OSS urged for poor nations

Developing nations should leap into the information age with open source software (OSS), delegates at the World Social Forum were told.

Speaking at the forum, musician John Barlow said poor nations would not be able to solve their problems unless they stop paying expensive software-licensing fees.

"Already, Brazil spends more on licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger," said Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyberspace civil-liberties group.

Open source software includes programs that are not controlled by a single company, reports The Seattle Times. The software can be developed by anyone, with few restrictions. The best known such software is Linux, which can be downloaded free from the Internet.

Microsoft has no immediate plans to integrate desktop search into its Windows operating system, Ziff Davis Media reports.

According to MSN information services and merchant platform product marketing GM Mark Kroese, the federal anti-trust battle Microsoft waged with the government has made the company think twice about what technologies it can add to the operating system.

"Working at Microsoft today versus five years ago is different. If anyone thinks the anti-trust case hasn`t slowed us down, you`re wrong. If I want to meet with a products manager for Windows there needs to be three lawyers in the room.

"While including desktop search in Windows might seem like a logical step to many, there is no immediate plan to do that as far as I know," Kroese adds.

A worm that spread using the MySQL open source database has been brought to a halt, after infecting more than 8 000 Windows computers, Earth Times reports.

According to an advisory issued on Thursday by the SANS Internet Storm Centre, the worm features the usual sets of commands to launch a distributed denial-of-service engine, various scanners and commands to solicit information from infected systems.

Most anti-virus scanners can easily detect the binary files carrying the worm, and infection can easily be stopped by using a strong password along with installing firewalls, the advisory said.

The channels through which it was supposed to receive further commands have been identified and have been cut out from the worm.

Symantec incident response senior manager Oliver Friedrichs says only residual infections are now being reported. "The worm cannot connect to those servers, so it has lost its control channel. Without those commands, the worm is not going to be able to spread."