2002.01.21 Meeting Notes

News

• AOL to buy RedHat, says some sources.
• AOL and RedHat NOT merging, says some other sources.
• AOL and RedHat not commenting on them merging.
• Bill Kendrick won 3rd place in the SDL Game Programming contest for his game "Vectoroids." First place was the popular Arkanoid clone "LBreakout." Second place was "Tower Toppler."
• AOL instant messenger buffer overflow found. Simply sending the appropriate data to someone's IM account can allow you to take complete control of their computer! (This problem is with Windows only)
• Major bug found in Athlon CPUs, relating to extended memory paging via AGP. 2.4 kernel is affected. You can work around the bug in the CPUs by sending "mem=nopentium" to the kernel during bootup.
• Australian Government censors its censorship. The list of blacked-out websites (deemed "indecent") is not being made public.
• Canadian flag is now copyrighted.
• Jon Johansen, co-author of DeCSS, has been arrested by the Norwegian agency in charge of economic crimes, under pressure by the MPAA (Motion Picture Assoc. of America).
• Eric Raymond's new python-based Kernel config. system should be coming somewhere in the Linux Kernel 2.5 series.
• A nasty sudo securiy hole has been found. All major distros. have fixes available.
• A vunerability in URL handling in PINE allows remote users to execute arbitrary code!
• A buffer overflow has been found in gzip.
• A buffer overflow has been found in glibc's filename globbing code. (Fortunately only occurs with filenames ending in "{")
• Kernel 2.5.2 has been released. It includes scheduling tweaks, a devfs update, and more block device work. It also includes a bug which breaks swap, so don't use this one. :^)
• A preemptive kernel patch for the new schedule has been released.

Project Reports

• Demo - There will be no demo in January.

• Installfests - Our last Installfest was yesterday. We had a great turnout - about 13 systems!

• LERT - There were two LERT calls recently.

• Library - The books "The C Standard Library" and "Are Your Lights On?" were donated by Ed Capriolia. "Running Linux, 3rd Ed." was donated by Chris DiBona. Pete Salzman purchased Paragon Partitioning software for Installfests.

Other Business

• Financial Report - $65.XX in voluntary dues were collected.

• Scavenger Hunt! - Jessica Luedtke and Matt Johnson won the scavenger hunt, and each got a copy of Herectic II for Linux.

• 4-H Presentation - 4-H's from around the state will be gathering at UC Davis, and LUGOD has been invited to come talk about Linux. We're planning on attending, but, depending on the length of time they want us to spend, we may need some extra speakers to volunteer.

• LUGODer of the Quarter - Bill Kendrick was recognized as LUGODer of the Quater, and was awarded a copy of Quake III and Heretic II.

Presentation

• Nile Geisinger and Alex Ledin of dLoo software talked about their "Springbox" software.

Attendance

• Pete Salzman
• Rhonda Bailey
• Bill Kendrick
• Melissa Hardenbrook
• Eric Engelhard
• Joel Baumert
• Chris DiBona
• Rod Roark
• Ryan
• Alex Ledin
• Nile
• Ed Capriola
• Mark Kim
• Henry House
• Matt Johnson
• Matt Snelham
• Jessica Luedtke
• Doug Barbieri
• Daniel
• Stephen Helms
• Foo Lim
• David Lindsay
• Aaron Marroquin
• David Siedband
• ... and 11 others

Photos:

Quote of the Meeting:

• Regarding the audio clip of RMS singing: "There was an AUDIENCE ... applauding!" - Bill Kendrick "That's because he stopped" - Matt Johnson