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Microsoft has issued Security Advisory (979352) after its own investigations into the highly-organized hacking attack in late December, the one that Google earlier this week insinuated came from China, led the software giant to conclude that a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in Internet Explorer was used by the perpetrators.

For those that may have forgot, at the start of December we launched the Phoronix Kernel Test Farm to begin benchmarking the Linux kernel on a daily basis using the automated tools that we provide via the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. Towards the middle of December we then unveiled the Phoromatic Tracker, which exposes these test results in real-time to the public. Well, it's now been a month of monitoring the kernel's performance and the entire Linux 2.6.33 kernel development cycle thus far, with many interesting findings.

Today is the birthday of Linus. Although that's essentially a private event for him, there's an interesting historical link to the creation of the Linux kernel, too. read more

Compared to past years when recapping the AMD/ATI Linux advancements over the past calendar year, 2009 was not quite as exciting, which can be viewed as both good and bad for their Catalyst Linux driver. There were many advancements this year on AMD's open-source side, but in 2009 there wasn't as many milestones for their Catalyst driver like in the past with the introduction of CrossFire, OverDrive, same-day Linux support, the AMD Catalyst Control Center, and other new features. Here is our 2009 year in review look at AMD's advancements to their proprietary Catalyst Linux driver along with our annual benchmarks.

As a Christmas (or holiday) gift to all Linux users, Linus Torvalds last night put out the Linux 2.6.33-rc2 kernel release. This is the second release candidate since the closing of the Linux 2.6.33 kernel merge window, that brought the long-awaited Nouveau driver, many other graphics improvements, and other exciting changes.

The holiday 2.6.33-rc2 release announcement from Linus Torvalds can be read at LKML.org. While I may be away on a sabbatical for Windows, you can continue to see how the performance of the Linux 2.6.33 kernel continues to evolve on a daily basis using the Phoromatic Tracker's kernel tracker...

In the vast world of communication, instant messaging is a long-standing medium. Facebook has entered the scene relatively recently, as has Twitter. If you use these newer mediums of communication and you're a Pidgin user then you may want to look at the Pidgin plugins for accessing them.

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With the FreeBSD 8.0 release now available, we reached out to NVIDIA to find out the status of their 64-bit BSD display driver, now that this operating system carries the necessary mmap extension support in their 64-bit kernel for their proprietary graphics driver to function. Andy Ritger, who heads the user-space side of NVIDIA's UNIX Graphics Driver team and was previously interviewed by Phoronix, provided a brief update.

Ritger doesn't have a firm ETA when a 64-bit BSD display driver will be released, but he hopes soon...

The KOffice team is very happy to announce version 2.1.0 of KOffice, 6 months after the platform release 2.0.0. This release brings a number of new features as well as general improvements in the maturity of the individual applications. Importing of documents have also been given an overhaul. read more

Oooh, spooky! Microsoft has once again denied rumours that it built a backdoor into Windows 7.

Today’s release of the list of the top 500 supercomputers shows that well over 90% are running Linux. Also,...

Increasing raw throughput over its predecessor by a factor of ten, the new Sun Constellation supercomputer was officially launched today.

It can be tempting to throw hardware at MySQL performance problems, but there are ways to tune your SQL database so that it doesn't always need more power. Sean Hull gives some excellent tips on simplifying, strengthening, and speeding up your MySQL database.

OpenSUSE 11.2 tugs at Karmic Koala's fur Novell has released openSUSE 11.2, just a few short weeks after Ubuntu 9.10 - aka Karmic Koala - landed.…Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

Google has launched Go, a new systems programming language born with concurrency, simplicity, and performance in mind. Go is open source and its syntax is similar to C, C++ and Python. It uses an expressive language with pointer but no pointer arithmetic. It is type safe and memory safe.

The Moblin project released the first beta of Moblin 2.1, fixing numerous bugs while adding support for a 3G modem. Other touted improvements to the netbook-focused Moblin 2.1 include a faster browser with plugin support, Bluetooth discovery support, higher screen resolution support, and an enhanced ConnMan.

Nokia N900 runs on the new Maemo 5 Linux open source software. The N900 lets users open multiple application windows and run simultaneously while taking advantage of its cellular features. The N900 offers a high-res WVGA touch screen, QWERTY keyboard and a Mozilla powered browser. The device runs on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, with up to 1GB of application memory and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration.

Two whirlwinds blew into Buenos Aires this week: the hundreds of Wikipedia supporters, editors and administrators here for their annual Wikimania conference, and the free-software activist Richard Stallman, who was in town as part of his never-ending tour of the globe to promote his cause. The two are set to meet Wednesday, when Mr. Stallman gives the keynote address at Wikimania in a theater across the street large enough to accommodate the expected crowd. But they don’t exactly blow in the same direction.

A paper with code has been released outlining an "invisible exploit" involving Intel SMM cpu cache poisoning. Intel has not yet commented.

Google has revealed its goal for releasing Mac OS X and Linux versions of its browser. Also, cutting-edge Chrome sports early work to enable extensions.

Why doesn't free trump expensive? Every Microsoft product has a free, open source counterpart created by dedicated programmers who loathe everything the company stands for. The free stuff is darn good. Yet companies and individuals continue to buy billions of dollars worth of Microsoft products.