While Linux is very secure-able, as always the weakest point is the human factor. The Psyb0t targets inexpensive Linux-based routers that ship with weak or no passwords, and other flaws that are simple to fix. Sean Michael Kerner tells the tale.

The same application performs differently on different platforms. Differences include compiler brand (Microsoft Visual C++ vs gcc), compiler version (gcc 3 and 4 were implicitly tested), operating system characteristics, and file systems. These OpenOffice.org 3.0 benchmarks measure vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org on 3.0 on Microsoft Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).

At FSF’s annual meet, O’Riordan described his anti-swpat lobbying background, how to apply techniques from Bilski and the EU to other jurisdictions, and the future direction of End Software Patents.

CACE Technologies, Inc., developer of tools to enhance the Wireshark user experience, today announced that they have released a Linux Fedora 10 driver for TurboCap , a feature-rich, full line-rate Gigabit Ethernet solution previously available for Windows-based platforms only.

These days free and open source software (FOSS) is recognised as a significant model for the development and distribution of software, transforming the way that software is written, perceived, packaged and sold. A large part of the success of free and open source software has been due to the revolution in software licensing that was led by the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Microsoft and TomTom have settled their patent lawsuit in a way that leaves Microsoft’s FAT patents active as a threat to other companies. Since I last wrote on this topic, TomTom brought a counter-suit against Microsoft, attempting to get the software giant to license four mapping patents that TomTom claims MS infringed. Tomtom apparently had previously been attempting to convince Microsoft to license. So, it’s hard for me to find sympathy for either player in these lawsuits, but there’s lots of sympathy to hand out to the software industry, justice, and Linux – all losers in this deal. Justice lost because there’s been no trial to overturn the FAT filesystem patents. As venture capitalist Larry Augustin wrote: “Those of us who have PhDs in computer disciplines and have studied operating systems and file systems, don’t see anything particularly innovative in FAT or its extension to support longer file names, FAT32.”

The following article presents a status report on the development of five of the most active notation software projects for Linux. Most of them are works in progress, but all are well along on their development track and in varying states of usability.

The short story: a little pricier than other brands, but a good sturdy satisfying machine with a choice of operating systems. Eric Grevstad gives an informative, detailed review.

Not so long ago I put up a tutorial which included three useful tips for Konqueror 3.5.9 (KDE3), and one of them was how to create an Open as Root service menu for directories. In this how-to I will show how to accomplish the same thing in KDE4 this time, for both Dolphin and Konqueror.

The Fedora Project released a beta of the next version of its free Linux OS with new security, desktop and developer features that provide a glimpse of the direction Red Hat could take with its enterprise Linux distribution.