Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The billions in federal stimulus funds directed toward the development electronic health records may help modernize the system, but it will likely be a slow process. Meanwhile, New York Lawyer Patrick Donahue is taking the initiative by launching the Sarah Jane Brain Project. His efforts are aimed at jump-starting innovative treatment for pediatric brain injuries using open source methods.

Python is moving to a distributed version control system (DVCS), but unlike many projects which have moved to Git, Guido van Rossum has selected Mercurial, also known as Hg (the chemical symbol for mercury), as the DVCS for Python.

As Linux sysadmins, many of us still need to deal with Windows worms and how they affect our networks. Tomorrow is April 1st, and the Conficker worm will be activating on vulnerable computers everywhere. Here's a quick HOW-TO showing how you can detect compromised and/or vulnerable computers on your network: There are 2 fairly easy methods available at this late hour.

When it launched the netbook phenomenon a couple of years ago, the most noticeable thing about the Asus EEE PC, apart from its size, was that it typically ran Linux. Suddenly everyone was predicting the demise of Windows and the rise of Linux. Microsoft, naturally, quickly backtracked on its end-of-life plans for XP and threw itself into the netbook market with the result that Windows now accounts for about 90% of the netbooks market and Linux the remaining 10%. So buying a netbook with Linux is not as easy as it initially promised to be. We scouted around to find a selection of mid-level netbooks that could be bought in South Africa with Linux pre-installed.

There are several ways you can try to protect yourself from Conficker. These include disabling AutoRun, since Conficker can spread by infected USB drives; using current anti-virus software; use Windows' own malicious software removal tool; or, switch to OpenDNS for your DNS service. There are many ways to try to stop these attacks, unfortunately, the bad guys are always working on getting newer and better ways to infect your system. The sad truth is no matter what you do with Windows, whether you're running XP, Vista, or the Windows 7 beta, you're not safe. Now, however there's a patch that will stop Conficker, and almost all other malware programs, in their tracks. It's called Linux.

The open source consultancy credativ, has joined the Linux Foundation. The company is based in Germany but expanded into the UK in November 2007. In the UK, they provide support services for all major Linux distributions, along with providing open source project management and training.

Corvallis, Oregon, April 1st, 2009 - Linux Fund is pleased to announce Linux Fund Casino, an open source online gaming site that will launch immediately upon the impending repeal of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), the proceeds of which will benefit Linux Fund's mission to support open source software.

The Fedora Project has released a beta version of its community-sponsored, Red Hat-based Linux distribution, with the final due in May. The Fedora 11 beta release offers faster, 20-second bootups, improved package management, new virtualization features, and support for cross-compiling Windows applications, says the open-source project.

While Linux is very secure-able, as always the weakest point is the human factor. The Psyb0t targets inexpensive Linux-based routers that ship with weak or no passwords, and other flaws that are simple to fix. Sean Michael Kerner tells the tale.

These days free and open source software (FOSS) is recognised as a significant model for the development and distribution of software, transforming the way that software is written, perceived, packaged and sold. A large part of the success of free and open source software has been due to the revolution in software licensing that was led by the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The following article presents a status report on the development of five of the most active notation software projects for Linux. Most of them are works in progress, but all are well along on their development track and in varying states of usability.

When big companies release new software, they launch it with lots of hoopla: press tours, technical conferences, free T-shirts. Open-source projects, even the well-known ones, generally release their major new versions with a lot less fanfare. The FOSS (free and open-source software) community is often too busy coding and testing to bother with marketing, even when the new "point release" of the software is really remarkable. And there are plenty of remarkable open-source applications on the way this year. Quite a few projects are quietly (or not so quietly) working on major releases or significant upgrades that they aim to make available sometime during 2009. I've rounded up 25 of the most notable here.

IBM last week filed a patent application for an offshore outsourcing methodology that is intended to help companies minimize the financial risks associated with sending work overseas. The patent application describes a computer-driven approach for putting values on both the quantitative and qualitative attributes of a "global resource sourcing strategy." For instance, the methodology takes into account the language skills and morale of offshore workers, as well as a list of the hard numbers involved in setting up an offshore operation, including labor rates and currency valuations. In short, IBM is attempting to reduce offshoring considerations to a mathematic model — or, in the words of the application, "a robust and reusable sourcing template" for identifying and analyzing "global resource pools."

When you save a document in your word processor, your work is encoded in a particular file format. You often have a choice of formats that you can use, with names like DOC, DOCX, RTF, WPD or ODT. Your choice of format will influence whether others can easily read your document today, whether you yourself will be able to read your document ten years from now, and whether you will be able to migrate painlessly to another word processor or operating system if and when you choose to do so.

The Linux Foundation welcomed its newest member today, the European-based free and open source standards consulting firm, credativ. This new partnership is a particularly exciting one, thanks to credativ's presence in the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, and its focus on creating and implementing standards. Naturally, credativ's business -- providing consulting and support services to businesses using free and open source software -- means it will take an active role in the Linux Standard Base workgroup. Because credativ is one of Europe's largest employers of Debian developers, the company also plans to participate in the Desktop Linux workgroup.

Egerstad and I had concluded at the time that someone had likely infected computers belonging to embassy workers and human rights groups and was using Tor to anonymously transmit data that was being stolen from the computers. He'd inadvertently scooped up the stolen data as it was transmitting from the infected computers to another location. Threat Level contacted a number of embassy and rights groups in China to notify them at the time that their computers were being spied on, but none of the groups responded. It seems clear now that Egerstad had tapped into data that was being stolen by GhostNet.

JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey is leaving Red Hat. Labourey had been at JBoss for the past eight years, nearly three of which were under Red Hat's ownership. Labourey's departure comes over two years after JBoss founder Marc Fleury left Red Hat in 2007. Times are good for Red Hat if its most recent financial results are a good indicator. But it seems as though Labourey is just ready to move on and take life a little slower too.

Cloud-services platform provider OpSource and content-distribution kingpin Akamai today are announcing some details about strategic partnership that’s now a few months old. I wonder if the decision to go public was influenced by Gartner’s March 26 report predicting the cloud services market will top $56 billion this year and hit $150 billion by 2013. If Akamai and OpSource are trying to ride this wave of optimism, they certainly can’t be ridiculed for the decision.

One might well think that, at this point, there has been sufficient discussion of the design decisions built into the ext4 "delayed allocation" feature and the user-space implications of those decisions. And perhaps that is true, but there should be room for a summary of the relevant issues. The key question has little to do with the details of filesystem design, and a lot to do with the kind of API that the Linux kernel should present to its user-space processes.

LXer Feature: 30-Mar-2009

It looks like Google's Chrome browser came out on the winning end of browser hacking contest, so I figured why not back it up with 11 Free Ways to Beef Up Your Web Browser. Eric S. Raymond speaks heresy at a LUG meeting, RMS doesn't want us to fall into "The Javascript Trap" and by the way, your distro sucks.;-)