<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela Electronic News Posted: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Proyecto Venezuela (PV) has publicly criticized the Venezuelan government's intention to turn April 11 into a town Carnival. PV policy director Maria Sol Perez Schael says 85 people died in April 11-14 and many small  storekeepers in barrio slum areas lost their businesses in the looting. 

"Since government-opposition negotiations started 7 months ago in the presence of Organization of American States (OAS)  general secretary, Cesar Gaviria, the opposition has tried to get a truth commission set up to see that justice is done ... the government has stalled every attempt to set up the commission." 

PV national coordinator, Luis Carlos Rubio says the government is incompetent in economic matters and is promoting more chaos in Venezuela. "Its exchange rate strategy is criminal and thankfully, there are voices, such as Economic Planning Minister  Felipe Perez, who are already talking about eventually eliminating the Exchange Administration Commission (Cavidi)."

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela Electronic News Posted: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Gung-ho Venezuelan Ranchers Federation (Fedenaga) president, Jose Luis Betancourt accuses the government of using agricultural deeds to hand land to Colombian guerrilla groups in border States. 

"There are subversive groups, common criminals, paramilitaries, hired assassins acting against us, Venezuelan producers ... they want to get in here through squatting and invading lands and are protected by members of the Armed Force (FAN) ... the use of agricultural deeds as imposed by Lands Institute president, Adan Chavez is completely unconstitutional."  

Betancourt, who declared war on the Chavist government last month, singles out Barinas State where he says the government land policy undermines Federation members' personal security and feeding the population. 

"It's not just a matter of defending farms but defending Venezuelan's food sources ... Barinas produces meat for 35,000 people ... milk production will drop this year 5-6% and meat 12-14% making Venezuela more dependant on imports." 

Sniping at pro-government National Assembly (AN) deputies, who visit border areas as House committee members, Betancourt calls them liars. 

"They claim that there are no subversives in border areas ... hiding the reality is to disregard the disease ... they identify with the subversives' ideology ... they should not use their parliamentary privilege to attack Venezuelan identity."

<a href=asia.reuters.com>Reuters Tue March 25, 2003 02:23 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - World oil prices fell back on Tuesday as British television networks said there were reports of an uprising against President Saddam Hussein in Iraq's second city of Basra.

U.S. light crude CLc1 fell 51 cents to $28.15 a barrel after a $1.75 jump on Monday. London Brent crude LCOc1 dropped $1.04 a barrel to $25.05.

Military officials said they knew nothing about any revolt in Basra but the British military said they would do everything possible to encourage and support any Iraqis trying to overthrow forces loyal to Saddam.

The reports reversed early gains made as Iraqi forces resisted a U.S. military thrust toward Baghdad while tribal violence in Nigeria kept nearly 40 percent of the country's crude output shut.

U.S. and British forces faced tough resistance from Iraqi fighters as they opened an assault on Republican Guards defending approaches to Baghdad in a campaign aimed to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Oil fell 25 percent last week as traders bet on a short war with little damage to Iraq's oil industry. Before the conflict, Iraq exported about 1.7 million barrels per day (bpd) to the 77 million bpd world market.

But confidence in a quick war waned after the weekend as U.S. and British forces suffered casualties and saw slower progress.

"While there are few who doubt the outcome of the conflict in Iraq, given the technological superiority of coalition forces, Iraq's oil infrastructure escaping damage is not as certain," said John Kilduff of Fimat bank in a report.

Meanwhile a series of bloody clashes in Nigeria forced closure at the weekend of just over 800,000 bpd of the 2.2 million bpd produced by Western oil firms in the West African OPEC nation.

Ethnic groups in the oil-rich Niger Delta have said they were battling for a greater share of the country's oil wealth.

Nigeria is one of the top six oil exporters to the United States, where fuel supplies have been running at 27-year lows partly due to an oil workers' strike in Venezuela.

Nigeria, which averaged 560,000 bpd to U.S. refiners last year, where its crude is valued for its high gasoline content, also exports to Europe and Asia.

"Nigerian crude is not the kind of stuff you want to be short of," said Paul Horsnell, oil analyst at J.P. Morgan. "It's very serious. It's not a little local disturbance."

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries said on Monday it could make up any shortfall in supply from Nigeria, OPEC's fifth largest producer.

The group has also pledged to make up for the disruption to Iraqi exports but now has only the slimmest of spare capacity cushions.

Code posted takes advantage of vulnerability in Windows 2000 By Paul  Roberts March 25, 2003      Just one week after Microsoft alerted the public to a serious security vulnerability in a component of its Windows 2000 operating system, a security researcher has posted code to exploit that vulnerability.

The code or "exploit" was posted to two online discussion lists frequented by the computer security experts on Monday by Rafael Núñez, a senior research scientist at Scientech de Venezuela in Caracas, Venezuela .

The actual code was written by an individual using the name "kralor," part of a group called Coromputer. Núñez verified and tested the exploit before posting it.

The exploit posted by Núñez could be dangerous, but it is similar to code that was already being developed and circulated among malicious hacker groups online, according to David Litchfield of Next Generation Security Software Ltd. in Sutton, U.K. (NGSS).

While posting an exploit to public forums such as the Bugtraq mailing list raises the profile of such code, it does not increase the risk of new worms or viruses being developed that target the Microsoft vulnerability, Litchfield said.

"Someone who would write a worm for this [vulnerability] would know how to without having exploit code provided," Litchfield said.

In fact, having the exploit code available could help "level the playing field" between network administrators and malicious [or "black hat"] hackers by providing administrators with detailed information about how attacks might be carried out, according to Litchfield.

The vulnerability concerns an unchecked buffer in a core Windows 2000 component called ntdll.dll that is used to handle the World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) extensions to HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), according to the Microsoft Security bulletin MS03-007. (See www.microsoft.com.)

WebDAV allows users to edit and manage files on remote Web servers. The protocol is designed to create interoperable, collaborative applications that facilitate geographically dispersed "virtual" software development teams.

An attacker could use the vulnerability to cause a buffer overflow on the machine running Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), creating a denial of service (DOS) attack against such machines or executing their own malicious code in the security context of the IIS service, giving them unfettered access to the vulnerable system, Microsoft said.

Microsoft quickly developed and released the patch for Windows 2000 after learning that one of its customers was already being attacked using WebDAV to target the ntdll.dll vulnerability.

However, the vulnerability can be exploited in many ways, with WebDAV just one prominent example, Litchfield said.

Litchfield released a paper on Friday announcing that NGSS uncovered new avenues of attack on ntdll.dll in addition to WebDAV. Some of those attacks could use IIS, while others might use other Java-based Web Servers, Litchfield said. (See: www.nextgenss.com.)

Despite Microsoft's security alert regarding possible attacks using WebDAV and IIS and Núñez's publication of exploit code for that particular scenario, users who are not running IIS or using WebDAV may also be vulnerable, Litchfield said.

"It's like the saying 'All roads lead to Rome .' There are lots of paths that lead to this problem and there will be other things like [the WebDAV exploit]," Litchfield said.

Litchfield encouraged administrators to assess their exposure to the vulnerability in the ntdll.dll component of Windows 2000, then download, test, and apply Microsoft's security patch as needed.

Administrators should also keep their eyes open for a more thorough patch for the ntdll.dll problem, following the problems that were reported by some customers who deployed the first patch, according to Litchfield.   Paul Roberts is a Boston-based correspondent for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.

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BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP)--European Union regulators may relax EU competition rules to help airlines cope with the Iraq war, which the industry fears will lead to $10 billion in losses, officials said Tuesday.

Proposals under discussion would allow governments to cover costs of extra security measures and loosen rules that oblige airlines to give under-used routes to rivals.

EU spokesman Gilles Gantelet said regulators may cast a ``favorable eye'' on airline alliances on particularly cluttered routes.

However the Iraq crisis does not yet merit any direct compensation payments to airlines, nor will EU members be allowed to cover airlines' insurance costs.

Such measures were adopted to help airlines through the crisis that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The International Air Transport Association last week warned that the Iraq war could cost airlines $10 billion on top of $30 billion in estimated losses they have already accumulated since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The EU's head office is expected to approve the proposals Wednesday and recommend them to transport ministers from the 15 EU nations meeting Thursday in Brussels.

Meanwhile, Europe's second largest airline, Germany's Lufthansa, said Tuesday it was cutting flights to the United States and Asia, blaming a sharp fall in bookings since the start of war in Iraq.

Lufthansa said it was putting off plans to expand its long-distance flights starting March 30, saying demand on trans-Atlantic routes had fallen ``particularly sharply.''

It said it would cut one flight a day on routes between Frankfurt and New York, Boston and Los Angeles. Flights to Dallas and Phoenix will also be reduced and smaller planes will be used for services to Philadelphia.

In Asia, Lufthansa said it was dropping plans to add flights to Nagoya in Japan and would use smaller planes to fly to Osaka and the South Korean capital Seoul.

It also announced cuts on services to Caracas, Venezuela and Johannesburg, South Africa.