Pine Digital Security announced a FreeBSD kernel leak, found when auditing a customer. The leak can be exploited to panic the server or elevate privileges. FreeBSD swiftly updated CVS, a security advisory will probably follow. Both the -RELEASE branch and -CURRENT branch are vulnerable.

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has an interesting article about an effort to add a Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer to NetBSD. The project has evidently already made a fair amount of progress, currently working to stabilize the WindowServer emulation portion that will then allow NetBSD to run Mac OS X graphical applications."

A reader writes: "Stumbled across a nice article about how the NetBSD Project is organized and some interesting ways users can help out." Good stuff, for those who want to get involved.

RooTchO writes "Included in this release is the new Extended Security Features, Improved/Additional sysctl parameters. New binaries in this release are: pfradix, pfsyncd, aclctl, netacl, getfacl, setfacl and cgdconfig. We have added chrooted sshd, apache, bind. Special files to also see are /etc/sysctl.conf, /etc/acl.conf and /etc/sshd/sshd_conf. And many new other goodies :)))"

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD 5.0-RC2 has been uploaded to ftp-master and is showing up on most of the primary mirrors. ia32, ia64, pc98, and alpha images are available now; sparc64 will be pushed out once it becomes available. The plan going forward is to cut an RC3 in early January, followed by 5.0-RELEASE a week later."

essdodson writes "Scott Long of the FreeBSD release engineering team has posted that FreeBSD 5.0 RC2 has been compiled and should be available shortly. Check it out and help make this the best FreeBSD release so far. The updated release schedule lists Jan 17, 2003 as the anticipated release date."

GrosBill writes "Onlamp publishes one more paper about IRIX binary compatibility implementation on NetBSD. This time, this is about emulating IRIX native multithreading capabilities on NetBSD, which is quite interesting since NetBSD does not support native multithreading for its native binaries yet. The paper also covers some reverse engineering tricks: how to use a debugger to discover everything about IRIX multithreading."

mkeke writes "In a post over at OpenBSD Journal, Theo states that he has written a spam blocker that works with pf and Spews. It looks darn cool :)"

Johnny Mnemonic writes "MacSlash is reporting that the Gnu-Darwin ports project has taken issue with some of Apple's current policies, to the extent of: 'GNU-Darwin will not support or distribute any software which links to proprietary libraries, and that includes Cocoa, Carbon, CoreAudio, etc. There will be no native package manager from GNU-Darwin (pkg_add suffices). Second, we will be moving our operations to x86, and we are putting the ppc collection into maintenance mode.' Astonished reaction on MacSlash, and recognition of the Fink alternative. Is this a worthy principled stand, or is it more like Kruschev banging his shoe in the UN? Will this help or hurt Apple's adoption of GPL technology?"

acaben writes "MacSlash has posted what Jordan Hubbard says will be his last interview for Apple. Apple's Engineering Manager for the BSD Technology Group talks about the new BSDPorts initiative, his thoughts on working for Apple and Apple's Open Source strategy, and how Mac users new to Open Source can get involved and contribute to the community. He also gets delightfully geeky in comparing the differences between Darwin's VM envirnoment and FreeBSD's and explains that Darwin was built with things like working with Final Cut Pro in mind."

Cajal writes "Four students at the University of Waterloo are working to add SMP support to OpenBSD as part of the Spinlocks project. More information is available in a story at the OpenBSD Journal's site. They expect to have an initial working MP kernel in January."

Dan writes "Murray Stokely of FreeBSD release engineering team announces that they're one milestone closer with the immediate availability of FreeBSD first release candidate for the i386, alpha, sparc64, and ia64 platforms. ISO images and FTP installation directories are available now from the FreeBSD FTP site."

LiquidPC writes "The new Daemon News is out. This month there are various articles such as Lightweight FTP jail with NAT, Getting More NetInfo Backups, Setting Up Sophos + Amavis For Postfix. And, of course, the usual Newbie's Corner, Answer Man, and Daemon's Advocate columns."

An anonymous reader writes "CNet has an article up about OpenBSD trying to get documentation for Sun's UltraSparc-III processor. Basically Sun is giving them a bit of run around....There is some documentation available for the processor, but not enough to get things to boot."

An anonymous reader writes "An OpenBSD book is being written and the author is looking for content suggestions to include in the book. It would be nice if the slashdot community suggested a bit or two. ;)"