Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Everyone who surfs the Net is eminently trackable. Internet data packets include not only the actual data being sent, but also headers with routing information that is used to guide the packages to their destinations. Even if you use encryption for extra safety, the routing information -- which cannot be encrypted -- can reveal details about what you're doing, who you're talking to, what services you're connecting to, and what data you're accessing. Intermediaries (authorized or not) can also see that data and learn about you. If you want a higher level of anonymity, TorK can do the job. It uses The Onion Router (Tor) network to provide you with a safer way of browsing.

BSDCan 2008 officially started this morning at 9AM with an opening talk by the event's organizer, Dan Langille. However, in reality the event has already been running for two days, with the FreeBSD tutorials having started on the 14'th. After arriving in Ottawa yesterday afternoon and finding my room in a 20 story University of Ottawa residence, I wandered down to the Royal Oak Pub for early registration, meeting several dozen BSD hackers from all over the world.

Linux on the desktop has yet to gain any real market presence. Despite the unrest over Microsoft Windows Vista, the companies that focus on Linux as a business have yet to deliver a go-to-market proposition that is compelling for the consumer, for the retailer, distributors, and original equipment manufacturers. Author John Terpstra continues his look at the challenges facing the desktop and server markets, with a close examination of current market dynamics.

Potential conflicts and overlap between the first update to HTML in a decade by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and XHTML has been addressed by the standards body. The group, meanwhile, has also acknowledged vendors are - once again - pushing their own platform-specific technologies, this time on RIA, with the standards process unable to keep up. This poses a problem on interoperability.

As has been widely reported, the maintainers of Debian's OpenSSL packages made some errors recently that have potentially compromised the security of any sshd-equipped system used remotely by Debian users. System administrators may wish to purge authorized_key files of public keys generated since 2006 by affected client machines. Simply using a Debian-based machine to access a remote server via SSH would not be enough to put the machine at risk. However, if the user copied a public key generated on a Debian-based system to the remote server, for example to take advantage of the higher security offered by password-free logins, then the weak key could make the server susceptible to brute-force attacks, especially if the user's name is easily guessable.

With autossh, you can monitor your SSH connections and restart them if they stop sending traffic or SSH exits abnormally. This makes autossh perfect for keeping secure port forwarding available. Some readers will be familiar with the TCPKeepAlive, ServerAliveInterval, and ServerAliveCountMax options to SSH itself. TCPKeepAlive causes TCP keepalive messages to be sent to the server, allowing SSH to detect if it can no longer contact the server. ServerAliveCountMax and ServerAliveInterval cause the SSH client to send traffic through the encrypted link to the server, and can be used both the avoid a connection being closed due to inactivity and to have the SSH client exit if traffic cannot be returned from the server for a specified amount of time.

Microsoft has announced an agreement with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) that will make Windows XP available on the non-profit's low-cost laptops for third-world children. Thank goodness third world children will no longer have to struggle to learn Linux, one tongue-in-cheek commentator observes.

The Italian firm CompuMaster has introduced a compact thin client that runs Linux. The "Praim Ino" can be mounted on the back of a monitor, draws just six Watts, and comes with a variety of client software, the company says.

Australian citizens who use GNU/Linux in their businesses should be asking exactly that question of their tax authority. (However, I doubt that anyone will do so - apart from one person who has been asking the question for at least three years). It's a tale that runs over nearly three years. Australian businesses have to periodically submit activity statements to the Australian Taxation Office and most businesses use the online method. The tax office provides a client for its electronic commerce interface (ECI) which allows businesses to file activity statements over the internet. Clients exist only for Windows and the Apple Macintosh.

Though the tools for voice control and dictation in the open source world lag far behind those in the commercial arena, I decided to see how far I could get in querying a database by voice and having the computer respond verbally. Using a number of open source tools, I'm happy to report success.

"As some of the latency junkies on lkml already know, commit 8e3e076 in v2.6.26-rc2 removed the preemptible BKL feature and made the Big Kernel Lock a spinlock and thus turned it into non-preemptible code again. This commit returned the BKL code to the 2.6.7 state of affairs in essence," began Ingo Molnar. He noted that this had a very negative effect on the real time kernel efforts, adding that Linux creator Linus Torvalds indicated the only acceptable way forward was to completely remove the BKL.

The news that Windows XP will be made available on the One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop is now official. When the project began, a move such as this would have been dismissed out of hand by any of those involved. What has changed to make the OLPC just another seller of Windows laptops?

In this second installment I'll profile Minicomputer, a subtractive synthesizer with some familiar aspects, unique characteristics, and terrific sounds. Let's take a look under its hood and see what makes the Minicomputer run.

Debian, the popular Linux distribution, has just been shown to have made an all-time stupid security goof-up. They managed to change OpenSSL in their distribution so that it had no security to speak of. Good job guys! OpenSSL makes it possible to use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) in Linux, Unix, Windows and many other operating systems. It also incorporates a general purpose cryptography library. OpenSSL is used not only in operating systems, but in numerous vital applications such as security for Apache Web servers and security appliances from companies like Check Point and Cisco. Yeah, in other words, if you do anything requiring network security on Linux, chances are good, OpenSSL is being called in to help.

Sugar Labs Foundation is being established to further extend Sugar, the highly acclaimed open source “learn learning” software platform that was originally developed for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) XO laptop. Sugar is the core of the XO laptop's human-computer interface; it provides a fun, easy-to-use, social experience that promotes sharing and learning. Sugar Labs will focus on providing a software ecosystem that enhances learning on the XO laptop as well as other laptops distributed by other companies, such as the ASUS Eee PC. Consistent with the OLPC mission to provide opportunities for learning, an independent Sugar Labs Foundation can deliver learning software to other hardware vendors and, consequently, reach more children.

There’s been a flurry of discussion around the idea of syncronicity in free software projects. I’d like to write up a more comprehensive view, but I’m in Prague prepping for FOSSCamp and the Ubuntu Developer Summit (can’t wait to see everyone again!) so I’ll just contribute a few thoughts and responses to some of the commentary I’ve seen so far.

Adobe Systems is reaching out for Linux desktop users with its announcement today that the first beta of Adobe Flash Player 10, a.k.a. Astro, is now available for Linux, as well as Windows and Mac OS X. In a statement, David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe, said that "Adobe had been working closely with the community; we are delivering groundbreaking creative features that will be transformative for interactive designers and developers, and revolutionary for end users."

Plugins and extensions—they're what made Photoshop such a bonanza from the late 1980s onward, and they gave it the market push to triumph over competitors who preferred to keep their tools and development completely in-house. It was a great idea—make your own product more valuable by letting other people enhance it for their own benefit—and it worked famously. In the graphics world, everyone's got 'em now. But, in the browsing world...well, it takes an open-source project to apply that kind of functionality across categories.

One of Carla Schroder's favorite Linux features is its endless adaptability as a cross-platform rescue tool, and her favorite rescue Linux of all is the excellent Gentoo-based SystemRescueCD. In this series, you'll learn how to set things right when things on your PC go awry.

Last year, I wrote about our school district's implementation of LTSP. In the article, I pointed out the significant limitations a thin client environment gives you. While I don't think my article was the reason the issues were addressed, less than a year later just about every limitation I highlighted has been eradicated. Welcome LTSP 5.