From the One Ping Only dept.:
Computer scientists say they've discovered a "severe vulnerability" in the world's most widely used software encryption package that allows them to retrieve a machine's secret cryptographic key.

...The scientists, from the University of Michigan's electrical engineering and computer science departments, said the bug is easily fixed by applying cryptographic "salt" to an underlying error-checking algorithm. The additional randomization would make the attack unfeasible.

An OpenSSL official, who asked that his name not be published, said engineers are in the process of pushing out a patch and stressed the attack is difficult to carry out in real-world settings.

Yesterday's surprise $1 billion buyout offer for Novell from the New York-based private investment group Elliott Management came with a letter, made public yesterday, spelling out the investors' goal for the company.

Release Date: 26 March 2010 Genre: Action | Drama | Fantasy Cast: Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson, Gemma Arterton, Ralph Fiennes, Alexa Davalos, Danny Huston, Izabella Miko Director: Louis Leterrier Writers: Travis Beacham, Phil Hay Studio: Warner Bros. Plot: The mortal son of the god Zeus embarks on a perilous journey to stop the underworld and its minions from spreading their evil to Earth as well…

Novell Inc., a seller of network software whose stock has slid 85 percent in the past decade, received an unsolicited takeover bid from shareholder Elliott Associates LP that values the company at about $2 billion.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation "celebrates" twelve years of the DMCA with a report listing of the problems which have resulted from that law, and from its anti-circumvention rules in particular. "EFF's report details the numerous harms stemming from the DMCA's ban on circumventing DRM, including Apple's attempts to lock down the iPhone and force users into its App Store. Also new in this year's report is the account of hobbyists threatened by Texas Instruments for blogging about potential modifications to the company's programmable graphing calculators as well as the story behind the legal attacks on Real DVD and other products that create innovative new ways for consumers to enjoy DVD content they have legitimately purchased."

Back in the Dublin office today after last week's GNOME Usability Hackfest in London , during which I didn't blog nearly enough.

This is a joke.. It was a lot of fun to make ! Comment and Subscribe so we will make more ;D…

Registration is now open for the first ever Texas Linux Fest. It will be held at the Monarch Event Center in Austin on Saturday April 10. There will also be evening social events on Friday and Saturday. "Exhibit space is filling up quickly, but if your company, organization, or open source project would like to reserve a booth, you can do so by visiting www.texaslinuxfest.org/sponsorship. There is still time for interested parties to submit a talk for consideration before the February 15 deadline." Click below for the full announcement.

The last set of FOSDEM speaker interviews has been posted; the subjects this time are Andrew Tanenbaum, Benoît Chesneau, Lindsay Holmwood, and Elena Reshetova, speaking on Maemo 6 security. "The main advantage of our security framework architecture is that we don't have any special 'security APIs' by default. For example, there is no secure_fopen() instead of fopen(), which should make the developer's life much easier. The only main change for most applications will be the creation of an additional file inside a Debian package, which we call the 'Aegis Manifest File'. This file declares the needed access control rights for the application, and it will be explained in more details in the presentation."

From the Need for Speed dept.:
A week ago, I let ya'll know that the core PHP team had been brought to Facebook's main campus. That team were forced to sign NDA's, and taken to a very quiet, secluded meeting room where some cool new Facebook-backed open source project was described.

Well, I was able to put all the pieces together on this one, finally, and I now understand exactly what is up: Facebook has rewritten the PHP runtime from scratch. This coming Tuesday, they will make a big announcement around this project, and will make it available as open source software. I'm not really sure of any of the details of the project, but I do know that Facebook hired someone two years ago to do this, and I'm relatively sure this was a one-man project during that entire time.