News http://bitspyder.net/ The 'libxml2' library is prone to an integer-overflow vulnerability because it fails to properly verify user-supplied data when handling XML files. Successful exploits of this vulnerability allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary machine code in the context of an affected application. Failed exploits may crash the application. This issue affects libxml2-2.7.2; other versions may also be affected. Bugtraq ID: 32326 Class: Boundary Condition Error CVE: CVE-2008-4226 Remote: Yes Local: No Published: Nov 17 2008 12:00AM Updated: Nov 18 2008 08:34AM Credit: Drew Yao from Apple Product Security Vulnerable: XMLSoft Libxml2 2.7.2 RedHat Linux Advanced Workstation 2.1 for the Ita 2.1 IA64 RedHat Enterprise Linux WS 4 RedHat Enterprise Linux WS 3 RedHat Enterprise Linux WS 2.1 RedHat Enterprise Linux ES 4 RedHat Enterprise Linux ES 3 RedHat Enterprise Linux ES 2.1 RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop Workstation 5 client RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 client RedHat Enterprise Linux AS 4 RedHat Enterprise Linux AS 3 RedHat Enterprise Linux AS 2.1 IA64 RedHat Enterprise Linux AS 2.1 RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop version 4 RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 server RedHat Desktop 3.0 Debian Linux 4.0 sparc Debian Linux 4.0 s/390 Debian Linux 4.0 powerpc Debian Linux 4.0 mipsel Debian Linux 4.0 mips Debian Linux 4.0 m68k Debian Linux 4.0 ia-64 Debian Linux 4.0 ia-32 Debian Linux 4.0 hppa Debian Linux 4.0 arm Debian Linux 4.0 amd64 Debian Linux 4.0 alpha Debian Linux 4.0 http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10530&hit=1 Adobe AIR is prone to a security vulnerability that allows attackers to execute arbitrary JavaScript code with elevated privileges in the context of the application. In addition, since Adobe AIR employs Flash Player, the application is prone to the same recent security vulnerabilities announced for that product. For details, please see the following BIDs: Versions prior to Adobe AIR 1.5 are vulnerable. Bugtraq ID: 32334 Class: Unknown CVE: Remote: Yes Local: No Published: Nov 17 2008 12:00AM Updated: Nov 17 2008 11:34PM Credit: Chris Weber of Casaba Security Vulnerable: Adobe AIR 1.1 Adobe AIR 1.01 Adobe AIR 1.0 http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10529&hit=1 Rogue VMs -- Be Very Afraid A rogue VM is no different than a rogue physical server, with the exception that many organizations have policies in place to prevent the introduction of rogue physical servers into the IT infrastructure, but either have no policy in place or do not enforce existing security policies to prevent users from connecting rogue VMs to the LAN. How does it happen? Typically, rogue VMs appear on user desktop systems more than anywhere else. In many organizations, users are allowed to run any of the following virtualization applications locally on their desktops: * Microsoft Virtual PC * VirtualBox * VMware Player * VMware Server * VMware Workstation Once a user has a virtualization application installed, he is free to download pre-configured virtual machines from the Internet or to copy VMs locally to his system using removable media such as a USB thumb drive. Users enjoy the freedom to run VMs locally because virtualization allows them to more easily conduct tests and train on new systems. While that's great, problems arise when users connect unpatched or unmanaged VMs directly to the company LAN. Keep in mind that most downloadable virtual appliances are not at the most recent OS and application patch levels, and very few have any pre-installed anti-virus protection. Please read the full article here (little long to copy paste here) http://virtualizationreview.com/columns/article.aspx?editorialsid=2653 http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10528&hit=1 VMware, Inc. VMW, the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that Redmond magazine readers have named VMware Workstation the best virtual PC product and VMware Server the best server virtualization product, marking the fifth-consecutive year that VMware products have been honored by Redmond. Past recognition by Redmond includes the ‘Best of the Best’, Editors' Choice, Most Valuable Product, "Products We Love!" and Readers’ Choice Awards. “We’re honored to be recognized by the readers of Redmond for five years running,” said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware. “It’s a testament to the quality, usability and innovation of VMware Server and VMware Workstation that they earn prestigious awards year in and year out. Our success stems from addressing a fundamental need of both business and government to do more with less. VMware virtualization has become a strategic platform for over 120,000 customers by reducing hardware, operational and environmental costs and increasing efficiency, flexibility and effectiveness. Moving forward, we are building on our value proposition by broadening our platform into a virtual datacenter operating system for an enterprise cloud that is highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing. We are proud of our market and innovation leadership, and dedicated to continuing to deliver increasingly transformative value to our customers.” VMware Server provides a superior introductory experience to virtualization with a stable, easy-to-use hosted virtualization platform that supports a broad range of operating systems and hardware. VMware Server includes a new intuitive Web-based management interface to provide a consistent management experience for Windows® and Linux users, supporting over 30 flavors of guest operating systems. Leveraging VMware’s industry-leading proven and stable virtualization technology, VMware Server provides an entry point to VMware’s broader Virtual Datacenter Operating System platform, VMware Infrastructure. More than 3 million copies of VMware Server have been downloaded since it was released in 2006. VMware Server is downloadable for free at www.vmware.com/download/server/. VMware Workstation 6.5 is the gold standard virtualization tool for technical professionals and is the most advanced and robust desktop virtualization solution for creating and running multiple operating systems locally on a single physical PC. With unparalleled advanced features like VM Record and Replay and Integrated Virtual Debugger for Visual Studio, Workstation provides software developers a revolutionary debugging experience with the benefit of deterministic replay and simulation of reverse execution. VMware Workstation is an indispensable tool in any serious software professional’s toolkit. VMware Workstation 30-day free evaluations are available from www.vmware.com/products/ws. “The most exciting aspect of the Readers’ Choice awards is the fact that users of the products choose the winners,” said Lee Pender, executive editor of Redmond, who coordinated the 2008 awards process. “Our readers are people in the trenches who use the products every day and know what works and what doesn’t. They’re the ultimate panel of judges, and year after year, they consistently vote VMware Workstation and VMware Servers as best products.” More information about the Redmond magazine Readers’ Choice Awards is available at: http://redmondmag.com/features/article.aspx?editorialsid=2573. http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10527&hit=1 Why Apple Won't Allow Adobe Flash on iPhone Don't hold your breath waiting for the iPhone to support Adobe's Flash software: Apple's terms-of-service agreement prohibits it. Although Adobe says it is working on a version of its popular Flash player for the iPhone, Apple is unlikely ever to permit it to appear in the handset's App Store, no matter how much customers want it. "I'm pretty skeptical that Flash could be implemented in a way that doesn't violate the Terms of Service of the developer's agreement," said Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous, developer of the popular Tap Tap Revenge iPhone game. Flash is Adobe's highly popular platform for displaying interactive graphics, animations and multimedia within a browser. According to Adobe, 98 percent of desktop computers currently support Flash, which has led to its widespread use by web developers. Adobe's recent announcement that it is working on a version of Flash for Windows Mobile has prompted speculation that an iPhone version might be coming soon. But the speculators may be waiting in vain, based on Apple's TOS and the company's history of tightly controlling applications for its smartphone platform. Allowing Flash — which is a development platform of its own — would just be too dangerous for Apple, a company that enjoys exerting total dominance over its hardware and the software that runs on it. Flash has evolved from being a mere animation player into a multimedia platform capable of running applications of its own. That means Flash would open a new door for application developers to get their software onto the iPhone: Just code them in Flash and put them on a web page. In so doing, Flash would divert business from the App Store, as well as enable publishers to distribute music, videos and movies that could compete with the iTunes Store. Apple's well aware of these problems, which is why the company wrote a clause in its iPhone developers' Terms of Service agreement (.pdf) that prohibits Flash from appearing on the iPhone: "An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise," reads clause 3.3.2 of the iPhone SDK agreement, which was recently published on WikiLeaks. "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)." This could come as major disappointment to iPhone owners, as the lack of Flash support has been a paramount complaint about the handset since its release. No Flash means that the iPhone browser is incapable of displaying a large portion of the internet. For example, free Flash games aren't supported, videos can't be streamed from the vastly popular television and movie site Hulu, and websites that use Flash to render content or navigation won't work on the iPhone. It's no wonder Adobe is expressing reluctance about the prospects of Flash for iPhone. The company on Monday demonstrated a version of Flash for Windows Mobile handsets. And all that product manager Michele Turner could say about iPhone was, "We are working on Flash on the iPhone, but it is really up to Apple." Adam Dann, CEO of Nullriver, agrees that Flash would take away some of Apple's control. Apple eventually banned Nullriver's application NetShare because it violated AT&T Terms of Service agreement by turning the iPhone into a wireless modem for tethering. If Apple introduced Flash to iPhone, it's possible Nullriver could code a Flash version of NetShare, repeating that violation, Dann said. Dann added that the only way Flash could ever appear on the iPhone is if Adobe offered an extremely stripped-down version of the software. But even if there is a "Flash Lite" for iPhone, that just reinforces the point that the handset's owners still will not have a true Flash experience. And aside from taking software control away from Apple, Flash would introduce a slew of other potential headaches as well. Flash apps could hurt battery life, suck up the graphics-processing unit's power, use an inordinate amount of memory, or potentially introduce security risks. Apple has plenty of customer complaints to address about the iPhone; the last thing it needs is to add Adobe and Flash to the pile. In August, Britain's Advertising Standards Authority pulled an iPhone advertisement because the commercial said, "All the parts of the internet are on the iPhone." The lack of Flash and Java support on iPhone were enough for the ad to be deemed misleading. And it's looking like Apple won't be able to air that ad again. Apple did not return phone calls for comment. http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10526&hit=1 EMC Acquires Additional VMware Shares from Intel EMCCorporation announced that it has purchased 500,000 additional shares of VMware Class A common stock, bringing EMC’s ownership of VMware's total outstanding common stock to approximately 84%. The 500,000 shares were purchased from Intel Corporation. http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10525&hit=1 Microsoft Active Directory is prone to a username-enumeration weakness because of a design error in the application when verifying user-supplied input. Attackers may exploit this weakness to discern valid usernames. This may aid them in brute-force password cracking or other attacks. This issue affects Active Directory on these versions of Windows: Windows 2000 SP4 Windows Server 2003 SP1 and SP2 Other versions may also be affected. An attacker may use the Microsoft Windows Active Directory logon interface to exploit this issue. Solution: Currently we are not aware of any vendor-supplied patches. Bugtraq ID: 32305 Class: Design Error CVE: Remote: Yes Local: No Published: Nov 14 2008 12:00AM Updated: Nov 15 2008 06:05AM Credit: Bernardo Damele Assumpcao Guimaraes - Portcullis Computer Security Vulnerable: Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Web Edition SP2 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Web Edition SP1 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition SP2 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition SP1 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition SP1 Microsoft Windows 2000 Server SP4 Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional SP4 Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server SP4 Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP4 3DM Software Disk Management Software SP2 3DM Software Disk Management Software SP1 http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10524&hit=1 Google is expected to release a free iPhone application today that lets iPhone owners ask to find local businesses, get driving directions, ask basic search queries ("What's the capital of Belgium?"), and displays them on-screen "within seconds on a fast wireless network," according to the New York Times. I don't see it in the iTunes app store yet; tell us in the comments if you do. [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/google_iphone.jpg[/img] http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10523&hit=1 [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/winwget_splash.jpg[/img] Any Unix-friendly dude or lady will tell you that Wget packs a ton of power for such a small terminal command. It can grab different versions of the same file on a regular basis, crawl through web sites to mirror content as many links deep as you'd like, grab the newest MP3s or Flash video files from a popular web site, and stretch it as far as your data-trading imagination can stretch. And with WinWget, a free wget graphical interface for Windows, you don't need to learn how to append a half-dozen options and switches in the right order and capitalization. Read on for a look at a couple of examples of how WinWget can expand your downloading power on Windows. NOTE: While WinWget spares you a bit of typing, a basic understanding of how to use wget makes it far more powerful. For a primer on getting started, try Gina's guide to mastering wget from the command line. [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/winw_options.jpg[/img] [b]Getting started[/b] WinWget doesn't require much setup at all—the program doesn't actually install itself on your machine, and any changes you make to its basic options are saved in the self-contained executable file. Click on Tools and then Options, though, and you can set the default download directory, how many threads WinWget is allowed to run at once, set up proxies if needed, and choose whether WinWget monitors your clipboard for links while it's open. That's helpful for huge downloads with big URLs you find on the web you want to feed to WinWget to keep trying to download, or pointing it to web sites to mirror. All the other options are what you set when you head to Jobs, then Add New Job. All that's actually required is entering a name and address for the download, but all the little checkboxes and number inputs in the tabs at bottom are pretty self-explanatory, and hovering over them gives you a little helpful tooltip as to what they do. What if you want to use WinWget on a scheduled basis, to grab the same file over and over? You can use any scheduling app for Windows to run a basic wget command using WinWget's command line function. On a standard installation, the command would be something like C:\Program Files\WinWGet\WinWGet.exe -http://whateverurl.com. If you're looking for manual control and timing, you can have WinWget auto-start by adding it to your startup folder and right-clicking its system tray icon to hit "Run All Jobs" and let it work in the background. [b]Dynamic wallpaper[/b] While showing off my own method for rotating desktop backgrounds in Ubuntu Linux, commenter Joeleena had an elegant solution that utilized an auto-updating world weather map and a bit of wget magic to make the background change with the world. With WinWGet, that kind of neat hack is not only possible in Windows, it's one copy-paste and a few clicks. Here's how I set my options to grab the image and replace the file. The "Timestamping" option doesn't grab the file if it isn't any newer than the one already in place: [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/wget_weather.jpg[/img] [b]Mirror a web site[/b] This is definitely one of wget's strengths, and basically gets its own options page. I've enabled the options below to grab all the images and other content that makes my web site display properly (-p), grab every page the app stumbles across (-r), make non-local links local (-k), and grab the next pages that my front page links out to (-l set to "1"). As Gina said in her original guide, through, be careful how you go about making local copies of the internet—you'll never be able to match Google's storage space. [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/winwget_mirror.jpg[/img] Those are my examples, but I'm sure our experienced Linux users can think of a few they can suggest to those without a mastery of the command line. Share the wealth in the comments. http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10522&hit=1 [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/2008-11-14_005558.jpg[/img] Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe AIR): Free Adobe AIR application MiniTask is a light-weight task manager with a surprising number of features. MiniTask displays in single window, the entire functionality of the application exists in one menu available via right click. You can bulk remove done tasks, separate tasks them with a simple labeled line break, set alarms, and export your tasks easily to the clipboard. MiniTask has handy keyboard shortcuts like the ability to create a new labeled divider by typing **divider name** in your task list, MiniTask will automatically convert and place it. MiniTask is a free cross-platform download that requires Adobe AIR. http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10521&hit=1 This must take the record for the trippiest data-center build anywhere, ever: It's an old nuclear bunker 30 meters below central Sotckholm, and its new conversion for one of Sweden's biggest ISPs has made it truly 007-worthy. Check it: it has simulated daylight, greenhouses and waterfalls, there're German submarine engines rigged as emergency backup generators, plus there's 1.5 megawatts of cooling for the servers. Oh, and it can survive a hydrogen bomb attack. That's 'cause it was built into the old "Pionen White Mountains" nuclear bunker from the Cold War, though they took a year to convert it, and had to blast out more than 4,000 cubic meters of extra rock to make room for Bahnhof's infrastructure. The backup engines are two Maybach MTU diesels, and they've got the submarine emergency sound horns still in place. Meanwhile the net connections even have triple redundancy, with the fiber-optic and copper trunk lines following three different routes into the bunker. That's one massively redundant data center, no doubt about it. On the human side, the 15 staff are treated to a 2600-liter fish tank, and a circular mid-air glass-walled conference room that has a moon-map for a floor. The CEO himself has confirmed that some sci-fi movie inspiration was deliberately incorporated into the design. Craziness. [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/bunkerserver.jpg[/img] http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10520&hit=1 Rumor has it over at [url=http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/13/is-apple-building-a-search-engine/]TechChrunch[/url] that Apple is working on some type of search engine. If you think about it, the idea is not so far-fetched: Apple’s Safari browser has 6-7% market share and currently uses Google exclusively as the search engine for both the standard and mobile versions on the iPhone and iPod. Through the maligned MobileMe, Apple has a suite of personal productivity tools that bring more traffic to them on a daily basis, which means there is a lot of searching going on without a lot of monetization on Apple’s part, according to Michael Arrington. Plus, there’s the Android factor. Google’s Android-y competition to the iPhone is not to be ignored. Arrington notes that Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who sits on Apple’s board of directors, usually sits out of discussions involving Apple’s mobile strategy. http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10519&hit=1 USB 3.0 will be unveiled next Monday, and so far the new specs for the protocol look incredible, promising 25GB transfers in a mere 70 seconds. To put that in perspective, the same transfer would take 13.9 minutes with the current USB 2.0 protocol and 9.3 hours on USB 1.0. Looks like the future of wired syncs and backups is bright and blazing. [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/superspeed.png[/img] http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10518&hit=1 [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/despam.jpg[/img] An office tower in downtown San Jose, California has long served as home to McColo—a hosting company whose servers in turn have quietly served as a conduit to a huge majority of the world's spam email, scam prescription drug markets and child porn sites. After investigations by the Washington Post's Security Fix blog identified McColo as supreme baddies and shut them down, web security firms saw spam volumes drop almost instantly by up to 75% The chart here was sent to the Post by a German hosting facility manager, showing spam's immediate decline after McColo's shutdown (Security Fix has several more charts from security organizations and individuals showing the same thing). It's fun to consider the trickle down effects here—just think of the saved CPU cycles on webmail hosts worldwide who suddenly had 70% less U.S. spam to crunch on, and the energy savings resulting? Last time this happened, when a similar northern California spam ISP called the "Atrivo" network was busted, it only took spammers a few days to get back to their old ways on another network. So, be sure to revel fully in a world free of Viagra deals, Kenyan wire transfer offers and content sharing proposals from personal lubrication sites (Mark's claim to wealth) while you can. http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10517&hit=1 [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/opengoo_splash.jpg[/img] Maybe you like the convenience and portability of Google Docs, Zoho, or any of the myriad other online office suites and scheduling applications out there, but you're not crazy about posting your documents and organizational data to Google or anyone who can guess your password. OpenGoo, a free office package that's easy to install on nearly any modern web space, gives you go-anywhere access to your own documents, calendar, contacts, tasks, and even email. We took OpenGoo through a test installation and grabbed a few screens to show off the suite's slick interface and features, so read on to see how you can test out your own web-as-desktop experience without pledging allegiance to any one web firm. If you just want to take a peek around OpenGoo without any commitment, the team has put up a live demonstration where anyone can create, edit and delete anything, though it's cleared out every day. Be prepared for some files named LULZ, in other words. If you really want to try it out yourself, the first step, as you might imagine, is heading to OpenGoo's web site and downloading the latest release in zipped format. If you're planning on installing OpenGoo on your own web space, it's simply a matter of un-zipping the archive and transferring the folder inside to your server, wherever you'd like to access it. I renamed the folder from opengoo_1.0 to simply opengoo for easy of access. If you want to try out OpenGoo without posting it live online, you can easily do so with a package like the WAMP Server for Windows, MAMP for Mac OS X, or installing Apache 2, mySQL 4.1 or higher, and PHP 5 on your Linux system (here's an example guide for Ubuntu). Extract the OpenGoo folder to your "www" folder wherever your server package ended up installing. Wherever you installed OpenGoo, head to that directory in your web browser--c:/wamp/www/opengoo would be a likely spot for WAMP installers, for example—and you'll be re-directed to an automated installation script page, similar to a WordPress installation: [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/opengoo1.jpg[/img] Hit "Next," and OpenGoo will run checks to see if you've got all the required extensions and permissions to run. If you're on your own system or a modern web space you rent, this should be a quick pass. Hit "Next," and you're at the database setup: [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/opengoo_database.jpg[/img] If you're using a tool like phpMyAdmin, it's definitely a good idea to create a new database for OpenGoo and give it its own username and password. If not, at least give the root user a password, rather than leaving it as the default blank. If you've got the details right, OpenGoo will work for a few minutes, show you a "Finished!" page, then ask you to create an administrator account and password, along with an email address for lost or forgotten passwords. You'll have to supply a company name, but you can obviously put whatever you want in there. Once that's all done, you'll be dropped at OpenGoo's main page (which I smooshed in my browser a bit to fit in a screenshot): [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/opengoo_wide.jpg[/img] Here's what it looks like when it gets a bit busier than I'm able to fake, courtesy of the live demonstration: [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/opengoo_busy.jpg[/img] The universal calendar view is pretty darn helpful, giving you a glimpse at all your events, tasks, and "milestones" (basically projects that organize tasks) in one view. As you add documents, notes, and web links to your workspace, they'll show up here as well. Now to the basics—writing and saving documents. There aren't any spreadsheets in OpenGoo 1.0, but the editing tools for documents and PowerPoint-esque slideshows are pretty extensive: [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/opengoo_editing.jpg[/img] If you're a fan of pre-2007 Word toolbars, OpenGoo's in your corner, seemingly. You can hide all those toolbars, though, by clicking the tiny little arrow in the left-most stripe. What everyone's going to notice first off, and likely call a deal-breaker, is that you can only save this document as a formatted HTML file. To download it as that, even, you have to head back to the main documents screen. I don't think it's necessarily a bird flipped in the direction of proprietary Word formatting, or even the ODF/OpenOffice movement, but an indicator that OpenGoo is where you go to work on documents, not pull off conversions. Copying and pasting my text in the screenshot into Word 2007 worked just as I'd hoped, with colors, formatting and sizes carried over. One solid difference between OpenGoo and big-name online docs sites is its catering to multiple users and standard business practices. Check out what you can do with a document when selecting it in the Documents overview: [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/document_view.jpg[/img] As you can see, you can download any version of a document (also in HTML-only), "checkout" the file to prevent others from editing temporarily, move it to another workspace, link it to other documents or notes and calendar appointments, and create "subscribers" who get notified when changes are made. We spend a lot of time checking out brand-new calendar tools at Lifehacker (seriously). OpenGoo has some of the most robust features for a new launch we've seen, with Outlook-compatible invitation sending, tagging, smart repeating events, object linking, and custom "properties" to create super-smart searches later: [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/opengoo_calendar.jpg[/img] Rather than loading this page with even more huge-screen pics to slow down loading even further, I'll say that OpenGoo's notes, contacts, tasks, links organizer, and calendar tool share are all of an intriguing, if not quite newcomer-friendly, piece: They're all well thought-out, efficient, and powerfully connected, but getting data into and out of OpenGoo at this point doesn't seem intuitive. There's no clear import or export functions, certainly not for non-HTML formats, so it seems like OpenGoo is mostly a place to start fresh with a new project or team. Having said that, one more cool feature of OpenGoo is its support for integrated email—POP for now, with IMAP to soon come. Setting up POP mail is a familar fill-in-the-blank game with usernames, passwords, ports and servers. I saw an option for enabling "Exchange compatibility" during setup, and the email writing interface is a decent rich-text affair, with (no surprises) tagging, object linking, and custom categorization. [img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/opengoo_mail.jpg[/img] Those are the basics of OpenGoo's roll-your-own online office suite, though you'll find a lot more by checking it out yourself, including the ability to back up your entire document space to an off-site file, support for multiple clients/companies/groups, and an auto-upgrade features to save everyone a lot of FTP headaches. Tried out the live demonstration or fired up your own copy of OpenGoo? Like what you see, or see a lot of promise? Can't imagine working without Microsoft Office compatibility baked in? Tell us your take on OpenGoo in the comments. http://bitspyder.net/newsdetails.php?id=10516&hit=1