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Software updates demand an Internet connection, which can make updating nearly impossible for those without reliable net access. There is now a solution: Keryx.

The IEEE has again ranked companies in different sectors to estimate the power that these companies have based upon their patent portfolio. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft came top in the "Computer Software" category and IBM tops the "Computer Systems" chart.

The so-called free economy is alive and well, despite a general economy that's in the dumps. Rather than legal tender, what makes this economy survive and thrive is a combination of ego-stroking and token rewards. It seems to be working pretty well for ThisNext.com.

The open source blogosphere featured two articles the last week of December 2008 that inaccurately draw software-market history timelines from which the authors then inaccurately position the place of open source software in the information technology (IT) market. I doubt if the statements are intentionally misleading; they are most likely the result of ignorance or sloppiness.

I write a great deal about Google mostly because it is always trying new things and putting them out there for free for the world to try. The tools are easy to access and use from wherever you are--any device with a browser and an internet connection--and you can't beat the single-sign on across the tool kit, but for all it has going for it, Google has a major trust issue. Every time I write about Google the comments always include people who won't trust Google with their content ever.

Sylvania's G Netbook Meso offers a nice-looking screen and plenty of ports -- you get three USBs as well as a VGA. The keyboard is just too cramped for reviewer Jack Germain's liking, though that's a problem found on just about any tiny netbook computer. The available Ubuntu Netbook Remix OS will give you the option to effortless switch between two GUI styles.

The Wikimedia Foundation has raised the necessary funds to operate Wikipedia until the end of June, the nonprofit organisation announced Friday. Wikimedia has received about US$6.2 million since launching its fundraising campaign in early November. More than 125,000 donors have chipped in.

German Linux integrator Millenux is launching a series of monthly workshops for Linux developers and IT managers on open-source Linux topics including high availablity (HA), Debian, and kernel development. The initial January 7 event in Munich will address "mobile computing," plus NoMachine's "NX" Xhosting technology.

Google with a dialect: You ph33l1n6 lu(ky?

Scanning and packet sniffing software; specifically network mapper (nmap) and tcpdump are tools I now use almost daily in some capacity. The underlying software of tcpdump - libpcap (packet capture library) - I have on three occasions needed to leverage pcap libs for various tasks. In the final part of the libpcap series the full source listing of the pieces from part one and part two are cobbled together into a single program. The Makefile is also constructed in addition to a small barely functional packet injector program which shows another side of libpcap; packets don't just have to be read they can be written as well.

The Obama administration has made a pledge to spend $50 billion dollars on Health IT, yet it is unclear how they will come to grips with proprietary health IT software, a problem I will call the 'Some Dude' phenomenon. In my now lengthening health IT career, I have frequently come across a remarkably destructive and unfortunately abundant person called 'Some Dude'. Some Dude is the proprietary license holder of an entrenched piece of health IT software that needs to be interfaced with other software. Some Dude is entirely and in my experience usually capable of: stonewalling, obstructing, fleecing, lying, tollboothing, and ignoring any effort to interface with their proprietary software. There are few to no penalties or consequences to the proprietary license holders for such destruction. There are many real consequences and penalties for patients and practitioners by such obstruction.

Chris Mason, the founder of the Btrfs file-system, had previously stated he hoped to merge the first bits of this much-improved Linux file-system into the Linux 2.6.29 kernel. With the 2.6.29 merge window still open, earlier this week he started a new thread entitled Btrfs for mainline.

Chris shares that the Btrfs file-system is currently working against the latest kernel Git tree and not much has changed with this file-system code since early December...

Firstly, allow me to recap. A couple of days ago, I reported a presentation at the Chaos Computer Club conference in Berlin which outlined a major problem with the way Certificate Authorities handle message hashing, essentially this attack relied on well-known problems with the MD5 hash algorithm. Problems based on hash collisions, which were previously considered to be theoretical having been discovered in 2004, were now well-lodged within the domain of reality.