Linux in the news

Recommended Reading

Retailer PCI Rebellion: 'No More Storing Credit Card Numbers' (Dark Reading)

Dark Reading has a a report on storing credit card numbers, with the National Retail Foundation advocating that retailers not be forced to store them. "'Data breaches have continued to occur at an unacceptable rate. There have been numerous instances of hackers targeting sophisticated retail computer systems that store or process credit card data, stealing the data and then using it to commit fraud,' he said. '[PCI] is a valiant attempt to prevent large stockpiles of credit card data from getting into the wrong hands. However, it is unlikely PCI will ever be able to keep pace with the continually-evolving sophistication of the professional hacker, or anticipate every possible variation of future attacks. We believe the time has come to rethink the assumptions behind PCI.'"

Comments (none posted)

Linux phishing botnet statistics can be deceptive (TechRepublic)

Chad Perrin at TechRepublic offers some thoughts on recent reports of Linux botnets in The Register, PCWorld, and elsewhere. "The obvious implication is that there are far more compromised Linux systems in phishing botnets than Windows systems. This is reinforced by eBay CISO Dave Cullinane's comment that 'The vast majority of [the phishing sites] we saw were on rootkit-ed Linux boxes, which was rather startling. We expected a predominance of Microsoft boxes and that wasn't the case.'"

Comments (none posted)

Ten ways to make more humane open source software (Humanized)

Humanized has a lengthy article on making free software more user-friendly. "The difference between the Mozilla and Firefox was that Mozilla was the result of developers contributing every web-browser feature they could think of. It only started to become humane once the Firefox team applied a unifying principle — 'Does this help Mom surf the web?' — and pared away features that didn't fit. It’s not enough to duplicate what has come before; even in an established category, a product still needs a unifying design, based on a clear vision of what users need to accomplish."

Comments (13 posted)

Trade Shows and Conferences

Regional Events Rock (Linux Journal)

Jon maddog Hall looks at some regional events. "Regional events allow customers to more easily see and talk with local vendors as well as the more local representatives of the national firms. The more local attendance allows the audience to get "up close and personal" with the speakers, and the age restrictions that exist at a lot of larger events are non-existent at these regional events. I met a lot of Free Software users who were still in strollers. :-)"

Comments (none posted)

Companies

Thank you Michael, but no, thank you... by Charles H. Shulz (Groklaw)

Groklaw has posted a different point of view on the tension between Novell and OpenOffice.org. "While Novell contributes quite normally to OpenOffice.org's import filters, it is also developing an OpenXML export filter that won't be available in OpenOffice.org-- that is, if you choose to use OpenOffice.org and not 'Open Office, Novell Edition'. And since these export filters are supposedly developed in collaboration with Microsoft, this technology would logically include Microsoft's sacred intellectual property that Sun and many others don't want to see covered by the JCA."

Comments (15 posted)

Linux Adoption

The Next Leap for Linux (The New York Times)

The New York Times looks at the current state of desktop Linux. "Until recently, major PC makers shied away from Linux. Now the industry is watching as Dell is selling two Linux-equipped desktop models ($549 and $870, including a monitor) and a $774 notebook PC. (Hewlett-Packard offers Linux systems to businesses, and Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought I.B.M.’s PC division, sells Linux machines in China and says it will soon offer Linux-based computers in the United States.) The Ubuntu version of Linux runs the Dell computers. Because Dell does not have to pay a licensing fee for the operating system, the computers are $80 cheaper than PCs with Windows Vista Home Premium or $50 cheaper than the stripped-down Vista Basic edition."

Comments (19 posted)

Linux set to dominate in embedded systems (EETimes)

EETimes analyzes the increasing use of Linux by embedded systems developers. "Embedded system manufacturers are increasingly committing to Linux as the operating system of choice, and this migration from more traditional and commercial operating systems is set to continue, according to market research group Venture Development Corporation (VDC). A recent survey by VDC (Natick, MA) suggests the majority of current Linux users surveyed plan to use Linux again as their primary operating system on future projects."

Comments (none posted)

Legal

Red Hat: Customers Can Deploy Linux with Confidence (eWeek)

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, recently gave a speech in which he said that Linux users needed to compensate Microsoft for patent infringement. Of course requests to "show us the patents" remain unanswered. This vnunet article and this Linux-Watch article are just two of the many articles we've seen.

eWeek takes a look at the responses from Red Hat and the Linux Foundation. "In a scathing response to Ballmer's remarks, Red Hat's IP team said the reality is that the community development approach of free and open-source code represents a healthy development paradigm, which, when viewed from the perspective of pending lawsuits related to intellectual property, is at least as safe as proprietary software. "We are also aware of no patent lawsuit against Linux. Ever. Anywhere," the team said in a blog posting."

Comments (3 posted)

Resources

Bastille: Classic Linux and Unix Security (Enterprise Networking Planet)

Enterprise Networking Planet takes a look at Bastille for system security. "The glamorous new kids in the Linux security parade are SELinux, AppArmor, and all manner of virtualization technologies. (Though it is being discovered that virtual machines, just like chroot jails, aren't all that difficult to break out of, so don't count on them for strong security.) But don't overlook the reliable, helpful old-timer Bastille Linux. Bastille Linux is both a batch of Perl scripts that lead you through hardening your Linux system, and an educational tool. I recommend running it just to get a grounding in basic security measures -- the newfangled things are nice, but the basics are still important and valuable."

Comments (5 posted)

Setting time the right way, the Linux way (Linux-Watch)

Steven J. Vaughan Nichols discusses time issues and NTP client/server configuration in a Linux-Watch article. "Since most computers store the Epoch's number of seconds as a 32-bit signed integer, the "End of Time" will come at 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2038. Since we're quickly moving to 64-bit computing, that won't be a real problem. The "End of Time" using a signed 64-bit integer will come sometime on Sunday, Dec. 4 in the year 292,277,026,596. With more than 290 billion years to go, I'm not going to sweat it. Believe it or not, we are already beginning to run into Epoch timing problems. For example, come January 19, 2008, you may get some interesting results from a 30-year mortgage calculator running on an older Linux or Unix system."

Comments (20 posted)

Reviews

Adobe readies Flex Builder for Linux (Tech Watch)

Tech Watch reports on Adobe's release of Adobe Flex Builder for Linux. "Flex Builder is an IDE for building rich Internet applications that leverage Flex and Adobe's Flash Player. Flex Builder Linux Alpha offers most Flex Builder 3 features such as project creation, code coloring, code hints and Ajax bridge. The release requires Sun Java Runtime Environment 1.5.x and the Eclipse 3.3 platform. The alpha product supports several Suse, Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux distributions and the Firefox browser. Plans call for expanding support to other browsers and Linux distributions, said Phil Costa, director of product management at Adobe."

Comments (11 posted)

Good-bye NetWare, hello Linux: Novell Open Enterprise 2.0 (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch looks at the release of Novell's Open Enterprise Server 2. "Now, with OES 2.0, the NetWare operating system kernel, NetWare 6.5 SP7, is still there if you run it, but it runs on top of the Xen hypervisor. You can also run the NetWare services, or a para-virtualized instance of NetWare, on top of Xen with the SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) 10 SP 1 kernel. So, if you're wedded to NetWare and its way of doing things, you don't have to wave good-bye to it."

Comments (none posted)

Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience (The New York Times)

David Pogue reviews the OLPC XO laptop for the New York Times. His take is quite favorable, giving Linux two positive stories in as many days in a pretty high-profile publication. "The truth is, the XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough — some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000."

Comments (36 posted)

Page editor: Forrest Cook
Next page: Announcements>>