Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Police data systems should be based on open source software, according to a data expert working with law enforcement. Ian Readhead, director of information for the U.K. Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), said Tuesday at a Unisys security event that emergency service data transferal systems should be open source, to help ensure interoperability between them.

In an article on its security blog, the Mozilla Foundation has presented a new security policy – known as content security policy (CSP) – intended to guard against the epidemic of cross-site scripting attacks (XSS) and other vulnerabilities. This allows web administrators, by sending special headers, to tell the browser which domains it should accept as sources for trusted code. Standard XSS attacks sometimes utilise vulnerabilities in web applications in order to execute JavaScript in the browser with the rights of trusted domains.

If you add Unix and Linux together as part of the same family, instead of seeing them as competitors, then Unix still accounts for more than half of all server spend. Paul Rubens takes a look at venerable old ancestor of modern computing.

A few days ago, version 4.0 of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification was released, weighing in at a hefty 727 pages. Lead by Intel, PC manufacturers as well as operating system, driver, BIOS, firmware and software developers have, for more than a decade, been working on this specification, which is designed to enhance the configuration management and power saving features of computer hardware. Despite this, there are still flaws in many implementations.

At the International Supercomputing Conference, Sun Microsystems is bringing a host of new and enhanced additions to its Sun Constellation supercomputer, touching on everything from software to storage to networking. In addition, Sun is previewing its upcoming Sun Blade systems that will be powered by AMD's new Opteron processors code-named Istanbul, which will complement the servers Sun rolled out in April based on Intel's new chip microarchitecture and chips code-named Nehalem EP.

The first ODF Plugfest was held on the 15th and 16th of June 2009 in the Royal Library in the Netherlands. The meeting was initiated by the Dutch government and the OpenDoc Society. Jos van den Oever, brand new employee of KO GmbH and Sven Langkamp, proud developer, went on behalf of the KOffice team. With over forty organisations and a total of sixty representatives from businesses, public sector organisations, open source projects and research institutions, the meeting was an incredible success.

For managing network and Internet connections from the Linux desktop, used by most distribution vendors is NetworkManager, which is a well rounded network connection manager from Red Hat for controlling wired, wireless, and mobile broadband devices. The ModemManager project was even spun off recently for furthering the mobile broadband support on Linux.

There are a variety of netbook distros out there, but you can have a little fun creating your own. Here are some software packages and tips worth considering:

On Debian based systems, or any that use Synaptic for package management, you can use Synaptic to help you setup multiple systems with the same software. On the first system select all the packages you want and then under the File menu use Save Markings or Save Markings as to save your selections to a file. If you save the file to a USB stick, you can then use Read Markings on subsequent installs to quickly duplicate your selections.

Could Intel and Nokia together make a success of the ‘Mobile Internet Device’ concept? The two companies announced plans to create what Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia calls “the next wave of mobile technology”; a new mobile device platform based on Linux and a range of open source technologies using Intel x86 Architecture chips and Nokia HSPA chipsets (which Intel is also licensing to use alongside Wi-Fi and WiMAX in other platforms).

ThinkFree announced the availability of a Linux-compatible office productivity suite designed for netbooks. ThinkFree Mobile Netbook ESD version offers word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, with "round-trip" Microsoft Office compatibility, synchronization and online document collaboration features, and 1GB of free online storage, says the company.

The 2009 Open World Forum (OWF) will take place on the 1st and 2nd of October at the Eurosite George V convention centre in Paris. The banner for the forum is "FLOSS: AT THE HEART OF THE DIGITAL RECOVERY" and it promotes free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) as a path to economic regrowth.

I was running Windows, and before it came along, MS-DOS, applications on Unix and Linux for ages. It was never especially easy, but experts could do it. With CodeWeavers' latest CrossOver Linux 8, though, it's become so easy that anyone should be able to do it. Now, if all your desktop needs are already being met by Linux applications, you don't need to worry with Crossover. But, if like many of us, you still want to use Quicken for your banking or you're stuck with a Web site that refused to work with any Web browser except Internet Explorer, then Crossover Linux 8 is for you.

LXer Feature: 22-Jun-2009

Is Mono an affliction that should be eradicated or a choice that should be respected? Does its inclusion in a distro reek of obeisance to Microsoft, or should the threat of a Microsoft claim to "ownership" be considered irrelevant to true FOSS believers? The debate over Mono continues to touch some raw nerves.

The editor Vim supports Unicode natively. If your X or console keymap is set up to enter unicode characters via the keymap, it will work fine in Vim. Alternatively, there are two other ways of entering these characters. The slow way is just to use their hex code. Hit Ctrl+V, then u, then type the hex code. For example, hex code 00BF will give you an inverted question mark, ¿. This is useful if you only very occasionally want to type one of these characters. Lists of UTF-8 character codes are available online.

The Remote Exploit Team has released a Pre Final version of the BackTrack 4 (BT4) security distribution (code named 'pwnsauce') as a 1.3 GB ISO image file. BackTrack offers a wide range of tools to enable users and administrators to test the security of items ranging from web applications to RFID systems. These include LAN and WLAN sniffers, password crackers, vulnerability scanners, the Metasploit exploit framework and several others.

The first alpha of Mandriva Linux 2010 has been released and includes several updates, boot time improvements and new features. The main focus of the 2010 release is to improve the user experience for daily tasks. In a blog posting, VP of Engineering at Mandriva – Anne Nicolas-Velu, provided an overview of the new features included in the development release and the current list of 2010 specifications.

In our last post, Deploying XO Laptops in USA Classrooms, we discussed the founding of OLPCsb last December, and provided a quick overview of our mission and objectives. In this post, we would like to share with the OLPC News Community how things have progressed over the past several months in regards to integrating the XOs into our local classroom!

The majority of people in the United States probably have no idea what is contained in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Similarly, most people are clueless about the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. Despite this, most of us who work in those fields are expected to not only know about them, but understand the security ramifications behind them. This gets to be even more complicated when you have to take into account that a number of the systems that are part of HIPAA or PCI based purchases are connected to the web.