BoomMike writes "While the popular media drools over eWEEK magazine's contrived Open Hack Challenge, which offers modest cash prizes for cracking a carefully arranged network, real geeks can compete in the Honeynet Project's new Forensic Challenge, and pick up the trail of a hacker who cracked one of the project's Linux-based honeypots last November. Mount the file system images and pour through the IDS logs to figure out the who, what, where, when, why and how of the attack, and you can win a book. SecurityFocus has the story." In a much related vein to the Honeynet crack RH6.2/7 there's a story on C|Net concerning the "worm" that's a new popular exploit set with the script kiddies on RH 6/7 servers.

brak writes: "Weird sea creature is found that exhibits Photonic abilities. Talking about its spine, researchers said... "The precise arrangement of the cylinders maximised reflectance around a narrow wave bandwidth, giving rise to the red colour." The whole article can be found at the BBC "

Brett Glass writes: "This paper, first presented at BSDCon 2000, describes state of the art methods of blocking spam and malware using BSD and Sendmail. The techniques described here are also applicable to other operating systems and mail transfer agents, so this paper is worth reading even if you're using NT, Linux, Postfix, qmail, etc. If you've never heard of a Rumplestiltskin attack, are baffled by the finer points of Sendmail configuration, or want to know how to block worms like ILOVEYOU before they reach vulnerable Windows clients, you'll enjoy this paper. Slides from the presentation are also included."

Mike Bouma writes: "Already well over 15,000 developers have bought the Amiga SDK 1.0 and soon there will be an update available (3D, Sound, GUI and performance improvements). It will be downloadable freely for 1.0 buyers and a Windows equivalent will be available. There is an enormous amount of activity going on within the Amiga community, for example only yesterday Hyperion Software acquired the rights for a Europa Universalis port. While Hyperion Software already had an incredible lineup of games licenses for the Amiga (Majesty, Soldier of Fortune, Sin, Heretic II, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Freespace: The Great War, Worms: Armageddon), Linux (Majesty, Sin, Shogo) and Mac (Shogo, Soldier of Fortune). Read this interesting interview with Thomas Frieden to know more about them. They are also working together with Titan Software to port various titles like Alien Nations as Titan has the Amiga and Mac porting rights.(Also their Exodus: the Last War *finally a Napalm beater?* and Evils Doom are great new games) Meanwhile many other companies are investing a lot of effort to support alternative OSes and especially the Next Generation Amiga Digital Environment. Some examples are Epic Interactive and PaganGames (Earth 2140, Scavengers, Magick, Simon The Sorcerer 2, Dafel: Bloodline, etc., for both Amiga/Mac and Foundations series), Crystal Interactive (Gilbert Goodmate, Bubble Heroes, Dark Millennia, Dweebs, Gorky17), Digital Dreams Entertainment (Hell Squad, Wasted Dreams series, Diablo's Land), Blittersoft (Wipeout 2097 for Amiga/Mac, Payback, Homeland, etc.) and many many other small and unannounced companies developing for the new Amiga. Some interesting Amiga SDK information and some open sourced games and utilities for the Amiga SDK can be downloaded here."

Duncan Lawie, our resident science fiction book reviewer takes a look at John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider this week. The book centers on a near future world where access to data means power - sounds like it's taken from today's headlines.

We got word last night that Copyleft has joined the ranks of the named defendants in the DeCSS suit - they received their subpoena yesterday, because they "distribute" the DeCSS source code - on t-shirts.

Welcome to the 2nd edition of Slashback, upgrading your Slashdot experience with another week's worth of additions, updates, new links and new thoughts, all for the same low cost. (Read more.)

randombit has sent us a review of William Stallings' Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice, 2nd ed. The book is a history of cartoons' effects on American children. Er ... rather, the book looks at applications of cryptography and in networking today. If you've read it or have comments, please add to the discussion below.

Professor Pollack put a lot of time and thought into answering your questions, and it shows. What follows is a "deeper than we expected" series of comments about Artificial Intelligence and intellectual property distribution from one of the acknowledged leaders in both fields.

The recent 'Ask Slashdot' about MIDI support for Linux sparked some enlightening conversation about music, computers, and where Linux fits into the state of the art. Development of production-quality authoring, sequencing and notation software is moving ahead, but as in any artistic relationship, there's a symbiotic relationship between artists and the tools they use to ply their trade. Part I of a series.

roadoi asks: "I have a Web server which is running RHLinux 6.0 and Apache 1.3.9+PHP 3.0.12 in a chrooted environment. This machine also runs an ftp server which authenticates off of the main /etc/passwd file. I want to have the ability to add system level accounts from the Web server (by running a script, etc.) and have accounts added to the main /etc/passwd file rather than the cut down /etc/passwd file lying within the chroot environment. Accounts should be active immediately so polling a database or the like at regular intervals is out of the question. Is this at all possible?" I see why polling some file would be such a bad idea, but maybe some kind of solution could be arranged where a daemon could be set to watch a port for account data. This opens up very large can of worms, however and is probably not the best option. Does anyone have any better solutions?

Gazoomba writes, "Researchers at the Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., have found a clue in our genes putting us closer to eternal youth. They hope to eventually do trials on worms and mice to try and get them to live longer and perhaps someday do the same thing for us. More on this story can be read here. "

We've linked to plenty of "secondhand" media pieces about the recent DoS attacks on major commercial Web sites. Fine. Now here's real, hard-core hard-tech info on the subject - in answer to your excellent questions - from somebody who actually knows what's going on, namely Dave Dittrich from the University of Washington. He's been interviewed up the yin-yang this last week by mainstream reporters who probably wouldn't understand half the answers he gives here. But this is Slashdot, so he didn't have to hold back or dumb anything down. Click below and enjoy!

Lawrence Person writes "With Neil Stephenson and Bruce Sterling hot topics of interest here on Slashdot, I thought my "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" might help add to /.'s SF debate. This originally appeared last year in an issue of Nova Express, the Hugo-nominated small press SF magazine I edit. However, though it's been translated into Portugese, it's never appeared on the web before. It discusses exactly why original cyberpunk works like Neuromancer were important, and why the work people like Stephenson, Sterling, Egan, Macleod, etc. are doing right now should more properly be thought of as postcyberpunk.

An anonymous Demon Customer writes "Demon Internet (a UK ISP) are blocking customers' ability to post to USENET through their news servers if a customer posts a message containing a URL to a defamatory article on a website (in this case Dejanews). They claim that the act of posting the URL is equivalent to posting the defamatory article itself. It doesn't end there. If another customer follows- up the original article and has the same URL in the quoted text, they also get their access pulled. Where does it stop? Do message ID's of messages containing the URL count (eg. in the `references' header)? This also opens a whole can of worms for the UK's defamation laws, with regards to the internet. Here is the post from a Demon representative which states their position."

After this most recent succesful foray into reviewing for us, Stern has sent us a review of net.wars. Written by Wendy M. Grossman, the book attempts to take a brainshot of the mid-1990s Internet. Click below to read more.

Kabby writes "I'm surprised it has yet to appear on Slashdot, but... Scientists announced Thursday that they have the first genetic blueprint of a multi-celled animal. Its DNA consists of 97 million chemical unitsand is expected to contain 19,099 genes. CNN has an article that i caught in the NY times this morning. Apparently, we are more closely related to worms than we'd like to be... See for yourself, but I am not convinced yet. " H: Interesting stuff-from what I've heard, the first complete de-coding of a genome. This one is actually cool because of the extent that this particular strand of nematode is used in experiments worldwide.

After the success of yesterday's Package Discussion, I've decided to open another can of worms up today. Making Money on OpenSource is a hard thing to do. Companies can't pay their programmers without cold hard cash, and programmers can't eat without cash. Hit the link below to read a very interesting bit written by Eric W. Sink of CSFactory, Inc.. We can't all write books about software and live off that, and we certainly can't all support others and make a living. How can programmers feed their family in a world where they give away what they do for free? Hit the link below to read more good stuff.