Short Items of Interest on Security
White House, DoD Demonstrate Support for Open Source Software 
The Office of the Secretary of Defense CIO recently released policy guidance promoting the use of open source software throughout the U.S. Department of Defense. The DoD is not the only area where the federal government is embracing open source, so is the White House whose Web site now runs on open source technologies. “By choosing open source software as the defining technology of Whitehouse.gov, it is clear that the President means business,” said Bill Vass, president and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal.
On Amazon EC2’s Cloud Computing Service
There is a new release of hardened OpenSolaris 2008.11 AMI on Amazon EC2’s cloud computing service. It contains Drupal AMI with AMP stack. Installed and pre-configured on this publicly available AMI are Drupal v6.10, Apache v2.2, MySQL v5.0, and PHP v5.2. In his introduction of this release, Sun Distinguished Engineer and Chief Security Architect Glenn Brunette offers two points: 1) no security-relevant changes were necessary to Drupal; and 2) MySQL was modified to not listen on the network for connections.
