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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once called Linux a cancer. Now, thanks to his company's alliance wit, he's probably labeling the open source OS as something much more benign. Like, say, "Cash Cow!" Evidence is emerging that Microsoft is making money, lots of it, from selling 'certificates' for Novell's SUSE Linux. Microsoft gained the right to distribute the certificates a little more than a year ago under a marketing and technical alliance with Novell.

A crisis call comes in from on high to inform me that we'll have four people in a porta-cabin on a client site and they'll need access to their e-mail, Internet & need the ability to share files - Oh and sorry about the short notice but could you sort it out before close of business tomorrow? A rummage in the basement junkyard of Bitsmith towers turns up a retired Dell Poweredge 2650 which appears to be in perfect working order. Lacking a spare licensed copy of any flavour of Windows Server, and needing to get the box live in short order, I used SME Server 7.2 from Contribs.org which I'd downloaded but never really got around to playing with.

The blurb on the back cover starts out, 'Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by participatory Internet applications'. That's fine and dandy, but what's the inside story? If you happen across this book at your local bookstore, do you wonder just what 'Collective Intelligence' is in this context? Let's find out a little about the concept, the practice, and this book.

Joomla! is a well-known content management system, mature enough to be used by thousands of amateur and professional Web portals. Installation is a breeze and consists of six click-next steps. However, a default Joomla! installation is not necessarily a secure one, so let's see how we can protect our portal from potential attackers.

Open-source advocacy groups have been gaining traction in arranging presentations in Polish schools to educate people about the benefits of Linux and open-source software. Originally started by a 15-year-old student, the event is turning into a big deal with presentations in many schools around Poland.

The Asterisk.org development team has released Asterisk version 1.4.17. This release contains a fix for a SIP security issue, as well as a number of other bug fixes. The security issue is documented in the published security advisory, AST-2008-001.

In the Linux world new users are often scared away by horror stories of having to compile their own programs. With todays distributions where there are, in the case of *buntu, over 20,000 pre-compiled programs to choose from and the need to compile your own programs is very rare. In fact about the only time you will compile your own programs is if you wish to use a different version than what the distributions repository supplies. Many people, when faced with a situation requiring a program compile, will shy away from this mystical seeming process. But it's pretty easy.

A significant amount of skill with a soldering iron and some custom firmware has revealed a number of interesting features Amazon.com hid within its Kindle e-book reader. Among the ones that hardware hacker Igor Skochinsky uncovered and described on his blog are a basic photo viewer, a minesweeper game, and most interesting, location technology that uses the Kindle's CDMA networking to pinpoint its position. There also are some basic location-based services that call up a Google Maps view to show where you are and nearby gas stations and restaurants.

Even though my Debian upgrade from Etch to Lenny on the test box went very well, I was a little bit wary of plunging right into it on the $0 Laptop because the Gateway Solo 1450 -- which I did get for $0 -- is a computer I actually rely on (i.e. I don't swap drives in and out of it like I do with the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client I use for distro testing).

Audacity, the free and open-source audio editor (also available for Windows and Linux) is in need of some Mac-love. Whilst Mac OS X users can get themselves either the stable v1.2.6 release or a 1.3.3 beta version, development going forward is a little uncertain at the moment. According to the Audacity forum, there are no active developers on the project with Macs, and the latest beta (v1.3.4) is not going to appear on the Mac platform until "someone [with a Mac] volunteers to compile it, and sort the remaining bugs out." Yikes!

It must have passed beneath my radar it when it first was filed in 2004, but it caught my eye recently when Andy Updegrove mentioned it in Chapter 3 of his book-in-progress, The War of the Words. I'm talking about Novell's November 2004 antitrust complaint against Microsoft, filed shortly after settling an different, OS-related, complaint with Microsoft for $536 million. What is interesting to me, and why this "old news" is worth talking about, is the analysis Novell made in their complaint of Microsoft's treatment of document format standards. The concerns of 2004 (or 1995 even) are very similar to the concerns of 2007. Let's go through Novell's argument and see where it leads us.

Prof. Christian Kurtsiefer, Prof. Antia Lamas and others from the Quantum Information Technology Lab have been at the 24C3, giving a lecture on Quantum Cryptography and Possible Attacks (Video), and demonstrating the hardware of a full working kit developed in the National University of Singapore for entanglement based QKD over a free space channel.

We were out on Christmas Eve doing an install in a nasty part of town. The East side of Austin at night isn't a good place for a couple white boys to be boppin' the streets after dark. Never the less, we had an install to do there and we had to get it done.

Like a lot of companies, Farpoint Group closes between Christmas and New Years. Traditionally, the end-of-the-year shutdown has been spent re-building the network, installing new equipment, etc., which is always wonderful therapy for techies everywhere, despite the bad language sometimes involved. The big project, though, was re-thinking our overall computing philosophy. So, anyway, I loaded up the Ubuntu LINUX distribution, and I am so impressed I can't express how impressed I am.

As of February 1, 2008 Netscape Navigator will no longer be; no more support will be available for Netscape Navigator and no new releases of the browser will become available. While most of us no longer use Netscape Navigator it is still a sad day that reminds of how an innovative company and project fell prey to the muscle of software giant Microsoft.

It's about the name-calling these Microsoft fans do. I heard 'zealots', 'bigots', 'advocates', the whole lot. What may be not too clear to these Microsoft zealots is why I am a fanboy. It's not because I really dig this "free the software, free the world" ideology. That came much later. It's because I like this "gimme the source" idea.

"New year, new kernel: Linux 2.4.36 is finally ready and has been checked long enough to be released. Quite a bunch of bugs, build errors and security issues have been fixed since 2.4.35, but all of those fixes were merged into 2.4.35-stable," 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau stated, announcing the latest 2.4 stable Linux kernel. He noted, "I should say that I'm quite satisfied of this dual-branch release model which proves to be very successful at separating quick fixes from changes which require more thorough testing."

Welcome to the seventh issue of OpenLDAP Weekly News (OWN), the unofficial weekly newsletter for the OpenLDAP community. In this issue: OpenLDAP 2.4.7 and 2.3.40 released, A new mailing list, update on build farm, "If there was an OpenLDAP Cookbook, what recipes would you like to see?" and much more.

Nmap is a must have tool for network administrators, it helps to discover computers in the network, see what services they are offering (ports open), works with TCP and UDP, and on this article you will see its command line form and also two GUI front ends, with a lot of options, and screen shots

Episode 226 of The Linux Link Tech Show is now available for download in OGG or MP3 format. We interview Aaron Seigo from the KDE Project regarding the impending release of KDE 4.0, Dan finds a web site that is a geek's paradise, Audio streaming with Butt (Icecast client), Soup+laptops = a search for a new Linux laptop and much, much more