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German boffins have pulled off a successful attack on HDCP copy protection – using cheap hardware and a lot of clever coding. Intel's HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content protection) allows the encrypted transfer of high definition video signals via DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort and other connectors and between TVs and Blue-ray discs or set-top boxes. The HDCP master key was leaked last year but there was no easy way to exploit this.

Earlier this month I showed the Intel graphics performance hasn't improved much in the Linux 3.2 kernel (but there might be a boost when RC6 is flipped on), but how is this new kernel shaping up for NVIDIA hardware owners wishing to use the open-source and reverse-engineered Nouveau driver? In this article are some benchmarks of the Nouveau DRM driver from recent Linux releases.

Much has been written over the last few days about Linux Mint's meteoric rise in Distrowatch's rankings, seemingly at the expense of Ubuntu's fall. While he thinks Linux Mint's rise is deserved, Larry the Free Software Guy is not convinced these stats are a sound yardstick, and he does his best Jerry Maguire in shouting, "Show me the downloads!"

From the 'Not so relaxing news' files: An interesting mailing list posting caught my eye the other day titled, EOL for couchdb. At first I did a double-take, couchDB is hitting end-of-life? How could that be? As it turns out it is the CouchDB support that Ubuntu has that is going EOL and that's very bad news for CouchDB in my opinion. Long story short is that Ubuntu - with UbuntuOne and other efforts - is the reason that I first ever even heard of the CouchDB and now Ubuntu is giving up on it.

In an Ubuntu-Desktop mailing list message, Jason Warner (Ubuntu Desktop Manager) has confirmed that Rhythmbox will be the default music player in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, replacing Banshee. But there's something even more interesting regarding the default application selection in Ubuntu 12.04: Jupiter Applet might also be included by default as a way to solve power issues.

I've compiled notes on installing the free DB2 Express C database on Ubuntu – which will work for other Linux flavors too with minor changes. This article includes a JDBC program that prints contents of a table to help in verifying connectivity from a Java program.

The GNOME Project announced a few minuntes ago, November 24th, the immediate availability for testing of the second development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which brings assorted fixes and improvements.

One of the areas where LibreOffice needs massive changes is layout and design of the suite. There are some developers and designers who are working on 'possible' design changes to the LibreOffice. That doesn't mean that the LibreOffice team has made a decision to change the UI. The good news is unlike Microsoft's Office's Ribbon interface which is an aweful waste of spcae, LibreOffice design team is looking at more sensible approach.

Wine 1.3.33 is released. Wine makes it possible to run Windows applications on top of Linux. This release brings a new Gecko engine and various other improvements and bugfixes.

Stronghenge is an Out-of-Band Application Firewall that can inspect both HTTP and HTTPS traffic for attacks against your web applications. Since Stronghenge's detection engine is based off of the most widely deployed IDS/IPS technology worldwide, Snort, it's easy to start using. Additionally, since it's an Out- of-Band solution it requires little to no modification to your existing network. With Snort's powerful regular expression support, you can implement a positive or negative security model. With it's standalone decryption engine for RSA algorithms and custom Snort additions, it can be deployed as a single or multiple appliance configuration where one device can do decryption where the other can do detection and blocking. However, this tutorial will just cover how to deploy as a single appliance configuration.

This Operating System has a great potential. It is very young yet to say something definitive. I wish developer the very best in his project, and hope to come back to it when new version is released.

Linux and Windows. It’s like comparing Apples and Oranges. Software can be compared, but how do you do so fairly and honestly? And what sort of presumptions should I make concerning where the reader of this article stands? I presume you are among the “rare” Linux users.

Not easy at all. Let’s start of with where I come from. I use Linux because I really prefer the stability and security of the platform. My system’s performance is better.. Hands down Linux is much better than any flavor of Windows in those three categories. But then there’s the software issue.

I’m going to compare software simply on a “Does it do the job?” and is there a Linux equivalent, or how close to equivalent they are.

In this case, the title might be a little misleading. And that is because awk is more than a command, it's a programming language in its own right. You can write awk scripts for complex operations or you can use awk from the command line. The name stands for Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan (yes, Brian Kernighan), the authors of the language, which was started in 1977, hence it shares the same Unix spirit as the other classic *nix utilities.

In my last article, I looked at some of the ways in which you can use Vimscript, Vim‘s built-in scripting language, to set up that text editor to do exactly what you want it to. Apparently you liked what you saw and asked for more, so here are some additional tips and tricks to help you get Vim to jump through the hoops of your choice, including techniques for specifying ranges to work on, accepting user input, and debugging.

In an effort to foil crackers attempts to cover their tracks by altering text-based syslogs, as well as improve the syslog process as a whole, two Red Hat developers are proposing a new binary-based tool called The Journal that could replace the syslog daemon in as early as the Fedora 17 release.

A straightforward way to save any Flash video you can watch in a browser.

Many network administrators know OpenSSL as a tool that implements Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) cryptographic protocols to secure your web surfing and email. But as we learned earlier this month, OpenSSL can do far more. With OpenSSL you can encrypt and decrypt files, verify file integrity, and see which encryption protocols and ciphers any server supports.

Icon Tasks is modified KDE 4.7 taskbar applet that comes with some of the best Unity / DockBarX features. It supports Unity quicklists, counters and progress bars, window previews with media player controls, comes with DockManager API (you can use the Docky helpers in Icon Tasks) and lots more.

ReText is a nifty text editor for those who appreciate markup systems like reStructuredText and Markdown.

The Independent Games Festival (IGF), an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference is the largest annual gathering of the indie video game industry. Linux games Minecraft, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Cobalt and Tiny and Big were finalist in last IGF with Minecraft being the grand prize winner. Amnesia and Minecraft together won 5 out of total 10 awards. Next Independent Games Festival will be held in March 2012 at San Francisco's Game Developers Conference. As many as 570 games have been submitted and many of them are our favorite Linux games. Lets have a look at these Linux games one by one.