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The long legal battle over ownership of Linux "is closer than ever to ending," reports the Register, "after a panel of three judges ruled a claim against IBM and Red Hat isn't valid, and that time has expired for further action." In 2021, an heir to SCO settled with IBM for $14.25 million — a sum that reflects the fact SCO had for years failed to produce strong evidence to back its claims. Another of SCO's legal successors, Xinuos, filed a new claim that IBM should be on the hook because Big Blue knew it did not own the code it contributed to Linux but instead had a non-exclusive license to use it. Xinuos argued that when IBM contributed Project Monterey code to Linux [25 years ago], it breached that license. Xinuos eventually took that argument to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York — and failed to convince it that IBM and Red Hat had a case to answer. Xinuos appealed, and on August 10th the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided [PDF] not to revisit the District Court's decision, agreeing that the original legalese governing Project Monterey means it's too late to re-litigate the matter. The Appeals Court also agreed that Xinuos tried to frame the case as a licensing issue but failed, instead arguing that the issue was really about ownership. That ain't all, folks, because Xinuos intends to file a petition to have the case re-heard by the full bench of the Court of Appeals. That hardly ever happens, unless the court finds significant errors or major legal issues that make a rehearing worthwhile. Law firm Kaplan says the Second Circuit has allowed reviews of less than 0.03 percent of the cases it has handled. So perhaps this matter is now close to a final resolution. Back in 2000 Slashdot interviewed one of the presidents of SCO.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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David Oldershaw, 61, of New Road in Chelmsford, has been charged with racially aggravated common assault following an incident in Braintree.

The London borough of Barking and Dagenham has the unenviable ranking in a new study - and residents and traders have said they are not surprised.

Official data last week showed government debt is just below £3trillion - a milestone it looks set to hit in the coming months - having been £350bn at the turn of the century.

United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent teased on Sunday that the country will take the 'single greatest financial offensive' against Iran, ahead of a scheduled news conference on Monday.

Chang'e 7 didn’t meet unspecified ‘launch requirements’

Tara Dexter (pictured) bought a smallholding in Sidlesham, West Sussex, while mourning the death of her veteran partner, Gary.

Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira leeched off the kindness of the couple by convincing them to care for her, and lying to explain her grown-up appearance.

Despite an addiction to trying to fix what is not broken, the BBC begin each and every MOTD by celebrating how long this staple of Saturday nights has been on our screens.

It survived testing and the boss signed off, so who was really to blame?

With their arrival on British shores raising innumerable eyebrows, the source said that they will look to work out a mutually beneficial relationship with their family.

The opposite of meritocracy is kakistocracy: the worst and least-qualified are the ones who rise to the top.

Get real familiar with that word, dear readers. I think you'll need it.

If anyone can back me up on this, it's our submitter, Jared B:

I am a teacher by profession, and worked for a year at an ed-tech company founded by a mechanical engineering professor, Harry. Harry had spent a great deal of time in the 90's developing a C interpreter (yes, you read that right). 30 years later, he remained convinced that his interpreter was the technology of the future, and had founded a company that offered math and computer science curriculum to K-12 students based on C programming.

Originally, he had written a textbook that introduced students to programming using a locally-installed version of his interpreter and custom IDE. A little vain, but no serious problems. As Chromebooks grew popular in schools, he had developed a web IDE where students could write and run C code.

But Harry could never give fully give up on the Windows IDE for his C interpreter. So, he included in the web version a "Run Locally" button for those school computers still running Windows. It worked like so: installing the interpreter and IDE locally would also install a daemon that activated on startup and ran a websocket server. This server had an endpoint which accepted as a parameter a string of C code. It would then pass this C code to the locally-installed interpreter to run.

As you might suspect, there was no authentication whatsoever on this local websocket server. Knowing the form of the protocol, ANY domain could connect to localhost:12345/execute_c_program and send arbitrary code to run (of course, Harry prided himself on the completeness of his C implementation, including execv() and the like). Trick a user into visiting a malicious website, and you automatically had RCE on their computer.

Adding insult to injury, I discovered that the server was bound to 0.0.0.0 so that if you had Harry's software (/malware) installed, any computer on the same network as you could send you arbitrary C code to execute without question.

These vulnerabilities had existed for several years before I joined the company. In all that time, Harry had never hired anybody but his own grad students as software developers, and none of them had noticed the problem. By that time, the software was installed on thousands of school-owned computers throughout the state.

I documented and demonstrated the vulnerabilities to Harry. He did release a new version of the software addressing the issues and citing "security improvements" in the release notes, but there was never a communication to school/district IT leaders to describe the importance of updating. I suspect that Harry should be in serious legal trouble for potentially compromising data related to schools and minors, but I've since moved on and dropped the subject.

During the year I spent at the company (not in any sense as a dev, mind you, but as a lowly curriculum writer), I also discovered and reported a cookie-stealing exploit that would have compromised student and teacher data, as well as a code injection on another of Harry's websites (he decided to demonstrate that his C interpreter could work as a web server via a page where a user could type a math expression, which was then eval()ed server-side without any sanitation). The latter vulnerability gave me remote access, where I discovered thousands of transaction records that included credit card information stored in the clear.

Harry's company is still in business to this day, and has recently been ranked in TIME's list of top American ed-tech companies. Oh, and the office router's admin page still had the default Google-able username and password, but that one's a freebie.

I knew someone like this once, only they were stuck on ColdFusion long after everyone else stopped caring about it. However, I don't think they went on to endanger an entire state's educational system, only to be lauded as a visionary leader. Can't say for sure, though.

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