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The Asterisk.org development team has released Asterisk version 1.4.17. This release contains a fix for a SIP security issue, as well as a number of other bug fixes. The security issue is documented in the published security advisory, AST-2008-001.

In the Linux world new users are often scared away by horror stories of having to compile their own programs. With todays distributions where there are, in the case of *buntu, over 20,000 pre-compiled programs to choose from and the need to compile your own programs is very rare. In fact about the only time you will compile your own programs is if you wish to use a different version than what the distributions repository supplies. Many people, when faced with a situation requiring a program compile, will shy away from this mystical seeming process. But it's pretty easy.

A significant amount of skill with a soldering iron and some custom firmware has revealed a number of interesting features Amazon.com hid within its Kindle e-book reader. Among the ones that hardware hacker Igor Skochinsky uncovered and described on his blog are a basic photo viewer, a minesweeper game, and most interesting, location technology that uses the Kindle's CDMA networking to pinpoint its position. There also are some basic location-based services that call up a Google Maps view to show where you are and nearby gas stations and restaurants.

Even though my Debian upgrade from Etch to Lenny on the test box went very well, I was a little bit wary of plunging right into it on the $0 Laptop because the Gateway Solo 1450 -- which I did get for $0 -- is a computer I actually rely on (i.e. I don't swap drives in and out of it like I do with the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client I use for distro testing).

Audacity, the free and open-source audio editor (also available for Windows and Linux) is in need of some Mac-love. Whilst Mac OS X users can get themselves either the stable v1.2.6 release or a 1.3.3 beta version, development going forward is a little uncertain at the moment. According to the Audacity forum, there are no active developers on the project with Macs, and the latest beta (v1.3.4) is not going to appear on the Mac platform until "someone [with a Mac] volunteers to compile it, and sort the remaining bugs out." Yikes!

It must have passed beneath my radar it when it first was filed in 2004, but it caught my eye recently when Andy Updegrove mentioned it in Chapter 3 of his book-in-progress, The War of the Words. I'm talking about Novell's November 2004 antitrust complaint against Microsoft, filed shortly after settling an different, OS-related, complaint with Microsoft for $536 million. What is interesting to me, and why this "old news" is worth talking about, is the analysis Novell made in their complaint of Microsoft's treatment of document format standards. The concerns of 2004 (or 1995 even) are very similar to the concerns of 2007. Let's go through Novell's argument and see where it leads us.

Prof. Christian Kurtsiefer, Prof. Antia Lamas and others from the Quantum Information Technology Lab have been at the 24C3, giving a lecture on Quantum Cryptography and Possible Attacks (Video), and demonstrating the hardware of a full working kit developed in the National University of Singapore for entanglement based QKD over a free space channel.

We were out on Christmas Eve doing an install in a nasty part of town. The East side of Austin at night isn't a good place for a couple white boys to be boppin' the streets after dark. Never the less, we had an install to do there and we had to get it done.

Like a lot of companies, Farpoint Group closes between Christmas and New Years. Traditionally, the end-of-the-year shutdown has been spent re-building the network, installing new equipment, etc., which is always wonderful therapy for techies everywhere, despite the bad language sometimes involved. The big project, though, was re-thinking our overall computing philosophy. So, anyway, I loaded up the Ubuntu LINUX distribution, and I am so impressed I can't express how impressed I am.

As of February 1, 2008 Netscape Navigator will no longer be; no more support will be available for Netscape Navigator and no new releases of the browser will become available. While most of us no longer use Netscape Navigator it is still a sad day that reminds of how an innovative company and project fell prey to the muscle of software giant Microsoft.

It's about the name-calling these Microsoft fans do. I heard 'zealots', 'bigots', 'advocates', the whole lot. What may be not too clear to these Microsoft zealots is why I am a fanboy. It's not because I really dig this "free the software, free the world" ideology. That came much later. It's because I like this "gimme the source" idea.

"New year, new kernel: Linux 2.4.36 is finally ready and has been checked long enough to be released. Quite a bunch of bugs, build errors and security issues have been fixed since 2.4.35, but all of those fixes were merged into 2.4.35-stable," 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau stated, announcing the latest 2.4 stable Linux kernel. He noted, "I should say that I'm quite satisfied of this dual-branch release model which proves to be very successful at separating quick fixes from changes which require more thorough testing."

Welcome to the seventh issue of OpenLDAP Weekly News (OWN), the unofficial weekly newsletter for the OpenLDAP community. In this issue: OpenLDAP 2.4.7 and 2.3.40 released, A new mailing list, update on build farm, "If there was an OpenLDAP Cookbook, what recipes would you like to see?" and much more.

Nmap is a must have tool for network administrators, it helps to discover computers in the network, see what services they are offering (ports open), works with TCP and UDP, and on this article you will see its command line form and also two GUI front ends, with a lot of options, and screen shots

Episode 226 of The Linux Link Tech Show is now available for download in OGG or MP3 format. We interview Aaron Seigo from the KDE Project regarding the impending release of KDE 4.0, Dan finds a web site that is a geek's paradise, Audio streaming with Butt (Icecast client), Soup+laptops = a search for a new Linux laptop and much, much more

Netscape, the Web browser that opened up not only the Web, but the entire Internet to mass use, is dead. It died after a long decline caused by its murderer, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It was only 15 years ago that only a handful of nerds knew about the Internet and the Web. Even after CIX (Commercial Internet Exchange) opened up the Internet for business in 1991, only the kinds of people who now use Linux were using the Internet.

Over the past year or two I’ve been drifting away from Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva towards distros derived from Slackware for desktop use. The reason is simple: these distributions tend to have the best performance I’ve found, particularly on older or limited hardware. Slackware itself lacks some graphical tools and user friendly features that more popular distros have but is outstanding in terms of stability and reliability. A number of Slackware derived distros retain those benefits while offering the ease of use many of us have come to expect. AliXe is such a distro, albeit one designed to be small and compact, making it particularly suitable for older hardware. True to it’s Canadian heritage, AliXe also offers full support for both French and English despite it’s small size.

xine-lib is the backbone of many Linux multimedia players, from xine itself, to Totem, Kaffeine and Miro. It's a great library to use to build your own media player, but unfortunately, documentation for it is rather hard to find. This tutorial provides some starting steps for using xine-lib to play audio in your own code.

Weave ; It's the newest Mozilla Labs project. It allows the user to save his browser settings on Mozilla servers (Favorites, sessions ,passwords...etc..) and be able to load it wherever he is. With this project. Mozilla is trying to be an online services provider which is an important step. But can Mozilla labs get over the privacy issues ?

We learned a lot in 2007, and we hope you did too! Here’s a list of the top 10 most popular articles of the year.