

Monty’s had a moment it would seem. MySQL creator Michael “Monty” Widenius has gone off on one about the recent version of MySQL. He says that last weeks version 5.1 still has fatal bugs, and that Sun Microsystems shouldn’t have released the database this soon.

MySQL v5.1 was made generally available last Thursday after months of development, but by the weekend Monty couldn’t hold his tongue any longer and had a bit of a rant about the release, claiming it was not ready for mainstream consumption yet.

On his blog titled, “Oops we did it again – MySQL 5.1 released as GA with crashing bugs”, Monty made it clear to users that they should be cautious before they install the latest version of the database on their live systems.

Monty claimed that the new version has around 20 serious flaws that could cause a crash, and said that users should consider v5.1 as a beta, and even hold off until patches to fix the flaws have been developed.

In a scathing assault on the MySQL team managers at Sun, he said that they had failed to learn from previous mistakes when – he claims – the company released a bug-addled version of the 5.0 database too early.

He quotes one of the developers pushing for the early release of the database: “Quality is not regarded to be that important. To quote Mårten Mickos: “MySQL 5.1 will be release as GA in or before December because I say so”. Mårten’s reasons for this is that he needs something he can sell and a release marked “GA” is much easier to sell than a release marked “RC”.”

Monty says that the reason the company wanted the release out is that it was better that v5.0 when it was declared generally available.

“In my opinion, this is not a good reason to declare something GA, especially as 5.0 GA was in terrible shape when it was released. What is worse is that the new features in MySQL 5.1 are of no better quality than new features in MySQL 5.0 was at the time MySQL 5.0 was declared GA,” he ranted

In his long-winded, and ill-advised venting, Monty recommends that new users should use v5.1 because its superior to the v5.0 community version, “which hasn’t been updated for some time”.

Monty made it clear that Sun, which acquired MySQL in February 2008 for $1bn, wasn’t to blame for what he feels is a premature release of the database.

“The decisions to do a GA release was solely been made by the MySQL management in Sun,” he said. “The only thing Sun can be blamed for is to not start fixing the MySQL development organisation soon enough to ensure that things like this can’t happen.

“I still have some hopes that Sun will come in and fix the MySQL development organisation, but with MySQL server releases like this one my hopes have started to fade a bit.”

However, as you can imagine Monty’s ramblings have not gone unnoticed and database administrator has retaliated at Monty’s efforts to “ambush his colleagues”.

She said: “This is another case of a developer, a brilliant one, mind you, one of the brightest in the open source arena, but a developer nonetheless, who has a non-user oriented mindset and is inflicting his view on the users.”

How long Monty will stay at the company is debatable. He started only in October and was annoyed at having to follow rules laid down by Sun, saying he “hated” how the company did business.

Expect a sacking in the coming weeks…

Monty’s post: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2008/11/oops-we-did-it-again-mysql-51-released.html
Angry Colleague: http://fakeamelia.blogspot.com/2008/12/monty-rants-or-yet-another-case-of.html