TechNiche

A worm capable of compromising FreeBSD systems running the Apache Web server is circulating the Internet. The worm, now known as Scalper, takes advantage of the known Apache HTTP Server chunk encoding stack overflow vulnerability to spread itself, according to Symantec. The open source Apache server is the most popular Web server on the Internet and is the engine running almost 65% of the Web sites found on the Internet. This is one of the first worms discovered that affect the Unix-like FreeBSD operating system, and although anti-virus companies are including it in their latest warnings lists, the worm is not known to be prevalent "in the wild".

Microsoft yesterday announced the launch of a new language, Visual J# .NET, at its European developer conference, rounding out the company`s list of .NET developer tools. Visual J# .NET is a development tool for Java-language developers building applications and services on the .NET framework. Other languages in the Visual Studio .NET suite include Visual C++ .NET, Visual C# .NET and Visual Basic .NET. The tool includes built-in XML Web services support so that existing J++ and Java language programmers can get up to Web services speed as quickly as possible.

A report from Gartner Dataquest reveals that more than one billion PCs have been shipped worldwide, and it predicts that the rate of adoption will increase dramatically to reach the two billion mark before 2008. The report says the greatest sales will occur in emerging markets such as China, Latin America, and India. According to a local survey conducted by World Wide Worx, only 3% of South African households are equipped with a PC.

The US Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reports that software bugs cost the US economy nearly $60 billion every year and that half this cost is carried by the users and vendors. NIST also found that $22 billion could be saved if the products were more thoroughly tested prior to their general release. [Full report]