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In this post I will interview Paul Battley, the man who wrote the program that worked around the DRM loophole at the BBC. No GNU/Linux user needs to be told what DRM (aka Trusted Computing, aka Palladium) is and why it is a thoroughly pernicious and Hydra-headed monster that needs to be slain. I hope to make that the subject of a post in the very near future, but in the meantime here is a quick thumbnail sketch of what happened with the BBC’s iPlayer, to bring you up to speed. The interview with Paul Battley follows.

Without much fanfare, the open source security area is growing rapidly. Here are top contenders from anti-virus, firewalls, forensics, intrusion detection, and more.

While large cheap hard disks allow you to keep your audio collection in a lossless format such as FLAC on your home network, when you are on the move you probably want to squeeze the most out of every gigabyte by using a compressed format. This article takes a look at three tools aimed at making audio conversion for portable music players a painless task.

Recently Products Editor, James Gray, caught up with IBM's Inna Kuznetsova, Worldwide Director for IBM's Linux strategy. They discuss IBM's Big Green Linux intiative and IBM's own power-saving move to Linux on its own data center.

Skype has released, in beta, a Java version of its softphone that will run on a wide range of cellphones. But every time you make or receive any kind of call you will pay for a mobile voice call. The beta version of 'Skype for your mobile' works on about 50 of the most popular Java-enabled mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson and is available worldwide with a feature set that includes chat, group chat, presence (seeing when your contacts are online), and receiving calls from Skype users, and through SkypeIn.

The Debian GNU/Linux operating system continues to generate interest from developers around the world, keen to sign up and contribute code to the open-source project now in its 15th year. But this popularity has been a mixed blessing. The project came under fire recently when programmers who wanted to get on board were unable to sign up and become registered participants.

Black Duck Software, a company best known for its services and software for the procurement and re-use of open source software, has acquired Koders, and with it the popular Koders.com search engine for free and open source software code (FOSS). Black Duck plans to integrate Koders' search technology into its own product line, while promising to enhance the Koders search engine while leaving its basic nature unchanged.

Microsoft PR threw down the gauntlet; “see how Windows Server 2008 stacks up versus Linux,” they say. There’s a “Get the Facts” URL being promoted with claims of direct comparisons between the two operating systems. Anyone reading the headlines alone could be fooled into thinking there’s substance to be found.

Yesterday, I read Doc's interview with Bob Frankston in the May 2008 Linux Journal. That, in turn, got me reading other things that Bob has written. Finally, that inspired this NicaLiving post. We know we have to seriously address communications connectivity with the Geek Ranch project. I have been thinking about regular telephone service, cellular service, streaming video, Internet connectivity and even helping the community get some connectivity as a bunch of separate items. The interview and other reading got me thinking that this is one problem -- the transport of bits.

What is the point of JBuilder, when you can simply use Eclipse? That has been the marketing challenge for CodeGear ever since it decided to scrap its home-grown Java integrated development environment and replace it with a new product based on the open-source Eclipse tools platform. JBuilder 2007, released in May 2007, was the first of this new breed, and it has now been followed by JBuilder 2008. There are, I guess, three ways in which JBuilder adds value.

Captain Charles Boycott was an unfortunate chap. Not only was he the object of prolonged social ostracism, but his name has passed into history as both a noun and a verb describing that action. At the moment, the idea is much on people's minds because of suggestions that the Beijing Olympic games should be boycotted, but here I want to discuss something quite different: whether the open source community should be boycotting Microsoft, and if that is even possible.

Welcome to this year's 17th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! This was surely one of the most trying weeks for the system administrators of many public FTP and HTTP servers that provide the Ubuntu ISO images - such was the demand for the new release that not even the project's main web site could keep up with the request rate! But that's a testament to Ubuntu's popularity, which has now grown into the world's most wanted alternative operating system. In other news, the Debian project has revived the Debian Weekly News, OpenSolaris has announced a final release candidate for its upcoming first stable release, Software Wydawnictwo has published the inaugural issue of the new BSD Magazine, and openSUSE has unveiled a new resource for beta testers of its distribution. Also not to be missed: our firs look at the new ASUS Eee PC 900 with Xandros Desktop pre-installed. Happy reading!

Firefox lets you tinker with many of its internal settings by entering about:config in the address bar. The preference settings exposed on that page let you make many changes, but the tabular interface is not exactly user-friendly. One alternative, the Preferential extension improves matters only slightly. The Configuration Mania extension helps sidestep some of the learning curve, but it's no panacea either.

Sun Microsystems is in talks with two more Linux projects to ensure its open source software and tools are delivered straight into the hands of developers. The company is speaking to representatives of the Debian and OpenSuSE projects, having already engaged with Ubuntu and Fedora over bundling its software.

This is the first post in my new series called Crystal Ball Sunday. These Sunday posts are where I take out my Linux, and related technology, crystal ball and give you my predictions for the coming months. This week I am focusing on corporate conversion to Linux.

If you think that Linux is only "for the boys", then think again. Did you know that there are women-oriented Linux communities that are created to provide both technical and social support for women Linux users? The most well known among them is called LinuxChix, and I’m not kidding. To know more about LinuxChix, I have collected some interesting facts about them so read on.

It is easy to do...get comfortable with the things that are and quietly mourn the things that were. Some of us gave up a favorite app or device when we abandoned the Microsoft sinkhole. Sometimes we miss those little things from time to time. Helios makes a fantastic discovery that gives him pause and reason to re-think some recent opinions. If we've learned anything, it's that Linux isn't static and just when you least expect it...it gives you something back you thought was long gone.

I’ve toyed with Linux since 2002, when I first installed Mandrake. With the latest release of Ubuntu, I was interested to see how far Linux had come since then in terms of being used easily by the mainstream. So, I tricked my grudging girlfriend Erin into sitting down at a brand new Ubuntu 8.04 installation and performing some basic tasks. It’s surprising how many seemingly simple things become complicated and even out of reach for someone without a knowledge of Linux. There are a lot of little things that could be done to make the experience a lot more friendly for non-computer-literate people – some of them easy to implement, others not at all.

Sun is to open-source the last closed-source parts of Java, a move that should make it possible to fully integrate the software into Linux distributions. Rich Sands, Sun's group manager for developer marketing, confirmed on Friday that Sun expects the work to be completed by the end of this year. Most of Java has already been opened up, barring a few elements that had been held back because Sun did not own the rights to them.

Well, here I am just a few miles from Yahoo!' headquarters and Microsoft's Silicon Valley residence. It's Sunday, and I've yet to hear screams from either camp. So, it seems that Microsoft's call to action deadline around the Yahoo! buy is passing with a lack of fanfare. Yahoo! may surprise us yet by leaking something to the New York Times or perhaps Steve Baller will call up his buds at the Wall Street Journal, but in lieu of such actual movements, I'm left wanting.