According to news.com, the announced website defacement contest is currently taking place, but there are chances that "web site attacks was mainly a flop".

The zone-h.org website is not accessible anymore, after it received 500 defacements links. As h-zone is the "official" repository of the contest, it is unclear how many sites have really been defaced ;-)

Due to h-zone.org trouble, the person running the challenge extended the contest for another day.

news.com reports that a website defacement contest will take place this Sunday. The winner will be the crackers group to get the more points with a maximum of 6,000 defaced sites. The points are given as following:

• Windows system defaced: 1 point
• Unix, Linux or BSD system: 2 points
• IBM's AIX: 3 points
• HP-UX or Apple's OS-X: 5 points

zone-h.org expects 20,000 to 30,000 defacements during this contest. They also noticed that the number of defacements decreased the recent days, while the scanning of web servers increased. They think that the crakers are currently looking for targets, and are waiting the contest time to launch the real attacks. This is not really surprising, for such a serious matter: It is really important to know who is the best :-)

If you want to have fun, just have a look on Zone-H defacements archives, and on their Hall of Shame!

It is interesting to compare the latest Netcraft web servers survey to the January ones.

In terms of active sites , Apache has now 67.54% market share (66.42% in January), and IIS has 23.98% (vs 24.79%).
Open source is going well in some areas!

Another interesting point of this survey is that Network Solutions is moving back a quarter of a million sites to Solaris after they moved them to IIS one year ago. Hum... I wonder why they come back ;-)

Mozilla 1.4 and Netscape 7.1 (which is based on Mozilla 1.4 too) have been released yesterday. Mozilla is available first for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Other versions (Solaris, OpenVMS, etc...) should follow soon, as usually.

Unisys's US patent 4,558,302 expired today. This was the LZW compression algorithm, which is used (among others) by the GIF format, created by Compuserve in 1987.

For some others countries, the LZW patent will expire later:

Europe: June 18th, 2004
Canada: June 6th, 2004
Japan: June 20th, 2004

More information about this subject on kuro5hin.

The question is: What will happen to the PNG format now?

Linus Torvalds leaves Transmeta after working 6 years there, to work fulltime on the development of the kernel. This should not change a lot for him, as he already spent most of his time working on the kernel at Transmeta.

He will now work for the non-profit Open Source Development Lab. This organization was created by a large group of sponsors (including Transmeta), and received from them a $20 millions investment.

He wrote about his move in a kernel mailing-list post announcing the 2.5.72 version of the development branch.

Have fun!

SCO decided to go on, and annonced yesterday that they "terminated IBM's right to use AIX in their business, development, distribution and sales"

What amazes me is that the offending portions of code contains JFS, RCU, and NUMA:

JFS (Journaled File System) was created by IBM for AIX.

RCU (Read-Copy Update) was created by Sequent for Dynix/ptx system. Sequent was acquired by IBM in 1999.

NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) was also acquired from Sequent, although others implementations were previously created by SGI and others.

None of these technologies were part of the original System V code, but the real claim against IBM is not copyright related; tt is about a breach of contract:

SCO claims that "IBM's 1985 Unix license, originally signed with AT&T, but subsequently transferred to SCO, prevents IBM from distributing software derived from the Unix code base."

They have a very broad vision of the derived term, IMHO ;-)

The new 2.4.21 kernel was released two days ago. Have a look on the changelog. This is mainly a bugfixes version, but there are some enhancements too.
You can download it on one of the 129 mirrors sites.

In the meantime, the development branch version is currently 2.5.71 (you can always get the current versions -stable and beta- on the kernel.org site).

Three hours ago, at 18:24, an earthquake measured six (on seven) on a Japanese scale, (and seven on the Richter scale) did hit Miyagi prefecture (near Sendai city). There were no victims apparently.

Tokyo, nearly 400 kilometers south, was hit too (I was in the office, on 15th floor, when it happened). It was not very strong, but quite long :-(

The full earthquake data is here, but I don't know how long this link will be valid...

Mozilla Firebird 0.6 has been released a few days ago. Firebird is the new name for the phoenix project, but, as next versions of Mozilla will be based on this branch, it is likely that Firebird will soon be renamed again (probably -and simply!- Mozilla Browser).

Firebird is certainly the best browser available today!

The standalone equivalent mail application, thunderbird, can also be downloaded, but I will wait a little before using it (I need at least GnuPG support, which is not yet included). Thunderbird will be the official mail application for Mozilla too, and will probably be renamed too (Mozilla Mail?)