Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Slashback GUI KDE Novell Security Worms

Slashback: KDE, Tsunami Hacker, and Image Bugs 121

Posted by Zonk from the oh-my dept.
We Slashback, to provide updates to three recent stories. All happy news, for once. JoaoPinheiro writes "After last week's reports that Novell plans not to ship the KDE desktop on Novell and SUSE Enterprise products, the company got lots of feedback from its customers. Novell has listened to them and reconsidered its desktop strategy." Meanwhile, in the employment sector, sebFlyte writes "Daniel Cuthbert, recently a high-profile victim of the UK's outdated cybercrime laws, has found a job in the security industry." Finally, one less thing to worry about, as gUnit writes "eWeek is reporting that virus researchers at Trend Micro jumped the gun with a warning that a Trojan in the wild was capable of exploiting newly patched Windows security flaws. Just 24 hours after announcing the discovery of a proof-of-concept Trojan that supposedly exploits a trio of image-rendering vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft, Trend Micro is retreating from that claim and offering up a batch of excuses."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Slashback: KDE, Tsunami Hacker, and Image Bugs More

Slashback: KDE, Tsunami Hacker, and Image Bugs

Comments Filter:
  • With all the news articles and coverage this got it might've been good for them anyway financially and a lot of people wont see the retraction so it may seem their ahead of the curve

    • Slashback RFC (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday November 11, 2005 @09:43PM (#14013216) Homepage Journal
      Internet reporting should have a way that retractions can't be buried. The technique of frontpaging war justifications, for example, then burying corrections, is an artifact of "front" pages and thick pads of printed paper. The new medium doesn't necessarily need to be limited that way. What can we invent to ensure that stories followed up by corrections are sure to feature the corrections in at least the same prominence? Maybe some kind of enhancement to RSS? Like requiring corrections to include a machine-readable reference to the original story, as part of the RDF? Then at least publishers have to relate the stories, in order to call them "corrections". Some publishers will probably just not follow that part of the spec, including "correction" labels in the freeform text without the required reference to the previous story. But those publishers that do implement the spec will be more reliable, and the ideas marketplace can choose among them.
      • There are still front pages and thick pads of information. It is the same problem, newspapers and websites should make retractions/corrections more obvious, but both mediums have limited prominent space, as you allude to on the web.

  • Good news all round (Score:1, Redundant)

    by arevos ( 659374 )
    Good news all round, it would seem. :)
    • Good news all round, it would seem. :)

      Indeed, here are some must-have KDE apps that are certainly going to help SuSE's popularity as a desktop operating system :
      AmaroK music player [kde.org] -- Intuitive, powerful, good-looking music player. Supports transfers to/from iPods and many audio formats.

      K3b [k3b.org] -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects,

      • Re:Must-have KDE apps (Score:5, Interesting)

        by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnar AT gmail DOT com> on Friday November 11, 2005 @11:23PM (#14013584) Homepage Journal
        How many times are you going to post that list?

        Besides, half the apps on your list are toys ... nice toys for a home desktop (yes, amarok and k3b is lovely) but where are the more "serious" apps like scribus? [sourceforge.net] Is there an gtk equivalent? Edutainment? I mention this last because linux might become more and more important in education, and only KDE offers a nice, integrated solution. In fact, I just read about a specific case where schools (in Germany) used KDE because of the edutainment package (was in one of the blogs on kdeplanet).

        Which leads me to what I wanted to say originally: marketing. KDE did no or very little marketing, and almost no research of KDE deployment. That's where the "other" project excelled: marketing, case studies, success stories, etc... This way, it was relatively easy for ximian's people to convince Novell's management that they should standardize on GNOME. It was at this year's academy that they decided to form the KDE Marketing Working Group [kde.org]. And in just a few days, oh look: Dutch Record Shop Chain Migrates 1000 PCs to KDE on Novell Linux Desktop [kde.org] that's bye bye for 1000 customers when the next upgrade cycle comes, if Novell standardized on GNOME. They use kiosk mode and the associated admin tools to lock the features - which seems to be a mature feature. In fact, here is an "enterprise ready" praise if there is any:"

        At the moment, almost all shops in The Netherlands and Belgium already use the KDE Desktop. After that phase is complete, the migration team will go to Norway and Finland to migrate the PCs used by the Free Record Shop and Bravo chains. "It's a fun project" says Arrachart, "We can show that you can save costs with ICT, while at the same time allowing greater possibilities in the way the shops are organised."

        And oh look, another two more cases (you have to scroll down) [blogspot.com]. Quote:
        on my right was a fellow who works for a company that makes linux based satelite t.v. transmission software (sky t.v. is amongst their clientelle) and they use qt for their in-house engineering tools. on my left were three men from a vienese company that writes kde software for a group of five private hospitals. these hospitals all run kde on the desktop and everything from patient records to x-rays is handled on them.

        So someone (quess who) misrepresented KDE's readiness or usefulness - and the demand for it - in corporate environments. But the damage is already done. Who would trust novell on this now? I think most of the users in the past days were looking at distrowatch (or at the Kubuntu site) ... some of them would stay to watch and see. Others will make the switch - why stay indeed?
      • While most of your post was interesting, there are a few things to correct:

        Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

        Nautilus has all the features you mentioned. There are some things Konqueror does that Nautilus doesn't (web browsing, for one), but nautilus is more capable than you give it credit for.

        Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (an
  • "Finally, one less thing to worry about, as gUnit writes "eWeek is reporting that virus researchers at Trend Micro jumped the gun with a warning that a Trojan in the wild was capable of exploiting newly patched Windows security flaws. Just 24 hours after announcing the discovery of a proof-of-concept Trojan that supposedly exploits a trio of image-rendering vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft, Trend Micro is retreating from that claim and offering up a batch of excuses." Its the new way to get microsoft t
  • I personally think SuSE is the most polished, eye-candy distro for KDE, some knoppix livecd's also have a fair amount of candy.

    Thats what amazing, Novell would drop it, but then again, they have a group of gnome developers in house...
    • That is generally my take on it too. That KDE is more polished and more eye-candyish but I think the Gnome crew excels at user-friendliness. Time and again, I have tried to find how to do something in KDE and had trouble, but in Gnome it just seems more like Windows. Not necessarily better but at least more familiar.

      The fact that they have Gnome developers in house would certainly help in integrating their apps and utils with Gnome but another good reason for doing so is that other enterprise players are al
      • This may not be the correct place to ask this, but what the hey...

        I am playing with Ubuntu at the moment, and have found it to be wonderful.
        I have managed to get basically everything the way I want it, except for configuring gnome properly. In Windows I can disable all the flashy eye candy and zooming windows etc ("Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing" tick in visual effects)
        I cannot for the life of me find out how to do something similar in Gnome.
        I have looked around and tried to read through th
        • Easy! The package you're looking for is called XFCE4 ;)
          • Oooooooooooh, thats very nice.
            I just installed all the packages and logged into it.
            After running through all the configuration, it appears to have (almost) everything I was looking for.
            It is customisable as I expect and runs as quickly as I like, however I cannot get the application list inside a single taskbar. Damn annoying really, I prefer the window titles to be at the very top and the app list inside the taskbar at the bottom (like XP). I have configured this part in gnome perfectly, but its not so e
      • That KDE is more polished and more eye-candyish but I think the Gnome crew excels at user-friendliness. Time and again, I have tried to find how to do something in KDE and had trouble, but in Gnome it just seems more like Windows.

        Ok, so tell me how to raise a window in Gnome _without_ clicking on the tiny two pixel wide frame (i.e., by clicking in the middle of the window) when the focus policy is set to "mouse follows cursor" and auto-raise is off.

        Simple answer - you can't. And Gnome doesn't want you to. M
        • Er, what's wrong with ALT-click? Here are some of the other click modifiers that I use all the time. I think they originally came from FVWM2, the WM I cut my teeth on at uni.

          ALT-leftclick: raise the window by alt-clicking anywhere inside it
          ALT-leftclick and drag: move the window without having to grab the title bar
          ALT-middleclick and drag: resize the window without having to grab the corner
          ALT-rightclick: bring up the window menu (equivalent to clicking on the top left corner of the window).

          Hope that help
    • It doesn't matter how good KDE is; the issue is the license on the underlying toolkit. It just doesn't make sense for a company like Novell to build their entire GUI strategy on top of a dual-licensed toolkit.

  • more details: official Novell PR on KDE (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 11, 2005 @07:51PM (#14012669)
    Firstly KDE will be the primary and default desktop on OpenSUSE and any future SUSE Linux releases. Secondly they will now ship the full KDE as a fully supported (and developed, whatever that means) desktop on all enterprise products. Some more details here [novell.com].
    • That is not what the cited source says, at all, read it for yourself!

      "All future enterprise-class Linux product releases, including Novell Linux Desktop, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Novell Open Enterprise Server, will continue to ship with both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments. In upcoming versions of Novell enterprise applications, the default desktop environment will be GNOME. When customers install Novell Linux products, they will be given the option to choose either the GNOME or KDE environme

      • * RIGHT * (read it again) (Score:5, Informative)

        by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Friday November 11, 2005 @09:20PM (#14013111) Homepage Journal
        Please read what you just cited and what he wrote. You're not contradicting him... the text you cited refers to completely different products. From what I've seen on German sites (which I can't read and thus have to trust others for translation), KDE is still the primary choice for SUSE desktops other than NLD (i.e., the remaining products that he listed in his post). Servers and NLD will use Gnome as a default (as your cite says).

        --
        Evan

  • KDE "Supported" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jason Earl ( 1894 ) on Friday November 11, 2005 @07:53PM (#14012678) Homepage Journal

    The real question isn't whether KDE will be included on SuSE Linux, or supported by Novell. The real question is how much money is Novell willing to spend *developing* KDE.

  • KDE will not be the default (Score:3, Informative)

    by vivek7006 ( 585218 ) on Friday November 11, 2005 @07:56PM (#14012697) Homepage
    Novell will continue to ship KDE also in the enterprise products as supported option and it's said that it will be easy to choose KDE as your desktop

  • I hate excuses (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Serveert ( 102805 ) on Friday November 11, 2005 @07:59PM (#14012707)
    "Given the time we needed to react to this, we didn't analyze it thoroughly. We wanted to do something fast and perhaps we didn't spend sufficient time on it," Genes said in an interview."

    EXCUSE

    He said the company received the Trojan sample from a customer in Japan and, during the initial research, the code definitely crashed the "explorer.exe" and EMF File Viewer in unpatched Windows systems.

    EXCUSE

    "We're still working with Microsoft to clarify what it is exactly and how it will be categorized in relation to MS05-053. But it's not exactly as we originally described it," he added.

    Ahh hah.

  • Bad law vs. stupidly pissing off the judge (Score:4, Informative)

    by nick_davison ( 217681 ) on Friday November 11, 2005 @08:02PM (#14012723)
    Daniel Cuthbert, recently a high-profile victim of the UK's outdated cybercrime laws

    To be fair, if you look at what happened:

    The judge indicated that he would normally have let Cuthbert go for the core act.

    However, Cuthbert didn't just commit the core act, acknowledge what he'd done and then say sorry. Instead, when the police investigated, he concocted a lie about what he'd been doing, causing them to spend a lot more time and money investigating, and only told the truth when caught.

    The judge outright stated that, whilst he would be inclined to simply give a slap on the wrists, the fact Cuthbert deliberately lied to the police led him to impose a harsher sentence.

    The same holds true of pretty much any law. If the judge feels the law is dubious, unmerrited or whatever, he has freedom for leniency. If you piss them off by deliberately lying to the police though, don't expect them to go easy on you.
    • A judge should not react like an uneducated person. The act and circumstances are what count, not the feelings of a judge.
      And what about the incompetent police investigators? Seen so much stupidity I am wondering what would happen if the police could hold an innocent person for 90 days without charge just because the person own a computer with harddisk. Now they can hold everybody without charge for 28 days. Better than vanishing in some secret camp for years, but imagine someone puts you away for a month.
      • A judge should not react like an uneducated person. The act and circumstances are what count, not the feelings of a judge.

        The judge said he would normally be inclined to leniency but that lying to the police meant that, when considering degree of intent, thus severity of the act, thus appropriate severity of the punishment, it implied Cuthbert knew what he was doing was wrong (as, if he felt he was in the right, why would he feel the need to lie?) and did it anyway.

        The judge didn't act because he was in a b
        • Heck, the guy lied because he suddenly realized what he did looks like an attempted break-in. Such reaction may be stupid. but people do stupid things when they are surprised. It is a human reaction. Even a later denial is completely understandable. But maybe not for a pissed police officer or a judge. Sorry, but I do not buy your explanations.
        • I knew I was in the wrong, I admitted it, he wrote my speed down as lower than I admitted to to cut me a break
          So, to reward you for not lying to him, he lied for you? I'm not sure what the moral of that story is...
          • So, to reward you for not lying to him, he lied for you? I'm not sure what the moral of that story is...

            Consider it something of a plea bargain in return for a full confession and cooperating with the police. It's quite common, except that a cop can't officially do that. But beyond that, it's common procedure in dealing with the law.
        • . I'd have likely ended up with several hundred dollars of fines and rubber gloves in uncomfortable places.

          So, instead you bent over and took it from your insurance company which raised your rates so that you will pay them way more than you would have paid to fight the ticket in the first place.

          Very commendable of you to do your bit for our corporate welfare state.
    • Unless you live somewhere like the United States where the hands of judges are tied with mandatory sentencing.
    • However, Cuthbert didn't just commit the core act, acknowledge what he'd done and then say sorry. Instead, when the police investigated, he concocted a lie about what he'd been doing, causing them to spend a lot more time and money investigating, and only told the truth when caught.

      That "explanation" is a confabulation. Judges aren't supposed to decide based on whether they are "pissed off", and it shouldn't take any longer to determine whether the defendant typed "../.." whether or not he admits it.

      The re

  • Hacker? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mustafap ( 452510 ) on Friday November 11, 2005 @08:02PM (#14012724) Homepage
    I still dont get this.

    >To check, he added ../../../ to the URL in an attempt to access the site's higher directories -- an action that triggered an alarm.

    So are we to believe that simple act resulted in a criminal conviction? Really?
    Surely there is more to it than that.
  • What a spectacular flip-flop! Now who can take Novell serious with similar announcements in future?

    This begs the question: Was the initial decision to only support GNOME made with no anticipation for consequences? If there were no consequences expected, then those who made the decision should be fired in my opinion.

    If there were anticipated consequences, then why did the PR personnel not do it in a sane way? This flip-flopping by Novell does them no good. They already have a [bad] reputation of spoiling e

    • OSS: The only community in which you can get roasted for trying to play nice when people ask you to.

    • Re:What a flip-flop! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Friday November 11, 2005 @08:53PM (#14012959)
      "Flip-flopping" is a very stupid term, and even stupider when used as an insult.

      Novell made what amounted to a mistake in the eyes of many of their users, and such users let Novell know that. So Novell did the responsible thing, listened to their users, and cleared up the problem. That's not a bad thing. They were being responsive to their customers needs.

      Indeed, it's very good when people go back and fix a mistake that they made. It's called being responsible.

      However, I do agree with you about the GNOME file selector being quite unusable. It is what keeps me from using Firefox.

      • Re:What a flip-flop! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bogaboga ( 793279 )
        > Novell made what amounted to a mistake in the eyes of many of their users, and such users let Novell know that. So Novell did the responsible thing, listened to their users, and cleared up the problem. That's not a bad thing. They were being responsive to their customers needs.

        If that were the case, then Novell should have adopted KDE ad the default desktop long ago. Some on-line survey indicated that SuSE had the best presentation of KDE and that it was why 76% of SuSE users were using KDE. In comm

      • Exactly! If more people only realised that being able to change one's mind is a good thing we wouldn't have Bush in office. ...but, but, he flip-flops!!!

      • However, I do agree with you about the GNOME file selector being quite unusable. It is what keeps me from using Firefox.


        Actually, Firefox doesn't use the GNOME file selector, the Mozilla people wrote their own.
        • No, Firefox 1.0.7 uses the horrible GNOME file selector dialogs.

          • I agree that it's still horrible, but it's not as bad as it once was. You can hit Ctrl+L to get a text box you can type locations into (not documented anywhere that I know of, I found out about it in Slashdot comment...). I've kinda gotten used to it after a few months of using Gnome. But honestly, when it comes to GIU file browsers, Windows still has the lead there. Windows explorer (and the file selection boxes, which contain explorer) are much better than either konqueror or Nautilus. Except for the shit
      • Firefox doesn't use the GNOME file selector, it uses its own file selector written in GTK+ (not that anyone really uses a file selector for a webbrowser). Anyway, I don't know what the issue is with the Gnome file selector, it was nicely rewitten a year ago, it has pretty icons, it has commonly used locations listed on the side, it has a great gui interface for changing the path and advanced functionality for showing and hiding relivant things. Basically its ownly problem is that you need to hit Ctrl-l if y
        • not that anyone really uses a file selector for a webbrowser

          Unlike you, the rest of the world finds the need to upload a file once in a while using a HTML form. Example: using gmail and attaching a file to an email.

          people's complaints about Gnome just because of a dialogue box that is open 0.1% of computer usage time or less is really clutching at straws.

          No, what you are witnessing is people airing a legitimate complaint. By the way, it's not just the file selector. I know I am veering off-topic sl
    • What a spectacular flip-flop! Now who can take Novell serious with similar announcements in future?

      A week ago Novell's position was that KDE would be shipped, but not as the default.

      Today's Novell's position was that KDE would be shipped, but not as the default.

      That's is a huge inconsistancy isn't it?

    • What a spectacular flip-flop!

      No, it's not a "flip flop". Because of user demand, they'll continue to support KDE, but Gnome is going to be their focus.
  • No matter what Novell/SuSe say, changing the default window manager to GNOME is the first indication that Novell wants to shift focus to the free GTK toolkit.

    You can put as much sugar on the subject as you like Novell PR, the proof is in the pudding.

    Only offering KDE support to technical-savvy users that know one window manager from the other is an attempt to appease the well-grounded pioneers of the SuSe platform.

    It is clear that this is a business decision to change the default to GNOME, and for all their
    • As nice as the free argument used to be, it's not really the case startings with QT4. QT, as of version 4, is now opensource on all 3 major platforms. Trolltech has shifted to the embedded market for most of its revenue.

      I personally prefer GTK for now other reason than asthetics. Even with theming, something about QT has always seemed off to me.

  • KDE should be default. GTK file selector bkoken. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Air-conditioned cowh ( 552882 ) on Saturday November 12, 2005 @01:30AM (#14014031)
    OK, this is a shameless troll but I'm really peeved by the GTK file selector and the way it hides what directory you're in unless you press this tiny little arrow. Is that going to confuse people or what?

    It's bad enough having Firefox and Gimp rendered unusable (shameless exageration) in this way let alone a whole suit of applications.

    KDE makes much more sense to me (shameless flamebait) and I hope there is another German distro that can become what Suse was once to fill the void that has been left by the "restructuring". All the times I've seen a US corporation take over a European company (shameless generalisation) they have just sabotaged it. I used to work for a European Harmen pro-audio company before the writing was on the wall what they wanted to do with it.
    • OK, this is a shameless troll but I'm really peeved by the GTK file selector and the way it hides what directory you're in unless you press this tiny little arrow. Is that going to confuse people or what?

      That's not a troll at all - it's a reasonable opinion backed with a coherent justification. That said, I've got my own reasons for disliking the GTK+ file selector, but this isn't one of them. In fact, it's the way that applications work on the Mac, which has influenced many Gnome design decisions.

      Having f
    • "Is that going to confuse people or what?"

      No it isn't. Because the GTK file dialog looks almost exactly the same as MacOS X's file dialog. [uwrf.edu] Everybody praises MacOS X for its usability, including the file dialog, and the GTK dialog looks almost exactly the same, therebefore the GTK dialog is good. If you say the GTK dialog is bad, then you must also admit that the MacOS X dialog is bad.
    • You're making the implicit argument that KDE should be chosen because it is technically better. But that's not the issue. KDE has always been technically better than Gnome (although the gap is small these days). The choice is really determined by legal and licensing issues, and Novell doesn't have much of a choice other than to go with Gnome as their main desktop.

      As for the US-vs-European angle, the KDE developers already screwed up big time once before on licensing issues. Perhaps the problem is that
  • This switch back to KDE doesn't quite resolve everything. From the slashdot story Suse Linux Founder Exits Novell [slashdot.org], it's clear that there has been a big internal fight over the changes happening at Novell. This comment [slashdot.org] under the above story sheds some light on just what.

    It looks like Novell is being pushed to make some bad moves by a major investor or two, with lots of R&D layoffs and pressure to sell off some of the technology that strongly identifies Novell with quality. Rings bells of the sort of thin

  • KDE is a mistake (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by idlake ( 850372 )
    You can see what happens with a two desktop strategy by looking at SuSE right now: Gnome under SuSE sucks.

    I think for Novell to continue spending time on supporting two desktops is a mistake; they should focus on doing a great job with one desktop, and they really don't have much of a choice other than to use Gnome.

    • > they really don't have much of a choice other than to use Gnome.

      Obviously, there is at least one other choice. KDE.
      • SuSE is a commercial distro and they need to be sensitive to the needs of commercial developers. KDE isn't a choice for them, due to the high licensing costs of Qt for commercial customers.
  • One linux distributor finally gets it that having a standardized gui is a good thing, and then the linux fan boys go bitch and moan at them because "they" want to have a choice when installing. Well if you don't like it, use another distributor then. End users would rather have one gui not have a choice of a gui. Standardization is what is holding back linux. That's what windows has, linux needs it too.

Slashdot Top Deals

Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.

Close