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Will Linux See Growth Next Year?
Canonical has said it expects Ubuntu to ship on 18 million PCs next year.
Having just launched Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical is bullish about its future, with Chris Kenyon, its VP of sales and business development forecasting that the firm’s operating system will ship on 18 million machines in 2013. According to Phoronix, Kenyon claimed that will amount to five per cent of worldwide PC shipments.
Kenyon’s prediction represents more than double the number of PCs shipped currently with Ubuntu and while that might seem optimistic the firm has been on a roll when it comes to OEM support. Prior to Canonical’s launch of Ubuntu 12.04 it announced certification for HP Proliant servers, and yesterday it revealed that it has been working with Dell on an Ubuntu image for Dell’s headline XPS 13 ultrabook.
Although Kenyon mentioned PC unit sales, it is unlikely to forecast a similar growth in servers pre-installed with Ubuntu despite the firm’s certification for some Proliant servers.
Kenyon believes that most firms buy bare metal servers and load their own tweaked images. He said, “As a point of fact the vast majority of this [Ubuntu on servers] is not sold pre-installed. […] Pre-install in the server market is just irrelevant, it is not how the market works. Even when something gets pre-installed an enterprise will wipe it because they will have their own image. [OS pre-installation] is a distraction [for servers, but] it’s a very applicable question in the client world.”
Hackers Plan To Go After Fox
Anonymous plans to take out the Fox news network because of its coverage of the Wall Street Protests.
Dubbed “Operation Fox Hunt”, Anonymous announced the plans on YouTube to attack the Fox News website on the anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day. Anonymous is also planning to target former Fox News personality Glenn Beck as well as current Fox News representative Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly during “Operation Fox Hunt”.
Anonymous said that it has had a gutsful of “right wing conservative propaganda” and “belittling the occupiers” of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Anonymous recently a distributed denial-of-service attack against the Oakland police department’s website after a 24-year-old wounded Marine home from serving two tours in Iraq was critically injured in the Occupy Oakland protest. Police allegedly threw an object that fractured the marine’s skull landing him in the hospital.
The Linux Kernel Got Hacked
Servers that are part of the Linux kernel.org infrastructure were affected during a recent intrusion where attackers managed to gain root access and plant Trojan scripts.
According to an email sent out to the community by kernel.org chief administrator John Hawley, known as warthog9, the incident started with the compromise of a server referred to as Hera. The personal colocated machine of Linux developer H Peter Anvin (HPA) and additional kernel.org systems were also affected.
“Upon some investigation there are a couple of kernel.org boxes, specifically hera and odin1, with potential pre-cursors on demeter2, zeus1 and zeus2, that have been hit by this,” Hawley wrote.
The intrusion was discovered on 28 August and according to preliminary findings attackers gained access by using a set of compromised credentials. They then elevated their privileges to root by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability that the kernel.org administrators have yet to identify.
Fortunately, logs and parts of the exploit code were retained and will help the investigation. A Trojan was added to the startup scripts of affected systems, but gave itself away through Xnest /dev/mem error messages.
According to the kernel.org admins, these error messages have been seen on other systems as well, but it’s not clear if those machines are vulnerable or compromised. “If developers see this, and you don’t have Xnest installed, please investigate,” the administrators advised.
The good news is that the exploit failed on systems running the latest Linux kernel version, 3.1-rc2, which was released two weeks ago. This is possibly the fortunate consequence of one of the bugfixes it contains.
Accused Hacker Out On Bail In England
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The accused ‘Topiary’, whose name is Jake Davis, was charged on Sunday and bailed by the courts yesterday. He was charged with five offences: Unauthorised access to a computer system, Encouraging or assisting offences, Conspiracy with others to carry out a Distributed Denial of Service Attack on the website of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, Conspiracy to commit offences of Section 3 Computer Misuse Act 1990, and Conspiracy with others to commit offences of Section 3 Computer Misuse Act 1990 contrary to Section 1 of the Criminal Law Act 1977.
According to a report at the Guardian, his bail conditions are that Davis must wear an electronic tag, not access the internet, and not leave his house between 10pm and 7am.
Davis, who appeared outside court wearing sunglasses and holding a copy of “Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science” by Micheal Brooks and who allegedly authored the Rupert Murdoch is dead story that appeared on the hacked web site of the Sun newspaper, has already gained support on the internet in general and especially on Twitter.