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ModSecurity is sophisticated application firewall that monitors the content of ports 80 and 443. ModSecurity can protect you from hack attacks, zero day exploits, directory traversals, SQL injection and a lot of other bad stuff. This script will help you locate the blocks that ModSecurity is performing for you so you can evaluate.

I’ve just built locally and uploaded to Launchpad Libvirt 0.9.6 via Debian Unstable, applying standard set of Ubuntu’s patches updated for 0.9.6. It allows follow http://planet.spice-space.org/ update VM’s XML profile under /etc/libvirt/qemu/ as suggested in second blog entry of Hans de Goede manage VMs via virsh or VirtManager having USB redirection support active in Spicy’s sessions. View for further details my previous posting to LXer

As an Ubuntu 11.04 user, Ubuntu 11.10 came knocking at my doorstep a few days ago. But the upgrade process wasn't the smoothest of operations. In this article, I've mentioned a few thoughts about switching to the new system.

An October 5 press release from The Document Foundation provides a bit of information about a vulnerability that was fixed in recent versions of LibreOffice (LO). The vulnerability sounds fairly serious: "This flaw could have been used for nefarious purposes, such as installing viruses, through a specially-crafted [.doc] file." It was evidently fixed, silently, in versions 3.4.3 and 3.3.4 of LO, which were released in August. The details (such as they are) were withheld "until users have been given time to migrate to the new version", but it isn't at all clear that Linux distributions have put out fixes yet. Worse still, OpenOffice.org (OOo) is vulnerable as well, but there has been no release from that project since January.

Installation problems with some key packages makes me not recommend that newbies install and use it regularly, but it's officially a pretty awesome live distribution again.

A mild rant on Microsoft Hotmail's odd "sweep" feature. A Microsoft employee responds in the comments section, and gets into a short conversation.

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot has been released now. Here is a list of things you should immediately do after a fresh installation.

With the Free Software Foundation having removed GNU PDF from their list of high priority projects after declaring the open-source work to implement proper Adobe PDF support a success, what's left to the FSF high priority project list and how are those remaining projects coming along?..

The release of Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" this week captured most of the Linux spotlight, but also arriving this week was Sabayon 7, the Gentoo-based Linux distribution that's meant to be easy-to-use and desktop-oriented. In this article Sabayon 7 has been pitted against Ubuntu 11.10 with its stock Linux 3.0 kernel and its new experimental Fusion kernel.

An indication of the extent to which people in today's world are prone to hypocrisy is evidenced by the way they react after someone dies.

The R500 texture semaphores work, the feature I wrote about and tested earlier this month, has been merged to master. This feature in the R300 Gallium3D open-source driver can provide some impressive performance improvements...

OpenIndiana is a distribution of illumos, which is a community fork of OpenSolaris. And OpenSolaris itself was the open source version of Solaris, before it was discontinued by Oracle, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, Inc., in January 2010.

OpenIndiana Build 151a is the latest development release, and the third so far. A stable edition is slated for release before the end of this year.

There is a desktop edition and a server edition. This review is based on test installations of the desktop edition.

It would seem to be another slow week in the FOSS news world. As always however, there were a few tidbits, and the passing of a computer pioneer who’s work has effected everyone who’s ever sat in front of a monitor and keyboard.

U.S. Predator and Reaper Drones Hit by Virus…or Not

We learned on Monday from ars technica that the U.S. Predator and Reaper drone fleet has been hit by a virus. According to the report, the malicious code logs the keystrokes of those in the “cockpit” flying missions over Afghanistan and “other war zones":

Here's a short tutorial I wrote on getting Java enabled on browsers in Ubuntu. I'd faced this issue a few days ago, and hope that this article serves as a quick and helpful tutorial.

I think one thing that often confused people when they first get involved with free software is the difference between FOSS and freeware (or shareware). The source of this sometimes confusion can be sorted with the Latin statement:

Gratis versus Libre

Texas Instruments has put out a new version of its DRM/KMS Linux driver for OMAP platforms as it prepares to hopefully see this open-source graphics driver merged into the mainline Linux kernel...

If you have a server, you probably would like to continually be updated on what the system logs records; a very useful tool that I discover is Logcheck: it works very well, and I’m very greatful with the developers.

I use it to have various email about the logs between a range of time like [3 hours].

Oil Rush is a real time naval strategy game with stunning graphics and gameplay. This is one game that kept all of us waiting. We had listed Oil Rush right at the top of 12 best paid games for Linux. Now, Oil Rush is available for installation via Ubuntu Software Center. Note that you can only pre-order the game right now, but you also get access to beta version of Oil Rush.

The government of Paraguay has embarked on an ambitious project with the aim to implement on an exclusive basis open source software (OSS) in all government agencies in 2012.

The new Start screen is definitely a big shock, and many PC users were deeply concerned that it represented a substantial step backwards. Though near-universally acknowledged as a good interface for tablet users, traditional desktop users who don't want or need tablets worried that they were going to be forced to use something designed solely for tablet users—something that really wouldn't work well with mice and keyboards.