News in Brief

Slim office
IBM is preparing a slimmed-down alternative to Microsoft's Office suite with a set of applications that run on corporate Web servers. The business productivity application comprises word-processing, spreadsheet, and e-mail software. IBM said that its applications are not intended to compete with the advanced features of MS-Office. Instead, the company is aiming at a large percentage of people who do not use the full set of capabilities in MS-Office. The applications are due in the second quarter of this year and will not be sold alone. The company will bundle them with its WebSphere portal server software.

SCO Linux for Itanium
SCO Group recently released a version of Linux for Intel's Itanium processor family. The software is based on version 1.0 of the Linux distribution from the UnitedLinux consortium, which includes SCO Group, SuSE, Conectiva and Turbolinux. The SCO Linux Server 4.0 for Itanium chips includes remote management features, clustering capabilities to let one system take over if another fails and security auditing tools. The software is available now.

Sendmail Header Processing Vulnerability
A new vulnerability has been discovered in multiple versions of Sendmail, one of the most common e-mail servers. Remote attackers may gain root access and complete control on affected SMTP servers. As SMTP servers are responsible for delivering and receiving e-mail, sensitive information may also be disclosed/tampered with by attackers. Sendmail is a widely used MTA (Message Transfer Agent) for Unix and Microsoft Windows systems. Sendmail has released patches for older versions and has released version 8.12.8, which contains patches for this vulnerability.

Microsoft promises secure Windows
There's a ray of hope for Windows users who are fed up with spam, viruses, worms—and resulting computer crashes. Microsoft says a future version of Windows will be more adept at detecting and handling malicious code. As proof of concept, Microsoft is showing new features for countering viruses and spam in Microsoft Word 2003 and Exchange 2003.