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While Linux has all kinds of powerful and excellent networking utiltities, there are times when you want to see how things look from the outside. Check out this sampling of free websites that test performance, tell you where things are, perform diagnostics and display the results in nice graphs and charts that even a pointy-haired boss can understand.

PyBlosxom, a very worthy project that took the Perl-based Blosxom and re-did it in Python, has been slow, development-wise, for a long time now. In recent months the project was near death, but a new maintainer is at least watching over what's left. Not that Blosxom is an active, living project, because it isn't.

In this day and age, you really want to make sure your data is safe on your server. One popular tool to help do this is the CSF/LFD package (ConfigServer Firewall and Login Failure Daemon).

Apt-fast is a script that can "drastically improve APT download speed" by using command line download accelerators such as Axel or Aria2 with multiple connections per package.

Announced this morning on the kernel mailing list was F2FS, a new open-source Linux file-system that comes courtesy of Samsung. F2FS is short for the "Flash-Friendly File-System" for Linux. The list announcement describes this new file-system as "a new file system carefully designed for the NAND flash memory-based storage devices. We chose a log structure file system approach, but we tried to adapt it to the new form of storage.

Ubuntu 12.10 includes a new shopping lens that shows Amazon search results in dash. These results are related to the query you typed in dash while searching for applications, files or other stuff. If a user clicks on these results and makes a purchase from Amazon, Ubuntu gets affiliate revenue which is invested back into Ubuntu development.

The latest version of the GNOME Shell is here, has it addressed the concerns of users, or gone further down the path of simplification?

Last week, HP delivered on a promise that few thought would ever be met; make WebOS fully open source by September 2012. Well, not only did they do it, they are preparing to put a lot of steam behind the project.

This week, we look at the computer science degree gap, changes in the iOS 6 App Store developers need to know about, and why business and IT still can't get along.

Google has released a general purpose framework for reranking problems, ReFr (Reranker Framework), as open source. Reranking is a technique that is used when there is a model that can offer several scored hypothesised outputs; rerankers can reorder the ranked outputs based on information not available to the original model.

If there was an overarching message from the speakers at last week's Open Hardware Summit, particularly those in the first morning block, it's that openness isn't that critical. It sounds strange coming from a conference whose name starts with "open," but speaker after speaker talked about hybrids and doing whatever worked, not just doing what was open.

Unity 6.8.0 has been released in the Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal repositories today, along with updated default lenses, bringing many bug fixes as usual, along with an option to disable online results from showing up in Dash.

As an ex-iphone user, having widgets on the homescreen (without having to jailbreak and use kludgy html based widgets) is great – and the grandaddy of all widgets is the weather widget. There are a lot of great weather widgets, but not that many that show hourly forecasts as their primary function. AIX Weather does this in a compact, informative and attractive way – bottom widget in the screenshot, just in case you were wondering. AIX Weather displays a grid/graph showing weather conditions, temperature and rainfall for the next 24 hours in your chosen location.

Great news guys, it was just announced that the upcoming Linux 3.7 kernel will incorporate support for multiple ARM System on Chips (SoCs) platforms.

This article explains the concept of Intrusion detection system (IDS) in general. It explains how an IDS works, its various types, the pros and cons of an IDS and how it differs from a firewall.

When the call came yesterday morning, I assumed at first I was being trolled—it was just too perfect to be true. My phone showed only "Private Caller" and, when I answered out of curiosity, I was connected to "John," a young man with a clear Indian accent who said he was calling from "Windows Technical Support." My computer, he told me, had alerted him that it was infested with viruses. He wanted to show me the problem—then charge me to fix it.

Verizon can change that password. In other to do that, they must have a master password, or as it is known in some circles, a backdoor. To Verizon, it is an administrative password. The only problem is their “administrative password” can unlock your administrative password.

If you are using an older PC then you have three choices: 1. Run an older version of Windows, 2. Throw it away and get a new one, 3. Install a lightweight Linux distribution such as Zorin OS 6 Lite.

Debian's Drupal package supports putting all your Drupal sites under one install of the package. This requires some attention to detail to make a policy robust enough to support any customization that a site may need. This write-up explains how that much flexibility can be achieved with the stock Debian Drupal package on multi-tenant systems.

Dot Categories: Community and EventsKDE had a visible presence at LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego, California, August 29-31. Thanks to the Linux Foundation for donating an exhibit space to KDE. LinuxCon 2012 was the fourth year this annual event has taken place. Sponsored and produced by the Linux Foundation, it is a premier Linux event and attracts big names in open source, both companies and individuals. The event has a corporate feel with many leading tech companies exhibiting and their representatives making presentations.