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Hollywood movies often have a tech geek entering commands and doing amazing things. While it may not be that easy to hack into public transport systems or or control the world like Eagle Eye, the command line is certainly a geeks playground.

This tutorial shows how to set up a Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Courier POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

Website encryption has sustained another body blow, this time by an independent hacker who demonstrated a tool that can steal sensitive information by tricking users into believing they're visiting protected sites when in fact they're not. Unveiled Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Washington, SSLstrip works on public Wi-Fi networks, onion-routing systems, and anywhere else a man-in-the-middle attack is practical. It converts pages that normally would be protected by the secure sockets layer protocol into their unencrypted versions. It does this while continuing to fool both the website and the user into believing the security measure is still in place.

These days, most people have at least one computer and a large collection of media files. The conventional practice for most people has always been to have redundant copies of their media collection on their various computers. While this system technically works, it is highly inefficient and creates the unnecessary task of keeping the media collection on each computer synchronized and up-to-date with the others. A far better solution is to keep all the media on one computer and stream it as needed to the other machines over the network.

Some times work can be a real kick in the nodes ;)

As Jim Zemlin, the executive director of The Linux Foundation, points out, "I am not joking or trying to be trite, but the answer to this question is: every single person in the modern world every day. Everyone who searches Google, picks up a phone and uses telecommunication infrastructure, watches a new televisions, use a new camera, makes a call on many modern cell phones, trades a stock on a major exchange, watches a weather forecast generated on a supercomputer, logs into Facebook, navigates via air traffic control systems, buys a netbook computer, checks out at a cash register, withdraws cash at an ATM machine, fires up a quick-boot desktop (even those with Windows), or uses one of many medical devices; the list goes on and on."

Release engineering for a large project is always a tricky task. Balancing the needs of new features, removing old cruft, and bug fixing while still producing releases in a timely fashion is difficult. Python is currently struggling with this as it is trying to determine which things go into a 3.0.1 release versus those that belong in 3.1.0. The discussion gives a glimpse into the thinking that must go on as projects decide how, what, and when to release. It is very common to find bugs shortly after a release that would seem to necessitate a bug fix release. Ofttimes these are bugs that would have been considered show-stopping had they been found before the release. But what about features that were supposed to be dropped, after having been deprecated for several releases, but were mistakenly left in? That is one of the current dilemmas facing Python.

Is MLM the future of Linux and Cloud computing?

Does Windows 7 contain more DRM than Windows Vista? Does Windows 7 limit you from running cracked applications, and will it open the firewall specifically for applications that want to check if they're cracked or not? Does it limit the audio recording capabilities? According to a skimp and badly written post on Slashdot, it does. The Slashdot crowd tore the front page item apart - and rightfully so.

The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is an annual workshop for developers and users of free software graphics applications to collaborate and advance the cause of high-quality free graphics software. From now until April 22, you can help support this event by making a donation to the LGM 2009 community pledge drive. LGM is free to attend, so your support is critical to making this important event a success.

How on earth will the prosecutors be able to argue that Pirate Bay is guilty of making content available when it has already conceded it doesn't actually do so? Or have I missed something really important here? I just cannot see how proving making content available as an intermediary rather than a host will be possible when it could not get a grip on the original argument.

I am a great fan of the Gutenberg project, a noteworthy and honorable effort to digitize copyright-free texts. This project has released into the public domain over 20,000 classic books. This article will explain how to integrate this huge body of material with the Ubuntu desktop. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

SugarCRM has long driven roughly 30 percent of its revenue through Sugar-on-Demand, its hosted offering. But in a recent TechTarget interview, SugarCRM CEO John Roberts pushes the envelope a bit on what it means to be open source and cloud-based..

Userful Corp. has won a deal to supply its Linux-based PC-sharing software to 357,000 Linux desktops in schools throughout Brazil. Userful's Multiplier software runs on top of any version of the open-source Linux OS and enables a single desktop PC to be shared by as many as 10 users, all connected by individual monitors, keyboards and mice. The massive deal, won in partnership with ThinNetworks and a number of local Brazilian PC manufacturers, is Userful's largest deployment by far. Including this deal, the Calgary, Alberta firm will now have contracts to supply more than 400,000 seats.

I spent the past few days installing Solaris 9 on the Sparc 20. (I got the OS super-cheap — $1 plus shipping — from eBay, unopened in the box). Solaris is quite a bit different from OpenBSD and Linux. I'm still getting the hang of it. A lot of the trouble I'm having is due to my near-total unfamiliarity with it. I do have "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Solaris 9," which I found remaindered at Fry's for a few bucks, and it's a good resource. It's somewhat short — not "complete," but for the "complete idiot," which I am in this regard.

It's easy for people to pick at Windows for being prone to virus and malware attacks. It's almost a given belief that if you're running a PC with a Windows operating system, you're much more susceptible to attacks than users with other operating systems. But let's quickly look at the reasons for this. First, it isn't really Microsoft's fault. It isn't that Windows is technically inferior, it's that the majority of the world runs on Windows. This fact alone is very attractive for any virus coder or exploiter. As a virus writer, you'd want to attack the majority, not the minority.

[Hmm..are you sure it's just five? - Scott]

The good people over at Novell must be wondering what to do next after Red Hat and Microsoft inked a deal on server virtualisation interoperability yesterday. What will hit Novell really hard is the fact that Red Hat has not had to bend over as Novell itself did in 2006; there are no patent clauses in this deal at all, no question of money changing hands. In sharp contrast to the hush-hush nature of the Novell-Microsoft deal, Red Hat has clearly outlined the details of what its agreement with Redmond involves.

I periodically get email notices for different books being published, inviting me to review them. David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual appeared in my inbox. I figured "why not"? Then it arrived, and I remembered the digital camera and started wondering if the dead could be resurrected. Yeah, I've encountered Flickr and Picassa and such, and sampled their wares. I thumbed through an old National Geographic at the barber's...uh, "hair stylist's" recently, and spent quite a bit of time going over the photos of the South Sandwich Islands. Was I really still interested in photography? Did I really have time for a hobby? Well, it wouldn't hurt to look at the book.

Here is another update for the fans of XWinWrap, the tiny program that allows you to run animated wallpapers on your system. You could use screensavers, movies and what not as your desktop background.

For the first time this week I finally had the pleasure of taking Damn Small Linux (hereafter, DSL) for a test drive. One of the companies that I work for required an easy, lightweight and quick solution to salvage an older project.