The latest TOP500 List of the fastest supercomputers in the world helped many in the technology community understand what open-source aficionados have known for years: Linux has quickly become the operating system of choice in the high-performance computing (HPC) market, growing from relative obscurity 15 years ago to powering 97 percent of the fastest computers in the world. But its appeal is found in more than cost or choice. Here are a few of the main reasons Linux has grown to own the lion's share of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Although the United States remains the top country in terms of overall systems, with 233, this is down from 265 on the November 2013 list. The number of Chinese systems on the list rose from 63 to 76, giving the Asian nation nearly as many supercomputers as the United Kingdom, with 30; France, with 27; and Germany, with 23—combined. Japan also increased its showing, up to 30 from 28 on the previous list. HP has the lead in systems and now has 182 systems (36 percent), compared to IBM, with 176 systems (35 percent). HP had 196 systems (39 percent) six months ago, and IBM had 164 systems (33 percent) six months ago. In the system category, Cray remains third with 10 percent (50 systems).

Choosing the best Linux browser for your needs requires just a bit of homework: Web browsers for the Linux desktop have evolved over the years, just as they have for other popular desktop platforms. With this evolution, both good and bad revelations have been discovered. Revelations from new functionality, to broken extensions, and so forth. In this article, I'll serve as your guide through these murky waters to help you discover the best in Linux browsers.

Turning its back on Microsoft Office's native formats, the UK government has adopted the Open Document Format for all its sharable documents.

Mozilla is proving the Web is a powerful gaming platform by creating new technologies and developer tools that enable game creators to port their popular titles to the Web. One of the trailblazers using these technologies is Trendy Entertainment, which is leveraging Emscripten and asm.js to bring its highly popular Dungeon Defenders title to the Web. Trendy announced today it will release a version of Dungeon Defenders Eternity featuring the same visuals and gameplay as the native desktop version, but available on the Web at near native speeds. Later today, the full game will be available to buy on Steam.

Google Drive is two years old now and Google’s cloud storage solution seems to be still going strong thanks to its integration with Google Docs and Gmail. There’s one thing still missing though: a lack of an official Linux client. Apparently Google has had one floating around their offices for a while now, however it’s not seen the light of day on any Linux system.

Developers of Tor software believe they’ve identified a weakness that was scheduled to be revealed at the Black Hat security conference next month that could be used to de-anonymize Tor users. The Black Hat organizers recently announced that a talk entitled “You Don’t Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget” by researchers Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord from Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was canceled at the request of the legal counsel of the university’s Software Engineering Institute because it had not been approved for public release.

Our own Jason Hibbets and Jen Wike are live blogging from OSCON 2014! This year's O'Reilly Open Source Conference already has all of the exciting vibes and makings of a great event. Keynotes started this morning at 9:00am PCT (live stream) in Portland at the Oregon Convention Center.

The long awaited Kali Linux USB EFI boot support feature has been added to our binary ISO builds, which has prompted this early Kali Linux 1.0.8 release. This new feature simplifies getting Kali installed and running on more recent hardware which requires EFI as well as various Apple Macbooks Air and Retina models. Besides the addition of EFI support, there is a whole array of tool updates and fixes that have accumulated over the past couple of months.

Catbird 6.0 enhances the security of OpenStack private and hybrid clouds through automated security policies, providing compliance assurance for enterprises. Enterprise adoption of OpenStack is taking off, and value-added security solutions for the open source cloud computing operating system are close behind. This week, Catbird announced version 6.0 of its cloud security platform, which it describes as the channel's first "security policy automation for private and hybrid cloud environments."

Electric Objects has achieved Kickstarter funding for its Android-based EO1, a wall-mounted, 23-inch HD signage computer for displaying digital art. New York City based Electric Objects is one of several companies reinvigorating the wall-mounted digital picture frame form-factor with more affordable prices, smartphone access, and other modern amenities. Like Framed, which is based on Windows Embedded, Electric Objects’s EO1 picture frame has easily surpassed its Kickstarter funding goals. There are still 17 days left, however, to get in on discounted pricing, including $299 for a May 2015 release, or $499 (the eventual retail price) for a wooden-framed version, or a beta test model due in Jan. 2015.

SSH offers a highly secure channel for remote administration of servers. However, if you face an audit for regulatory or business requirements, such as Visa/Mastercard PCI, you need to be aware of some potential authentication related short-comings that may cause headaches in an audit.

The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies.

Zorin OS 9 Core is a decent system, and those who it is aimed for, literally Windows migrants, will find everything they want in this operating system. As this is an LTS edition, it will be supported for a long time. It means you can install it on your computer and forget about upgrade problems, as well as forget about the Microsoft empire.

This article is based on a talk I gave at DockerCon this year. It will discuss Docker container security, where we are currently, and where we are headed. read more

A C-like language with all the OO trimmings, garbage collection, strong data types, and excellent string processing makes a powerful tool for Web programming.

In today's open source roundup: Microsoft hits the panic button about Chromebooks. Plus: Firefox 31 has been released, and how to install additional desktops in Linux.

Privacy Badger is a browser add-on for Firefox and Chrome that’s designed to stop “advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web.” And it’s designed to require zero configuration to use. Just install and forget it!

A review of Linux distribution milestones.

Two recent, excellent, blog posts have touched on a topic I've been wrestling with since May's OpenStack Summit: What is the role of the Product Management function, if any, in the OpenStack development process?

As you know, GNU Linux is much more than just an OS. There is literally a whole sphere on the Internet dedicated to the penguin OS. If you read this post, you are probably inclined towards reading about Linux online. Among all the pages that you can find on the subject, there are websites that every Linux adventurer should have in his bookmarks because these websites are more than just tutorials or reviews, they are real tools that you can access from anywhere and share with everyone.

Mozilla has officially released Thunderbird 31.0, an email and RSS client, for all the available platforms, and the developers have actually made a number of improvements to the application. The first version has been released in the Thunderbird 31.x branch, but unlike some of the previous updates, this one actually brings something interesting. It's been a while since Thunderbird received any real improvements, but that's not exactly Mozilla's fault.

Big data is one of the most pervasive buzzwords in today's technology world. But it's impossible to deny how deeply data touches all aspects of not just our lives but also business and industry. The amount of data collected about everything is staggering—a typical transatlantic flight generates 30 terabytes of data about the engines alone!

Cisco has picked up a lipstick-gloss in one hand and a pig in the other, by re-launching its developer program to have another shot at attracting third party coders to its platforms. For not the first time, The Borg has hit upon the idea that getting others writing functions and applications for it is a big chunk of its future. It's not even the first time it's called the program the Cisco Developer Network (or DevNet in the parlance of today's announcement).

ProtonMail, as the name suggests, is an email service. The outfit is based in Switzerland and the service offers bumper-to-bumper encryption, is browser-based, does not log IP addresses, and will accept bitcoin and cash payments for paid accounts.

When Microsoft swallowed half of Europe's biggest tech company, it was only a matter of time before it spat something out. And so it has, ending Nokia's thirty-year roller-coaster ride. However, the decision will make tens of million of its customers take a look at Android – surely the last thing Microsoft wanted to happen.

No matter how much I love Plex, there's still nothing that comes close to XBMC for usability when it comes to watching your network media on a television. I've probably written a dozen articles on Plex during the last few years, so you know that's tough for me to admit. Still, no matter how many Plex-enabled devices I might buy (Roku, Amazon Fire TV, phones, tablets, Web browsers), I run XBMC on all my televisions. The interface, when coupled with a back-end MySQL database, is just unbeatable.

Interested in keeping track of what's happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what's happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

Read our Python masterclass for beginners and follow it up with ten projects in Understanding & Implementing Python volume one. Python is one of our favourite programming languages and we’ve covered it a lot over the years in Linux User & Developer. We’ve compiled ten of the best Python projects in the first edition of our digital Developer Manual, available now from our Newsstand app.

The pitfalls of working on closed source projects for contract developers...

A detailed analysis of iOS by a security expert digging into claims of NSA spying on Apple products has revealed some unexplained surveillance tools hidden in the operating system.