Nokia Smartphones Will Use Microsoft's Silverlight

Nokia plans to include Microsoft's Silverlight on its S60 software platform for smartphones running the Symbian OS, beginning later this year. Microsoft's cross-platform multimedia plug-in will eventually also be on Nokia's Series 40 devices and Internet Web tablets as well as devices running the Windows Mobile and Linux operating systems.

Open Source Yearbook — Panel at CeBIT Thu 6 March 2008

Next Thursday 6 March 2008 at 17:00-18:00 CET, there will be a panel on “The Commercialisation of Open Source” at the Future Talk Booth in Hall 9 (Stand A30) of the CeBIT fair in Hannover, Germany. One of the purposes of the panel is to publish the Open Source Yearbook 2008, the fifth in a series of yearbooks produced by a team around Professor Lutterbeck of the Technical University of Berlin.

I’ll be one of the panelists, representing MySQL AB. Other panelists are from OpenOffice.org, Citrix, the Zope user group, and the Free Software Foundation.

For the book, I wrote a chapter called “Architecture of Participation: Taking part in Open Source at MySQL“. It describes our attempts at MySQL at increasing the level of participation by our community in the development of MySQL, which has traditionally been very centralistic in its development model.

If you read German and want to have some fun at the cost of other business models than that of MySQL AB, I recommend you to read the comment “Windows Closed Source Yearbook appears at CeBIT” on heise closed.

Links (all in German):

• The Open Source Yearbook home page: http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/
• Blog note on the CeBIT panel: http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/blog/207
• Newsticker item at heise online: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/103860/from/rss09
• Fun comment on Closed Source Yearbook: http://www.heise.de/ix/news/foren/S-Windows-Closed-Source-Jahrbuch-2008-erscheint-zur-CeBIT/forum-132986/msg-14504436/read/
• My article “Architecture of Participation: Teilnehmende Open Source bei MySQL“: http://www.heise.de/open/The-Architecture-of-Participation-Teilnehmende-Open-Source-bei-MySQL–/artikel/104253

Lunch with Mayflower

Since well before I joined MySQL in 2001, I have had contact with now-members of the four-headed management team of Germany’s top-notch PHP experts and solution providers Mayflower GmbH.

Mayflowers and MySQLers frequently pop into each other at PHP conferences and other Open Source events, and meet informally under various circumstances ranging from Christmas parties to Biergarten discussions. It’s always interesting to exchange thoughts on virtual companies, Open Source, business models, IRC, scrum, and finding developers (some of which have worked for both MySQL and Mayflower, incidentally). And by sheer coincidence, Mayflower’s Munich headquarters is now about 150 metres from where I live, in the same street that I look out at from my home office (Mannhardtstr.). This time, they copied us, though — I arrived first and they became neighbours several months later …

So you can imagine that I was happy last Friday when I had asked Johann-Peter Hartmann to come to celebrate life under the Sun “with a colleague or two”, and he brought in all three other members of the Mayflower leadership quadruplet: Albrecht Günther, Björn Schotte and Gregor Streng. We had miso soup and sashimi, with hot sake and green tea, at Jin’s Heaven Takumi another 200 metres towards Isartor. Delicious food, good drinks (they wondered I hadn’t brought along salmiak vodka) and entertaining discussions.

Looking forward to more of the same with Mayflower over the years to come!

Anti-phishing.info

Anti-phishing.info is information about the internet scam known as "phishing"! Detect phishing attacks, how to prevent and avoid being scammed, how to react when you suspect or reveal a phishing attack and what you can do to help stop phishers. By following simple steps you can greatly reduce your risk of being phished!

Phishing is a type of internet spoofing scam or hoax, which has exploded on the net lately. Gartner Inc. estimate that 57 million Americans have received phish attack emails only in the five first months of 2004. Of these 3 – 5% were successful, although successrates of up to 20% has been seen towards targeted users. The potential for income is continuously attracting spammers, programmers and earlier sophisticated virus developers, making the scams progressivly worse to see through.

Imagine your self coming home from summer vacation, from abroad maybe? You might have used your VISA or MASTERCARD on several occasions. The following day you receive a mail from your personal bank claiming suspicious withdrawal from your banking account resulting in a suspension of the bank account for security reasons.

To reopen the account you are told by a phisher to follow a reactivating procedure which among other things includes giving out your personal banking account information to a online registration form on the banks website. Everything will look real! The banks URL in the address field of your browser will show the banks address, the logos on the web site will look authentic and the language will seem appropriate official and often intimidating to make you act immediately. Following the instructions, however, may make you a victim of internet phish fraud.

The phish industry has only just begun to develop. The safety company MessageLabs received 14 different phishing emails in 2003, while their phishing stat / stats in 2004 registered 290 016 attempts. With continued increase, this will become a ordinary problem on the internet in the future to come!

IP Filter

What is it ?

IPFilter is a software package that can be used to provide network address translation (NAT) or firewall services. To use, it can either be used as a loadable kernel module or incorporated into your UNIX kernel; use as a loadable kernel module where possible is highly recommended. Scripts are provided to install and patch system files, as required.

To see an overview of how IP Filter fits into the overall picture of TCP/IP with your kernel and the order in which the various phases of packet processing is done, click here.

The firewall can:

• explicitly deny/permit any packet from passing through
• distinguish between various interfaces

and can match on the follow IP header fields:

• source/destination IP address (including inverted matches)
• IP protocol
• TOS (Type of Service)
• any of the 19 IP options or 8 registered IP security classes
• fragments (if it is or isn't)

In addition, IPFilter can

• send back an ICMP error/TCP reset for denied packets
• keep packet state information for TCP, UDP and ICMP packet flows.
• keep fragment state information for any IP packet, applying the same rule to all fragments.
• act as a Network Address Translator (NAT)
• use redirection to setup true transparent proxy connections.
• provide packet header details to a user program for authentication
• in addition, supports temporary storage of pre-authenticated rules for passing packets through

Special provision is made for the three most common Internet protocols, TCP, UDP and ICMP. IP Filter rules allow for packets to be matched based on:

• TCP/UDP packets by port number or a port number range
• ICMP packets by type/code
• "established" TCP packets
• on any arbitrary combination of TCP flags
• "short" (fragmented) IP packets with incomplete headers

To keep track of the performance of IP Filter, a logging device is used which supports logging of:

• the TCP/UDP/ICMP and IP packet headers
• the first 128 bytes of the packet (including headers)

when:

• a packet is successfully passed through
• a packet is blocked from passing through
• it matches a rule setup to look for suspicious packets

To examine a set of example rule files and an example of what can be done, click here.

IPFilter keeps its own set of statistics on:

• packets blocked
• packets (and bytes!) used for accounting
• packets passed
• packets logged
• attempts to log which failed (buffer full)

and much more, for packets going both in and out.

The current implementation provides a small set of tools, which can easily be used and integrated with regular unix shells and tools. Amongst these tools is a new addition, ipftest, which is provided so that you can test a rule set before committing it to use in your kernel. A brief description of the tools provided:

1. ipf - reads in a set of rules, from either stdin or a file, and adds them to the kernels current list (appending them). It can also be used to flush the current firewall rule set or delete individual firewall rules.
2. ipfstat - interrogates the kernel for statistics on packet processing, so far, and retrieves the list of firewall rules in operation for inbound and outbound packets.
3. ipftest - reads in a ipf rule file and then applies sample IP packets to the rule file. This allows for testing of firewall rule list and examination of how a packet is passed along through it.
4. ipmon - reads buffered data from the logging device (default is /dev/ipl) for output to either:

* screen (standard output)
* file
* syslog

5. ipsend - generates arbitary IP packets for ethernet connected machines.
6. ipresend - reads in a data file of saved IP packets (ie snoop/tcpdump/etherfind output) and sends it back across the network.
7. iptest - contains a set of test "programs" which send out a series of IP packets, aimed at testing the strength of the TCP/IP stack at which it is aimed at. WARNING: may crash machine(s) targeted!
8. ipnat - reads in a set of rules, from either stdin or a file and adds them to the kernels current list of active NAT rules. NAT rules can also be deleted using ipnat.

Documentation on ioctl's and the format of data saved to the logging character device is provided so that you may develop your own applications to work with or in place of any of the above.

To retrieve this package via anonymous ftp, use: ftp://coombs.anu.edu.au/pub/net/ip-filter/ip_fil4.1.28.tar.gz