Nessus is a proprietary comprehensive vulnerability scanning tool. It is free of charge for personal use in a non-enterprise environment. Its goal is to detect potential vulnerabilities on the tested systems. Tanable Network Security announced the release of Nessus 4.2.0 last month. Nessus is now using a web based interface to manage scans and their results.

The Nessus vulnerability scanner, is the world-leader in active scanners, featuring high speed discovery, configuration auditing, asset profiling, sensitive data discovery and vulnerability analysis of your security posture. Nessus scanners can be distributed throughout an entire enterprise, inside DMZs, and across physically separate networks.

Nessus is a great security audit tool, and it works quite well with Ubuntu. But, if you install Nessus from the Ubuntu repositories, you're going to be stuck with an older version. If you need the better functionality of the newest version, you'll need to download it from the Nessus.org website.

"THE more things change, the more they stay the same," claims one of our readers, who prefers to remain anonymous. "Got .Nessus in your country's infrastructure?" is the question he asks when suggesting that Microsoft is trying to poison the GNU/Linux operating system so as to gain more control over it because Free software takes over at the expense of Microsoft.

Today we updated the data used by the Linux/BSD Distribution Chooser aka distro quiz. The data has been adjusted to the current development status of the included distributions. We also added support for two new systems: NetBSD and KateOS.

"Gnu FreeFont is a free family of scalable outline fonts, suitable for general use on computers and for desktop publishing. It is Unicode-encoded for compatability with all modern operating systems..." -- via http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/ --

The Conficker worm has infected several million computers since it first started spreading in late 2008. In this paper German developers presented several potential methods to repel Conficker. The approaches presented take advantage of the way Conficker patches infected systems, which can be used to remotely detect a compromised system.

The Internet has always been a place for corroboration and communication, but most Internet communities have degraded substantially. There are large numbers of communities devoted exclusively to sexual talk, and others that focus on illegal activities such as attacking servers or piracy. Here and there, good communities spring up and foster information exchange as well as general chatting.