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OpenID sounds like a great idea - essentially single-sign on for multiple web sites or web applications, without participating sites having to see your credentials. But is it trustworthy and safe in the light of recent revelations concerning a flaw on the DNS system on which it relies?

In the past, data was structured, secure and tightly controlled. The bad news is that the data was limited by the firewall of personnel, technologies, and process rigidity. Today, however, the demand is for just-in-time and inclusive data, moving away from a monolithic data system mentality to multiple sources of data that provide real-time inferences on consumers, activities, events and transactions.

Community journalism encourages members of the community to participate in the news process, not just as passive readers, but as active producers of the news itself. This direct connection to the product is similar in many ways to the kind of community building that goes on in open source development.

Yes, Nortel Networks acquired Pingtel -- an open source VoIP firm. But the bigger story: Nortel may finally realize it needs to leverage open source communities to combat Cisco Systems. At least that's the spin from The VAR Guy.

We all know the term “FUD“, don’t we? If you haven’t heard of it, it means “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”, and it was created a big software monopoly, often headlined “Get the facts”. Some years ago, I got the real facts. And the real FUD.

Wired: Are you going to develop a version of Firefox for the iPhone? Lilly: No. Apple makes it too hard. They say it’s because of technical issues — they don’t want outsiders to disrupt the user experience. That’s a business argument masquerading as a technological argument. We’re focusing on more important stuff. The iPhone has been influential, but there’s not that many of them. We’re part of the LiMo Foundation — Linux on Mobile. The Razr V2 is a LiMo phone, and you’ll see more in the next year or so.

Hiring a well-known free software advocate to oversee efforts to work with the community is a good plan for any company, but for a company that has had rocky community relations, it may be essential. VIA Technologies has done just that, by contracting with Harald Welte to help guide its strategy to work more closely—and less contentiously—with the community. VIA announced a new effort aimed at cooperation with the free software world last April, but got off to a slow start that had people wondering about its commitment to fulfilling that promise. Welte will be well placed to ensure that community concerns are heard within VIA.

In a significant victory of free and open source licences the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit - which deals with IP issues - has upheld an open source licence, in particular referencing the Artistic Licence from Creative Commons.

How to avoid alias recursion loops in any Linux or Unix shell.

youtube-dl is a small free opensource command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com. youtube-dl is a platform independent tool that works on UNIX, Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. The latest version of Youtube-dl is 2008.08.09 and requires the Python interpreter, version 2.4 or later. I’ll try to keep it updated if YouTube.com changes the way you access their videos. After all, it’s a simple and short program.

Ok, more specifically, troff using the mm macros to HTML. This is another from my "rusty scripts" collection which was written for a specific task long ago. In this case, we were converting some internal documentation from troff using the mm macros into HTML. troff is a very sophisticated system so doing this right would be a lot of work. But, writing something to get rid of 90% of the grunt work of conversion is pretty easy. Paul Dunne did one for the ms macro set which you can find here but mm is different.

The communications equipment maker has bought one of its software suppliers, Pingtel, in a deal Nortel claims will help promote open source communications.

Continuing our journey, it's time to take a trip up the OSI Reference Model, and learn what this mysterious thing is all about. The network stack is of great significance, but not so much that it's the first thing you should learn. We've waited to start the "layers" discussion for good reason: Many so-called networking classes will start by teaching you to memorize the name of every layer and every protocol contained within this model. Don't do that. Do realize that layers 5 and 6 can be completely ignored, though.

Pardus is a GNU/Linux distribution funded and developed by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. Pardus has its own unique installer, package manager, configuration wizard, and control panel. This originality, and the developers' attention to detail, make Pardus worth a look. From the beginning of my experience, Pardus showed its attention to detail. The installer is so incredibly simple that even a Microsoft fan would be hard-pressed to complain. The installer hasn't changed much since we took a look at the previous release seven months ago, so I won't reiterate the process, but it's still worth mentioning how easy to use the installer is. My only complaint is that my choice of Dvorak for keyboard layout was not available as an option.

Yahoo is helping make location more global with the launch of its new Fire Eagle platform. Fire Eagle lets users update their location in one centralized place, then have that data broadcast to a number of services. The launch opens up new possibilities for developers. Because the platform is open, any service can put the data to use -- and plenty already are.

Today those who believe in free content and free and open source software won a major victory in court. The underlying facts, and counsel, were hardly major figures on the commercial landscape: the open source software at issue had been developed for model train buffs under an infrequently used free and open source license, and the attorney was young and inexperienced.

Who says you have to give up your must-have Windows applications when you migrate to Linux? If you can't leave some crucial Windows program behind, you can run it using CodeWeavers' latest version of CrossOver Linux. Though today there are many great Linux end-user applications, some people still have "must-have" Windows applications -- Quicken instead of GnuCash, for instance, or Photoshop instead of the GIMP. That's where CrossOver Linux 7 comes in.

An important topic at Akademy is modularisation and integration. It has been the main topic of one talk but you will find it comes up in many others. It is clearly on the minds of many hackers here.

The Find command in Firefox locates the user-specified text in the body of a Web page. The command is an easy-to-use tool that works well enough for most users. Sometimes, however, a more powerful Find-like tool would make locating text easier. Learn how to build a tool that isolates relevant text in Web pages faster by detecting the presence and absence of nearby words.

Its just been made official that the State of Pahang is migrating all its productivity suites to OpenOffice.org. This succinct memo from the State Secretary of Pahang entitled "Perlaksanaan Penggunaan Perisian OpenOffice.Org Di Semua Agensi dan Pentadbiran Negeri" (translated: "Implementation of OpenOffice.org suite in all State Agencies and Administrative centres") outlines the reasons for migrating, the benefits and how to proceed.