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The article discusses E-Stewards, a new certification program for e-waste recyclers that aims to prevent dumping in landfills and developing countries. That old CRT monitor the size of a small fridge. The original Apple Newton that kicked the bucket and never woke up. The early-vintage musty VA Linux box – what happens to all of this e-junk after it, if ever, leaves your basement? Ideally e-junk lands at a reputable e-recycler with the equipment to safely recycle and/or dispose of these items that are very difficult to process. What happens frequently is that a less-than-reputable outfit will pack your e-junk onto a container and ship it off to a developing country with lax environmental and labor laws, where it will wreak havoc on the environment and poor people.

If all goes according to plan, the first alpha release for Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) will be released tomorrow. It's not even been one month since the release of Ubuntu 8.10, but this first alpha release will show early signs of what we can expect to see in this next Canonical-sponsored release -- albeit many of the features are still in planning. In this article we will provide a glimpse at what Ubuntu 9.04 should hold in store to captivate Linux desktop users.

An Amazon Kindle is $359. How about a free one? It's been a year since Amazon released its Linux-based Kindle Ebook Reader into its online store and currently more than 200,000 people have purchased one. Are you going to join the fray at almost 400USD or wait for my bombshell? I suggest you wait.

StarOffice 9 reminds me of the classic Monty Python skit in which Graham Chapman wrestles himself. Although StarOffice is being aggressively presented as an alternative to Microsoft Office, it seems to be equally marketed and bundled to compete against OpenOffice.org, the free software project that is sponsored by Sun and that shares a common code base with StarOffice. The trouble is, the differences between the two have diminished with each release, until, with StarOffice 9, you have to wonder who the potential customers might be.

The Typo3 Association is warning users with accounts at Typo3.org of a possible misuse of stored data. In a mail sent to its account owners, Typo3 reports an unauthorized person posed as an administrator to gain access to sensitive data stored there by registered users.

Mozilla Chief Wrangler Mitchell Baker today reported Mozilla's financial position which shows 2007 revenues of $75 million up by 12 percent from 2006 revenues of $67 million. Though Mozilla is on the upswing, Baker's report shows some areas of potential future financial concerns including an IRS review.

While I remain in agreement with many observers who see the economic downturn as potentially very positive for open source, I have to wonder whether we're going to see some of the leadership open source companies swallowed up in all the financial carnage. Red Hat, Novell, and Sun Microsystems are all companies that I'd like to see continue their open source leadership without the meddling of huge corporate parents, but one has to wonder how cheap these companies can get in the public market before their independence is threatened.

Known as Kardphisher and “in the wild” since April, 2007, last week the malware author of this trojan horse mimicking the Windows XP activation interface while collecting the credit card details the end user has submitted, has made significant changes to visual interface and usability of the trojan, consequently improving its authenticity. Guess what happens when a gullible end user falls victim into this social engineering attack?

Some time ago I was required to adapt a bespoke website application (which I had originally written) so it not only supported multiple languages but also multiple character sets. The website, MakingContact.org, is a on-line community for families with disabled children run by the charity Contact a Family. It required “support” for four languages in addition the English it was currently in: Somali, Arabic, Farsi and Simplified Chinese. Yes, I know the latter is not actually a language but for these purposes the cap fitted. I decided to do it using Smarty, the PHP-based templating engine. Whilst it was possible that a CMS or similar could do the job now, at the time I could find none which supported multiple character sets in the way I required. I’ve been meaning to write the process down for some time so here’s how I did it. Read Ryan's story of how he did it at Freesoftware Magazine.

Last week in our classic Networking 101 series we learned about Border Gateway Protocol, the networking protocol that powers the Internet. This week Charlie Schluting leads the dive into iBGP-- Internal Border Gateway Protocol-- to learn how to connect all those BGP routers together, and how to route between thousands of computers without going nuts.

Marking the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell this week are announcing upcoming availability of both the beta version of Moonlight, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology on Linux, and the general release of Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. The November 2006 agreement has had Microsoft offering Suse Linux support certificates from Novell. The companies have also agreed not to sue each other's customers over intellectual property issues. Some have protested that the agreement legitimized Microsoft's claims that Linux violates its patents.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Wednesday, November 19, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. In today's news, a real news Flash for 64 bit Linux users, Gartner says open source software rules (but watch for those lawsuits), Novell/Microsoft relationship enters its third year, French recording association as stupid as US recording association, and RedHat CEO rocks with E&Y.

The Gartner numbers seem positive, and encouraging -- especially in light of the acknowledgement that the remaining 15% are planning to move toward more open source software in the near future. Then Gartner drops the bad news -- cases that Moody says don't end badly (they are usually remedied with a polite phone call) or even happen terribly frequently (12 or so cases a year) -- that 69% of companies have no formal method of evaluating and cataloging their open source applications, leaving them at risk of intellectual property liabilities.

On desktops and Netbooks, Ubuntu has had a remarkable year. But on the server, Ubuntu continues to face multiple major challenges, reports The VAR Guy. Here's the scoop.

The 32nd edition of the Top 500 supercomputers lists was released late last week and Linux-based systems occupy 439 of the 500 positions. Other Unix variants, including BSD-based systems occupy another 24 positions.

A recent attack piece against Richard Stallman was written by Linus Torvalds on the eve of Obama’s election. Black and white by Linus Torvalds Linus begins with this: So I’m pretty well-known for not exactly being a huge fan of the FSF and Richard Stallman, despite the fact that I obviously love the GPLv2 and use it as the license for all my projects that I care about. How unfortunate to write negatively of Stallman in the very first sentence. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

PHP is an easy-to-learn programming language. It's well suited for developing simple scripts you can use to help you in all kinds of games. Each article in this series will cover 10 scripts simple enough for even a beginning developer, but useful enough for a seasoned game player.

The Linux desktop comes with a variety of multimedia players, such as Xine, MPlayer, and Amarok. Yet all digital media players are only as good as the files they have to work with, and preparing those files requires the best tag editor you can find. I checked out half a dozen of the more popular and stable graphical ID3 tag editors available for Linux. I found that going from no tags to great tags requires keeping more than one of these editors on hand.

In an effort to coax more users to take advantage of the many extensions for its Firefox browser, Mozilla has just launched FashionYourFirefox.com. The site is divided up into categories, which cater to individual interests and "online lifestyles," according to Mozilla's announcement. The site looks like a good idea for extension novices, but I don't see some of my favorite extensions, and some of the categories have a pretty sparse number of extensions.

Let cron handle your repetitive tasks - an introduction to crontab. A crontab is a simple text file that holds a list of commands that are to be run at specified times. These commands, and their related run times, are controlled by the cron daemon and are executed in the system's background. More information can be found by viewing the crontab man page. We will run through a simple crontab example later.