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The results of a Homeland Security Department-funded bug hunt spanning 40 popular open-source programs has thus far met ambivalence from the open-source community. While many projects are using the results to improve their software, others are bemoaning the high number of false positives.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is set to displace PostScript as the standard print job transfer and processing format for Linux, though Linux will maintain PostScript support for a long time to ensure backward compatibility.

The Debian project team has released a second revision of Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 "Sarge." The release adds security updates to the stable version, along with corrections for some "serious problems," the team said. The distro uses a 2.6.16 kernel and the GNOME desktop environment as default.

Even if you use Thunderbird on a daily basis, you probably don't know it inside out. There are still quite a few 'hidden' features not covered in the online help that can significantly improve your emailing habits. And since Thunderbird's functionality can be expanded via extensions, you can add some clever features to it too.

This is the third of my three-part series of reviews on books written for people migrating from Windows to Linux. The first book was Marcel Gagne's Moving to Linux, Second Edition and the second was Spring into Linux by Janet Valade.. You might want to read those reviews before this one, since I draw comparisions between them.

Finland-based Solid Information Technology Ltd hopes to pick up where Innobase Oy left off by announcing plans to develop an open source storage engine for the MySQL database.

Foreword: In this guest editorial, FSMLabs CEO Victor Yodaiken relates his company's experiences in the real-time Linux market to market conditions shaping Wind River's effort to redefine embedded software development as "device software optimization," or DSO.

While other corporations develop vapourware, a small group of coders are actually delivering something.

I love this quote fromDouglas Crockford:What a Flash intro says to me is"I hate my job. What I really want to do is make films. But they won't let me do that because I don't have talent. So watch this Flash intro." Soon as I read it, I immediately thought of Dack Ragus, whose Web Economy Bullshit Generator made me wish I'd supported verbs in BuzzPhraser. Even Way Back When, Dack was a devout disparager of Flash.

Enterprise-level features, flexibility and cost have always been key factors for organizations that choose open source over proprietary technology. For IT managers in the government sector, however, these benefits often take a back seat to another software characteristic: IT security. Is open source secure enough for the government's IT infrastructure?

[One criticism of this article - Massachusetts is not trying to pass an "Open Source" document policy. They are trying to pass an "Open Format" document policy. - dcparris]

Sirius Corporation is one of Europe's leading Open Source consultancies with development staff who have contributed to the success of many Open Source software projects including Samba and OpenLDAP. The company is the founding member of the Open Source Consortium, formed with the assistance of the Society of Information Technology Management - SOCITM , and the Open Standards Alliance to represent the Open Source business community in Europe. Recently, Sirius Corporation successfully implemented an Open Source network infrastructure for a 120 person engineering and risk consultancy business with a number of regional offices in the UK and the Middle East.

DSPAM is a scalable and open-source content-based spam filter designed for multi-user enterprise systems. It is great at filtering out spam but on busy mailservers the pruning of the MySQL databases takes way too much time.

Linus Torvalds uploaded the 2.6.17-rc2 kernel, explaining that he usually releases -rc kernels weekly but due to travel and general quiet he waited longer, "I expect to be back to the weekly schedule now, even if it is quiet (which I hope it will be)." Read on for the shortlog which includes a list of all changes in the -rc2 patch. Linus also offered a quick summary of the changes:

"Not a lot of hugely interesting stuff, with a large portion of the diff being a late MIPS update (tssk tssk), and the huge diff from the long over-due removal of the Sangoma wan drivers that have been marked BROKEN for a long time. Same goes for the qlogicfc driver (which has been supplanted by the qla2xxx driver).

"As a result, the diff has just tons of deletions, even if most of the rest of the changes aren't all that big. But there are netfilter fixes, some more splice work, and just tons of random stuff: usb, scsi, knfsd, fuse, infiniband.."

Database Designer for PostgreSQL lets you build your database structure visually. It diagrams all of your tables, the references between them, views, and stored procedures. You can even import existing PostgreSQL, Microsoft Access, Sybase, Oracle, Informix, MSSQL, DBF, and other types of databases into your diagram using Universal Reverse Engineering through ADO.

The head of SAP's product and technology group has drawn a sharp contrast between his employer's approach to corporate acquisitions and that of rival Oracle. In doing so, Shai Agassi pretty much dashed the hopes of start-ups hoping to exploit the growing trend towards acquisition by an enterprise IT provider as an exit strategy.

The California Open Voting bill passed a committee vote today. This has been its first test.

"The system uses AES encryption, requires a constantly open two way IP connection and it sends encrypted keys to the content along with the content, and these have to be decrypted by an existing public key. Entitlement messages are delivered out of band in a separate communication..."

[This is more of a discussion than a news article, but might be interesting to some - dcparris]

Novell beefs up its security position through purchase of real-time monitoring tool.

Internet users surfing with Firefox must urgently upgrade to avoid over 20 security holes in the open source browser, the Mozilla Foundation has warned.

We need to put freedom and the protection of privacy back into web advertising and web searches. We could utilize such a movement to fund GNU/Linux projects.