Russia may not be the only place spam hosts lay in wait. Tuesday of this week San Jose webhoster McColo went offline. The result is that the world's spam rate is now down by three-quarters, at least according to the Washington Post's online service.

The opening keynote Thursday of the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego was by author and security expert Bruce Schneier. In his opinion "perceived security" should be an aspect of all security implementation.

In one fell swoop and with an automatically distributed patch, Google and T-Mobile fixed a problem with the G1 mobile phone whereby users could access root privileges and possibly raise all kinds of havoc.

Israeli security firm Yoggie has released its Linux-based USB Stick Firewall Gatekeeper product in an Open Source version. The open firewall products also include a developer kit.

Linux kernel developer Ted T'so shared his know-how in a number of tutorials at the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego. One theme was getting first help for system crashes, and in the process, he took the opportunity to present SystemTap.

Nmap is rolling out a new scripting engine to automatically investigate vulnerabilities that turn up in a security scan. We’ll show you how to protect your network with Nmap and NSE.

Sun Microsystems has added three new members to its Storage 7000 family that include Open Source software.

Adobe cautions in an advisory against a whole series of flaws in Adobe Reader 8.1.2. Most of them also affect Linux.