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Known as Kardphisher and “in the wild” since April, 2007, last week the malware author of this trojan horse mimicking the Windows XP activation interface while collecting the credit card details the end user has submitted, has made significant changes to visual interface and usability of the trojan, consequently improving its authenticity. Guess what happens when a gullible end user falls victim into this social engineering attack?

Some time ago I was required to adapt a bespoke website application (which I had originally written) so it not only supported multiple languages but also multiple character sets. The website, MakingContact.org, is a on-line community for families with disabled children run by the charity Contact a Family. It required “support” for four languages in addition the English it was currently in: Somali, Arabic, Farsi and Simplified Chinese. Yes, I know the latter is not actually a language but for these purposes the cap fitted. I decided to do it using Smarty, the PHP-based templating engine. Whilst it was possible that a CMS or similar could do the job now, at the time I could find none which supported multiple character sets in the way I required. I’ve been meaning to write the process down for some time so here’s how I did it. Read Ryan's story of how he did it at Freesoftware Magazine.

Last week in our classic Networking 101 series we learned about Border Gateway Protocol, the networking protocol that powers the Internet. This week Charlie Schluting leads the dive into iBGP-- Internal Border Gateway Protocol-- to learn how to connect all those BGP routers together, and how to route between thousands of computers without going nuts.

Marking the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell this week are announcing upcoming availability of both the beta version of Moonlight, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology on Linux, and the general release of Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. The November 2006 agreement has had Microsoft offering Suse Linux support certificates from Novell. The companies have also agreed not to sue each other's customers over intellectual property issues. Some have protested that the agreement legitimized Microsoft's claims that Linux violates its patents.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Wednesday, November 19, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. In today's news, a real news Flash for 64 bit Linux users, Gartner says open source software rules (but watch for those lawsuits), Novell/Microsoft relationship enters its third year, French recording association as stupid as US recording association, and RedHat CEO rocks with E&Y.

The Gartner numbers seem positive, and encouraging -- especially in light of the acknowledgement that the remaining 15% are planning to move toward more open source software in the near future. Then Gartner drops the bad news -- cases that Moody says don't end badly (they are usually remedied with a polite phone call) or even happen terribly frequently (12 or so cases a year) -- that 69% of companies have no formal method of evaluating and cataloging their open source applications, leaving them at risk of intellectual property liabilities.

On desktops and Netbooks, Ubuntu has had a remarkable year. But on the server, Ubuntu continues to face multiple major challenges, reports The VAR Guy. Here's the scoop.

The 32nd edition of the Top 500 supercomputers lists was released late last week and Linux-based systems occupy 439 of the 500 positions. Other Unix variants, including BSD-based systems occupy another 24 positions.

A recent attack piece against Richard Stallman was written by Linus Torvalds on the eve of Obama’s election. Black and white by Linus Torvalds Linus begins with this: So I’m pretty well-known for not exactly being a huge fan of the FSF and Richard Stallman, despite the fact that I obviously love the GPLv2 and use it as the license for all my projects that I care about. How unfortunate to write negatively of Stallman in the very first sentence. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

PHP is an easy-to-learn programming language. It's well suited for developing simple scripts you can use to help you in all kinds of games. Each article in this series will cover 10 scripts simple enough for even a beginning developer, but useful enough for a seasoned game player.

The Linux desktop comes with a variety of multimedia players, such as Xine, MPlayer, and Amarok. Yet all digital media players are only as good as the files they have to work with, and preparing those files requires the best tag editor you can find. I checked out half a dozen of the more popular and stable graphical ID3 tag editors available for Linux. I found that going from no tags to great tags requires keeping more than one of these editors on hand.

In an effort to coax more users to take advantage of the many extensions for its Firefox browser, Mozilla has just launched FashionYourFirefox.com. The site is divided up into categories, which cater to individual interests and "online lifestyles," according to Mozilla's announcement. The site looks like a good idea for extension novices, but I don't see some of my favorite extensions, and some of the categories have a pretty sparse number of extensions.

Let cron handle your repetitive tasks - an introduction to crontab. A crontab is a simple text file that holds a list of commands that are to be run at specified times. These commands, and their related run times, are controlled by the cron daemon and are executed in the system's background. More information can be found by viewing the crontab man page. We will run through a simple crontab example later.

If all goes according to plan, the first alpha release for Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) will be released tomorrow. It's not even been one month since the release of Ubuntu 8.10, but this first alpha release will show early signs of what we can expect to see in this next Canonical-sponsored release -- albeit many of the features are still in planning. In this article we will provide a glimpse at what Ubuntu 9.04 should hold in store to captivate Linux desktop users.

A patent represents a grant from the United States government to an individual for the exclusive right to make, use, import, sell, and offer to sell an invention. In order to obtain a patent, an inventor must prove that the invention is new, useful, and not merely an obvious improvement over what was already known.

ono Bacon, Ubuntu's community manager, has been hard at work nailing gelatin to the wall. Okay, not literally, but he's putting a lot of thought into how he can best determine the vitality, growth, needs and wants of the Ubuntu community and how they best mesh with, and give back to, the wider Linux and open source communities.

With diff-ext, GNOME users can compare and merge files from within Nautilus. If, instead, you use KDE 3, try out kdiff-ext from the same site, which works with Konqueror. Each utility handles paths to files and directories and invokes an external diff tool to perform the grunt work. With diff-ext you can easily compare two files with different names, from different directories, or whole directory trees.

Chip maker ARM is to get Ubuntu Linux up and running on its ARMv7 processor architcture, part of its plan to get its chips into netbooks and handheld internet devices. It's all about taking the fight to Intel's Atom, of course. The chip giant's processor has become the de facto standard for small, cheap computers. But the handheld tablet side of the story - the MID - has yet to take off, providing ARM with an opportunity to tout its platform's superior power efficiency.

Doing “stuff” on linux is just so easy. By “stuff”, I mean everything from doing some normal day chores, downloading files, customizing things, automating routine tasks, etc. The backbone for this is “the terminal” (not the movie :P). I can do almost anything I want from the console.

Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term “swap” to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk, and the region of a disk the pages are stored on. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say I’ve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space really required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?