For starters and advanced *BSD users
jfruhlinger writes “Theo de Raadt has made the shocking claim that OpenBSD includes a backdoor that the FBI paid coders to build. Brian Proffitt has tracked down one of the programmers names as being on the FBI payroll (actually, he tracked down two programmers with the same name). Both deny working with the FBI.”
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Aggrajag and Mortimer.CA, among others, wrote to inform us that Theo de Raadt has made public an email sent to him by Gregory Perry, who worked on the OpenBSD crypto framework a decade ago. The claim is that the FBI paid contractors to insert backdoors into OpenBSD’s IPSEC stack. Mr. Perry is coming forward now that his NDA with the FBI has expired. The code was originally added ten years ago, and over that time has changed quite a bit, “so it is unclear what the true impact of these allegations are” says Mr. de Raadt. He added: “Since we had the first IPSEC stack available for free, large parts of the code are now found in many other projects/products.” (Freeswan and Openswan are not based on this code.)
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dmbkiwi writes “The first beta release of KDE SC 4.6 was released yesterday. OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately, so being curious as to what’s new, I’ve downloaded and upgraded to the new release. These are my impressions thus far.”
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jschauma writes “NetBSD 5.1 has been released. NetBSD 5.1 is the first feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It includes security and bug fixes, as well as improved hardware support and new features. Some highlights include: RAIDframe parity maps, which greatly improve parity rewrite times after unclean shutdown; X.Org updates; Support for many more network devices; Xen PAE dom0 support; Xen PCI pass-through support. For a full list of all changes, please see the release announcement. NetBSD 5.1 is dedicated to the memory of Martti Kuparinen, who was the victim of a traffic accident in June 2010.”
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Mortimer.CA writes “The release of OpenBSD 4.8 has been announced. Highlights include ACPI suspend/resume, better hardware support, OpenBGPD/OpenOSPFD/routing daemon improvements, inclusion of OpenSSH 5.5, etc. Nothing revolutionary, just the usual steady improving of the system. A detailed ChangeLog is available, as usual. Work, of course, has already started on the next release, which should be ready in May, according to the steady six-month release cycle.”
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The July-September, 2010 Status Report is now available with 55 entries.
