Peter Nixon’s News Niche

While I would not dare to lay claim to the title of “Security Expert”, there is unfortunately many people in the IT industry who do carry such titles and and make such claims, and most definately shouldn’t either. I do however have among my close friends people, not only people who can safely lay claim to the title of “Security Expert”, but who are in fact bona fide “Security Researchers”. These friendships and an interest in all things security related (not just IT) leads me to stumble across things like this presentation on 0day (0day means an unpatched security bug unknown to the public). Among other interesting points, it lists the figure of 348 days as the average time between a private discovery of 0day bugs and patching by the vendor. This is an astonishing figure! Basically, this means that any computer system you own is always vulnerable to security holes that you don’t, but someone else does know about!

Here is an interesting article about a Windows power user giving SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 a trial. While the title of the article itself is a little negative, I think she gives it a pretty fair review.

Microsoft Office users now can easily import and export to the OpenDocument Format. The StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview, a plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 that allows users of Microsoft Word 2003 to read, edit and save to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is now available from Sun Microsystems.

Europe’s lawmakers should “correct” policies that “implicitly or explicitly” favour the use of proprietary software, according to a newly published report from the European Commission (EC) mentioned in The Register today
The EC commissioned Netherlands based UNU-MERIT to investigate the “economic impact of “FLOSS” in Europe”. The researchers found open source software is worth around €2bn every year to the European economy.