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Dave's return to the limelight started with his new site, LXer.com. After some preliminary catching up, he finally agreed to do an intervew with me. Out of the Linux spot light, he has created web sites such as Dave's Garden, the largest database of plant listings and images in the world. He admits his passion for Linux, though. Fortunately we have him back.

Day eight of aKademy marked the end of the coding marathon. As though restless with their desktop, KDE hackers turned their attention to a tutorial in live cracking, an impromptu demonstration of command line tools, and a brief rootkit panic. Despite the shift in focus, I found some time to talk to some members of the documentation team about their plans.

We received a lot of interesting feedback in comments and email as a result of the story we ran last week on Email Sender ID: the hype and the reality." Many of those who contacted us are intimately acquainted with the subject matter, having had personal, first-hand involvement in the process to date. One of those was Yakov Shafronovich, who co-chaired the Anti-Spam Research Group during 2003, when the group was considering this very issue, prior to passing it on to the IETF. That led to an exchange of email messages during which I got a much clearer look at how Microsoft is once again embracing, extending, and attempting to encumber open source technology. Doggone it, it looks like Kerberos all over again.

Web services, by definition, are particularly vulnerable to breaches in security. The flow of potentially sensitive data not only between machines, but between enterprises and across untrusted networks, presents the need for special attention to areas such as message confidentiality, message integrity, authentication, and authorization. Additionally, since Web services are well suited to business-to-business communications and cooperation, there should be some way to enforce trust relationships between business partners. Finally, Web services are used not only by humans, but by other Web services as well. The high degree of automation required for interaction between Web services requires well-designed software architectures, preferably built upon well-designed standards.

Indeed, if the framework is looking less appealing right now, it's only because some say that Microsoft's licensing terms are incompatible with Open Source.

Linuxlookup.com is reporting an online petition to ATI Technologies Inc. The community will no longer endure ATI's poor driver support for Linux both in 32-bit and 64-bit computing. This petition is aimed at the designers at ATI who for whatever reason choose not to acknowledge our pleas and specifically at ATI as a company. The signers of this petition will no longer purchase ATI products until ATI make a workable 3D accelerated 64-bit driver for Linux and a 32-bit that utilizes the full potential of the Raedon chips.

The scanning engine has been rewritten and is now faster, gentler against target hosts and now able to scan many hosts in parallel.

comparison. The analysis shows that Windows is more secure than four key Linux distributions (MandrakeSoft, Debian, SuSE and Red Hat).

Cornell University Library is developing an open source publication management system that will provide authors and publishers with a more affordable way to publish scholarly research on the Web. In making its DPubS software available to libraries, university presses and other independent publishers, Cornell will expand opportunities for creative communication among scholars around the world.

In their own series of aKademy interviews, the German IT news website Golem.de has talked to KDE contributors Fabian Franz (also a member of the Knoppix development team) and Kurt Pfeifle about FreeNX. Now OSnews carries the English translation. NX, developed by NoMachine.com aims for nothing less than to revolutionize network computing. The software allows to connect and work on remote desktops even across low bandwidth links such as ISDN or modems. While at its core it speed-boosts X11 connections, as an addon it also can accelerate VNC/RFB and Windows Terminal Server/RDP sessions by a factor of 2 or more.

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) plans to host an enterprise-focused conference in the San Francisco area early next year. The three-day OSDL Enterprise Linux Summit (OSDL-ELS), which will be held in Burlingame, CA from January 31 through February 2, will include three educational session tracks and a full day of tutorials that address topics and issues around successful Linux deployments in real-world scenarios, the group says.

Federal government agencies and departments locked into restrictive outsourcing and procurement contracts will find relief under a Labor policy of encouraging the innovative use of open source software, according to shadow IT minister Senator Kate Lundy.

Microsoft looks to be giving the Linux client an opening against Windows with its changes to Longhorn's timing and features. Or are other contenders waiting in the wings? Check out two vastly different views of its opportunities.