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Over the last few years there has been a lot of fanfare around open source companies and their liquidation events. Most of the news has been around Sun's billion dollar acquisition of MySQL or the Citrix acquisition of Xen and even Yahoo's acquisition of Zimbra. In contrast there was little attention paid to the SourceFire. Actually if you ask most open source users about SourceFire they would probably answer "SourceWho?" If you ask open source users if they have heard of ClamAV or Snort they probably would be able to tell you that they are the leading open source software for virus protection and intrusion detection respectively. Recently, SourceFire has been in the news a bit lately as Barracuda Networks has made a bid for their open source competitor.

Jeff Yan and Ahmad Salah El Ahmad, at the School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, England recently published a research paper entitled “A Low-cost Attack on a Microsoft CAPTCHA“, demonstrating how they’ve managed to attack the Microsoft’s CAPTCHA used on several of their online services such as Hotmail and Windows Live, with over 92% recognition rate. Here’s a summary of the research :

Updated version of the bash shell /dev/tcp and udp pseudo filesystem and its potential use.

As we covered earlier today, Facebook has released a big chunk of its platform code as open source - using the CPAL (Common Public Attribution License) for their main license. If you haven't been closely following the proliferation of open source licenses, this is probably a new one to you. As with any open source code, it's smart to understand your rights before you start depending on the new platform - especially since some of the provisions of the CPAL may surprise you.

n spite of fragmentary information about changes, that I’ve published since my last insight (like the Amarok 2 visual changelog), I’ve decided after all to gather them all in one place. Hence, I invite you to the next insight of KDE 4. The revision of the day is 811150.

Right from the time the 7-inch model made its debut, there have been any number of positive reviews. With the emergence of the 9-inch model, the praise has grown even louder with the Linux fanatics among the crowd of yea-sayers seeing the device as the one that finally gives the operating system a chance to gain its comeuppance against Microsoft. In truth, the eeePC has many things going for it. The size and weight are major plus factors - it would win over a businessman on those counts alone.

If you work with the command line you've most likely used hexdump or od to dump binary files, but what do you do if you have a hex dump of something and you want to create the binary version of the data? Assuming your needs aren't too complex, the answer may be xxd. You can use xxd to dump binary files just like hexdump and od, but you can also use it to do the reverse: turn a hex dump back into binary.

Learn to make use of the Kerberos authentication tickets in the day-to-day network services on IBM AIX V6 and discover how Kerberos can be useful in getting rid of the password hassles for network service logons. This is another method towards achieving single sign on (SSO) on an AIX system network.

ProcessMaker is an open source workflow manager that works either on the client side or as a hosted application. Founder Brian Reale began developing ProcessMaker in 2002 after working with the South American Telecommunications Regulatory Institution to create a "paperless office." Once that system was deployed, Reale thought he could create an affordable standalone product that would make it easy for users to eliminate paperwork and create a more efficient workplace. Reale built the new product using open source software, and has licensed it under the GPLv3.

Venezuela became the latest in a string of countries to appeal the approval of Microsoft's Office Open XML file format as an international standard. The format was approved in an international vote after a fast-track process that several participating countries say was flawed.

Ramping up its efforts to build search market share, Microsoft signed a deal to embed a Live Search toolbar on all Hewlett-Packard consumer PCs in North America starting next year. In addition, Live Search will be the default search engine on browsers on the computers, the companies said. Both features will be included in HP PCs in January 2009. While the deal could boost use of Microsoft's search platform, it could also boost support of Silverlight, Microsoft's new browser plug-in and development runtime for adding multimedia to Web applications.

If you're anything like the average System Administrator, you are understaffed, underfunded, and overworked. By now, you've also gotten used to the idea that no one knows you exist until the mail server goes down, then you're suddenly on America's Most Wanted. In this article, I'm also assuming that you have many servers that you are responsible for. I'm also assuming that you don't really want to work as hard as you are; if you do, you should become a Windows server manager and begin worrying about frequent patches from Microsoft, security vulnerabilities, virus protection, a clumsy user interface, and lack of native scriptability. I'm not saying that Linux is perfect, but there are a lot of things about Linux that just makes it easier to administer.

When I read that Asus was to embed DeviceVM's GNU/Linux-based Splashtop Linux on millions of mainstream motherboards, I wasn't particularly impressed. It's all very well putting this stuff on motherboards, but quite another thing using it – how many times have you poked around the ROM on your motherboard? It seemed more or a gimmick to me – a box on the features list that could be ticked.

In May of 2007 I wrote a post called Open Source and Microsoft Free. Little did I know that this post would show up on Digg, Slashdot, Craigslist, and several other popular web sites and become a platform for both the Linux and Microsoft camps to wage yet another flame war. This whole "Microsoft free" experiment started when a colleague of mine challenged me to eat my own dog food after reading many of my posts about my dabbling with open source technologies. The next day, after a few blue screens of death and various issues with Outlook, I grabbed a Ubuntu CD and installed it on my laptop....at work! From that day forward, I have not used a single Microsoft product at work. It has been one year now and I have survived with Thunderbird and Evolution, Open Office, Firefox, and many other open source replacements for Microsoft products.

When it comes to monitoring your Linux system, few tools can rival Conky. This lightweight system monitoring utility can help you to keep an eye on virtually any aspect of your system, and it offers a huge list of options to choose from. But this flexibility comes at a price: all Conky's settings are stored in the .conkyrc file, which you have to create and tweak manually. The good news is that once you understand the inner workings of the .conkyrc file, you can easily create powerful Conky configuration profiles.

The trouble with having a huge market share is that the only way to move is down - and that's exactly what's happening to Windows and Internet Explorer, according to an new report. The question is how much further are they going to fall?

Some quick background: Researcher Nitesh Dhanjani responsibly reports to Apple than it is possible for a malicious Web site to litter the user’s (Windows) Desktop or Downloads directory (~/Downloads/ in OSX) with executables masquerading as legitimate icons.

Apple is nearing 8 percent market share in the PC industry, according to the latest research. But Apple doesn't deserve all of the credit for the Mac's success. The open source industry is a big reason why Mac sales are booming. Here's why, according to The VAR Guy.

Now that there have been at least three official appeals filed against OOXML, by South Africa, Brazil and India, as well as a letter of protest from a participant entity at the BRM over the way matters were handled in Denmark, I thought this might be an excellent time to take a moment and remind ISO of its published Code of Ethics [PDF]. Here's just a bit of it, some words to live by, or at least words I hope they will live by, as they decide what to do with the appeals. And then some information on what happens next.

If you need robust graphing software, consider aiSee, a cross-platform graph package that supports nested graphs, exports to many bitmap and vector formats, and handles graphs with as many as a million nodes. aiSee is free for noncommercial use under its own license.