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Businesses

Submission + - 1st Asian Nation to Adopt Open Software Standards

em8chel writes: "Japan has adopted a policy under which government ministries and agencies will solicit bids from software vendors whose products support internationally recognized open standards and thus becomes the first country in Asia to embrace the open software Standards, The OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance) says in a press release (PDF).

"By giving preference to open software formats such as ODF, it is saying that information should be competitively priced, innovative, and easily available to the widest range of people, now and in the future. We hail Japan for its diligence and vision," congratulates Marino Marcich, ODF alliance Managing Director.

"Securing open standards based interoperability is critical to accelerate innovation. The interoperability framework will propel healthy competition and open up more opportunities for small and medium siye companies in Japan", says Masayuki Hayase of Justsystems Corporation.

The new guidelines are available (in Japanese) from Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry."
Communications

Hotmail vs Goodmail 222

Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton wrote in with his latest column. He says "Are we being too hard on Goodmail for their plans to charge senders a quarter-penny per message to bypass companies' spam filters? Hardly anyone has mentioned that Microsoft has been doing the same thing for years, only (surprise!) charging more. Hotmail lets senders pay a $1,400 "fee" to help get through their spam filter; when I wrote to them about my newsletter being blocked as spam, they said they knew it wasn't spam, but they told me several times they would not even talk about unblocking it unless I paid the $1,400. It's odd that so little attention has been paid to Hotmail's program, since it not only mirrors the Goodmail situation, it validates Goodmail's critics who have said that once you start charging to bypass spam filters, the next step is the marginalization of people who won't pay." Read on for more words.
Operating Systems

Ubuntu Continues to Grab Market Share 427

slasher writes "MadPenguin.org discusses the future of Ubuntu and confirms Ubuntu's growing market share in the Linux market. Author Matt Hartley writes, "Now, for the biggest question: do high numbers mean that Ubuntu is the best distribution out there? Some will argue that this is an impossible point to make, as each person has different needs from their distribution. But for the sake of this article, we will be considering the average user, not the Slackware crowd, who is obviously much more comfortable within a command line environment than mainstream users."
Security

Secretly Monopolizing the CPU Without Being Root 250

An anonymous reader writes "This year's Usenix security symposium includes a paper that implements a "cheat" utility, which allows any non-privileged user to run his/her program, e.g., like so 'cheat 99% program' thereby insuring that the programs would get 99% of the CPU cycles, regardless of the presence of any other applications in the system, and in some cases (like Linux), in a way that keeps the program invisible from CPU monitoring tools (like 'top'). The utility exclusively uses standard interfaces and can be trivially implemented by any beginner non-privileged programmer. Recent efforts to improve the support for multimedia applications make systems more susceptible to the attack. All prevalent operating systems but Mac OS X are vulnerable, though by this kerneltrap story, it appears that the new CFS Linux scheduler attempts to address the problem that were raised by the paper."

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