An attack on Open Source

The Oracle-Sun merger is causing many people to throw their hands in the air. Some are doing it with excitement while others are fearing that this merger could destroy the powerful free source program MySQL.

“In Linux there actually is fierce competition between Oracle's flagship product and MySQL,” Mueller said. “MySQL really has already made its presence felt at the high end of the market where Oracle generates most of its revenues and profits, and is a pretty painful, hurtful competitor to Oracle because of its open-source nature and extremely aggressive price structure. What the market needs is for MySQL to continue that trajectory.”...Read the entire article at the Examiner.com.

CASE Tool: d'zine

D'zine is Open Source. This looks great for those who code and need to create class diagrams from what they have already coded.
The following are features and as stated in d'zine web page:

• Open Source CASE tool for OOAD.
  
• Draw use case ,interaction ,class ,deployment ,ER Diagrams.
  
• Code generation in C++ and java.
  
• Normalise your ER diagrams and generate SQL code.
  
• Reverse engg design from code.
  
• Just put in your Java or C++ code and generate class diagrams.
  

Know This: E-mail Hoaxes, Authorities to Reference, Firewalls

I received an e-mail today "warning" about the "postcard virus". I became unimpressed at the large quantity of people that continue sending this e-mail without verifying its validity. After completing some simple searches through Google's search engine, I found many articles dating back to 2001, identifying this e-mail as a hoax.

• Urban Legends at About.com http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_postcard_virus.htm
• Hoax-Slayer http://www.hoax-slayer.com/postcard-virus-hoax.shtml
• CNET Forums http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6132_102-0.html?threadID=284646
• Truth or Fiction http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/a/a-card-for-you.htm
• Anti-virus Software at About.com http://antivirus.about.com/od/emailhoaxes/p/postcard.htm
• Break the Chain http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/postcardvirus.html
  
• Perry Internet Consulting http://blog.perryweb.com/?p=148
• Snopes http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/postcard.asp
• Sophos http://www.sophos.com/security/hoaxes/sectorzero.html
• Winferno http://articles.winferno.com/antivirus/postcard-virus/
• Norton Community http://community.norton.com/norton/board/message?board.id=nis_feedback&thread.id=1310
  
• Virus Busters http://virusbusters.itcs.umich.edu//hoaxes/virtual.html

When this e-mail is continually re-forwarded, precious time and email bandwidth are wasted. This is disadvantageous for a company.

Sophos recommends this policy to avoid hoaxes.

• Don't Fall for a Virus Hoax http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/1999/11/va_hoaxes.html#prevent

Check the Authority that the author references in this case McAfee, Microsoft, and CNN. Also the major firewall vendors post the current virus threats on their individual sites.

• McAfee http://www.mcafee.com/us/threat_center/default.asp
• Symantec (Norton) http://www.symantec.com/norton/security_response/threatexplorer/index.jsp
• Zone Alarm http://smartdefense.zonealarm.com/tmpl/body/virus/sdrc_virusMain.jsp
  
• AVG http://www.avg.com/us-en/top-threats

The e-mail also referenced Microsoft's authority.

• Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/

CNN was also referred to. Here is the search for "postcard virus" within CNN.

• http://search.cnn.com/search.jsp?query=postcard%20virus&type=news&sortBy=date&intl=false

Consumer search lists the top Firewalls

• http://www.consumersearch.com/firewalls/best-pc-firewalls

These are two free Firewall providers

• http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/
• http://free.agnitum.com/