Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Today, we live in a world of rapidly diminishing privacy. If you use your employer's email system, it is possible that every message you send or receive is logged and intercepted without your knowledge. This may have unintended or even disastrous consequences if an intercepted email message contains sensitive personal information. Unless your email goes through Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protected connections, your email is vulnerable to what is known in the IT security field as man-in-the-middle attacks, where an attacker can intercept your message as it flies to its intended recipient.

Hoping to give their respective research efforts a shot of adrenaline, Microsoft and Brother Industries have agreed to a broad patent licensing deal that gives Microsoft access to Brother's embedded Linux printing products. The agreement, which includes compensation paid to Microsoft by Brother, gives Brother access to Microsoft's patents for Brother's current and future products, including multifunction products and "certain Linux-based embedded devices." Microsoft in turn gains access to Brother's patents for Microsoft's current and future products, including Windows and Office and a number of other unspecified IT products.

Enterprises are increasingly looking at open source for critical enterprise date integration projects, according to a global survey of more than 1,000 respondents. The survey, conducted by open source data integration provider Talend, said organisations trying to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for data integration software, were considering OSS.

Unemployed? Take a lead from the great open source entrepreneurs, and have a slice of open source cake, suggests Sramana Mitra in an interesting Forbes article that goes on to profile Apache and CollabNet Founder Brian Behlendorf, SugarCRM Founder John Roberts, and SpringSource Founder Rod Johnson.

Do a search for Linux applications on Freshmeat and you’ll get around 11,828 hits. (As of January 12, 2008, that was the tally.) Of those 11,828 applications, which ones are worth using? Not 100 percent of them for sure. Still, buried within that grand total you will find a few gems that get zero publicity but are worth giving a go. This article will highlight some these little-known apps, which range from multimedia to certificate authority tools and anything/everything in between.

The Internet gives nuclear powers to both good and evil, and the conscientious Web admin budgets a fair bit of time to securing Apache against abusive spiders and flies. Ken Coar shows how to protect your sites from abusive crawlers and hijackers.

Nothing could say plainer that Microsoft now fears for the desktop. You don't appoint someone whose job is to lead a "global desktop competitive strategy" that embraces PCs, netbooks and mobile internet devices after years of assuming the desktop was yours forever unless you have a clear and vivid idea that there is a new and real threat in this sector. And you don't have to be a mind-reader to guess that Microsoft is thinking of GNU/Linux here.

Camp KDE, the KDE community event of North and South America, has finished. Similar to the European KDE meeting, Akademy, the first two days were based around a series of talks on various topics. After that we moved towards BOF sessions, local discussions and programming. We had a trip to the Appleton Estate, visited Rick's café and had a lot of fun. The following article details some of the things that kept us busy.

Facebook is the latest large company to join the OpenID Foundation's board as a sustaining corporate member. In a blog post, Facebook's Mike Schroepfer (formerly of Mozilla), said, "We see great opportunities to increase our contributions across the open stack, and to continue our work with the open source community to evolve existing projects." The current sustaining corporate members are PayPal, Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo.

Marketcetera calls its Automated Trading Platform the first open source platform of its kind for traders, hedge fund managers and broker and dealers. Though open source software is gaining wider acceptance in business, getting the Wall Street world to open up to open source presented a "fairly uphill battle," according to CEO Graham Miller.

We all love it when things run on time. There are certain things which need to happen when the clock strikes the hour - buses and trains need to arrive, a cron job on your server needs to spark some script or the other to life, your kids need to be at school.

Opera is set to shake up the way it handles JavaScript claiming that its new engine, Carakan, will be the fastest JavaScript engine available. Carakan (pronounced Tsharakan) is now 2.5 times faster than Futhark, the JavaScript engine in the Opera 10 browser. It could be even faster when ready, the company said. The company plans to release Carakan as soon as possible in an as-yet-undetermined version of the Opera browser.

Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, we take to Sydney's streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration.

German Wikipedia users now have several print options. They can print pages via the print version option on the Wikipedia page, or they can order a complied document through a new print-on-demand option. The print-on-demand feature is the result of work that started in 2007 between the Wikimedia Foundation and PediaPress. While the print-on-demand (POD) service is currently only available on the German language Wikipedia, English language Wikipedia and other Wikimedia project support is coming in spring 2009

Ubuntu Jaunty Alpha 4 has been released, two months ahead of a final release in April. Jaunty, or Ubuntu 9.04, has a few small changes in this release including X.Org 1.6, better font settings and notification improvements.

Is Ubuntu ready for prime time in the enterprise? Ubuntu users think so, according to a recent survey from Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, Canonical, and IT consultancy Red Monk. Unlike many surveys that land on the desks of IT journos each week, the one done by Canonical and Red Monk was based on a very large number of responses. People from 6,819 companies answered questions about the operating systems they have deployed in their organizations and how these OSes are used to support mission-critical and other workloads.

SCO Group boss Jeff Hunsaker has done away with corporate speak in his latest seasonal note to partners and customers and replaced it with a terse, blunt message that reads: "Blah. Blah. Blah." Sadly the CEO and president of the bloodied and bruised software company was not immediately available for comment, but we think this link here speaks for itself and we have a screen dump here just in case it mysteriously disappears.

LXer Feature: 06-Feb-2009

Why does the newspaper deserve to be saved? Just because they have been around for a long time? That is not a good enough reason for me. Or the arguments that society will somehow be lessened by their absence or be less informed without them is arrogant and presumptuous.

On behalf of the KDevelop team I am happy to announce that we have reached the next milestone on our way to a final release, KDevelop 4 Beta 1. We feel that KDevelop 4, although in no way feature complete, is now usable and stable enough to get first feedback from a somewhat wider audience. Being a beta there are of course still bugs and missing functionality, but we have excellent language support for C++, integration of the CMake buildsystem, subversion, git and even starts of Qt GUI designer integration.

The Fedora Project team today announced the release of Fedora 11 Alpha. The release includes a number of new features including the new Windows Cross Compiler and a development release of Gnome 2.26 as the default desktop.