"It's a dangerous Internet out there, kids. If you are going to work on remotely connected machines, do it safely. Simple file transfers and interactive sessions have scp and ssh respectively; in fact there is hardly a commercial Web hosting provider left that doesn't support them. For more complicated scenarios we have VPN tools. But what if you need to work with files on a remote server, but find scp tedious in repetition and FreeS/WAN too cumbersome? You might find just what you're looking for in sshfs -- a tool for mounting a remote filesystem transparently and securely as if it were just another directory on your local machine.

"sshfs is primarily the work of Miklos Szeredi, a Linux hacker from Budapest who is better-known as the creator of FUSE, the Filesystem in USErspace framework that makes sshfs possible. Szeredi was already working on FUSE when he discovered Florin Malita's similar project named LUFS and its SSHFS filesystem..."

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" Security architecture is a new concept to many computer users. Users are aware of security threats such as viruses, worms, spyware, and other malware. They have heard of, and most use, anti-virus programs and firewalls. Many use intrusion detection. Architectural security, though, remains a mystery to most computer users". The truth is, anti-virus software, firewalls, and intrusion detection are only the surface of security..."

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By: Chris Lynch

Most of us have heard of BitTorrent, the highly scalable peer-to-peer file sharing technology designed to reduce the bandwidth strain on content distributors. With BitTorrent, the challenge is not in finding content to download, but in installing BitTorrent on your computer and finding a good, user-friendly client to manage them. We took a look at BitTorrent itself and the excellent Azureus client, and can offer you some tips on how to install them on your system.

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By: Benjamin D. Thomas

This week, advisories were released for cyrus-imapd, curl, xloadimage, xli, PERL, slypheed, libgal2, libsoup, evolution, gimp, procps, lsof, lockdev, xloadimage, mailman, boost, kdelibs, firefox, thunderbird, mozilla, devhelp, epiphany, rxvt, LTris, MySQL, ethereal, ipsec-tools, and ImageMagick. The distributors include Conectiva, Debian, Fedora, Genotoo, Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE.

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By: Brice Burgess

Last week I was faced with the situation every user and administrator dreads -- my Web server was hacked. Here's hoping you can use my experience as a guide to investigating your own compromised server, if and when the time comes.<> The nightmare started when I returned to my office to discover 17 missed calls on my cell phone. A moment later, the phone rang again. A frantic customer complained of "eyes" on his Web site. I visit the site, and, lo and behold, discovered it proclaiming being "owned" by a hacking group. Upon further investigation, I discovered all the other Web sites on the Debian-based server had been defaced.

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"If you're thrifty and you use an office suite, it's hard not to like OpenOffice.org, the open-source set of office productivity tools. Version 1.0, which first appeared in 2002, does most things Microsoft Office can do (including smoothly trade files with users of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint). Plus it's free. So what's to improve in version 2.0?

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