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Run by the organizers of the CanSecWest Vancouver 2008 security conference, the competition is a repeat of the "PWN to Own" contest at CanSecWest in 2007, when security researchers competed to win a MacBook Pro and US$10,000. The prize was shared between security researchers Dino Dai Zovi and Shane Macauley for their successful use of a zero-day QuickTime vulnerability, which they used to compromise the MacBook. The vulnerability was subsequently found to also affect Windows platforms.

OpenSource is giving birth to the community driven PC Vendor philosophy.

A few days ago TrueCrypt 5.0 has been released, a great tool for encrypting your hard drives. It can be used to encrypt existing partitions or create a virtual one located in a single file. In this article we cover the changes in version 5.0 and provide you some useful benchmarks.

This is a look at the fourth Alpha release of Hardy; including many of the applications that are now included by default and the major changes that will improve stability and usability. Among these are the addition of Firefox 3 and Remote Desktop on the applications side, and a new method for systems control known as Policy Kit, which enables the administrator to unlock certain functions for normal users.

libLASi is a library originally written by Larry Siden that provides a C++ stream output interface ( with operator << ) for creating Postscript documents that can contain characters from any of the scripts and symbol blocks supported in Unicode and by Owen Taylor's Pango layout engine.

Another week has slipped by with a good handful of Linux releases being announced. In case you missed them the first time around here again are some of the more interesting: OpenSuse released a second alpha version of the forthcoming OpenSuse 11.0.

eZ Publish is one of the most well known and widespread web content management systems. Because its setup is not trivial, this tutorial shows how to install eZ Publish on an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) server.

Damn Small Linux won't add just any application to its 50 MB distribution. But when there's a big hue and cry, things that users really need tend to get added. I thanked Robert Shingledecker for adding my favorite lightweight image editor, MtPaint, to DSL, and I'm anxiously awaiting another improvement: Firefox in DSL will move from the current version 1 to the GTK 1 version of Firefox 2. That's a big deal because a lot of Web sites require at least Firefox 1.5 for full functionality.

SSHMenu is a panel applet for GNOME that allows users to connect to remote computers over SSH with a single click. The menu looks incredibly similar to the GNOME Applications menu, and it is fully customizable. The interface allows you to add seperators, submenus, and new entries really easy.

I've been as critical of gOS as anybody, maybe even more so. The Ubuntu-derived OS that first ran the $199 Everex desktop offering that sold through Wal-Mart and a few others was a distribution that was far from ready for prime time, as they say.

Yesterday I discovered a whole new world of Trusted Computing in the XBOX 360 that I had never heard of on the internet or anywhere before.

Chief technology officer Earl Malmrose of the Berkeley, Calif.-based ZaReason and I didn't just talk about the Everex Cloudbook. Also on display were a $299 desktop machine and a few laptops (beginning at $899), all running Ubuntu 7.10, which ZaReason preinstalls and configures for its customers.

Microsoft Office links to third-party commercial add-ons, includes up-selling promos, requires cookies for certain functions, and collects technical information. While this is a normal day on the web, should the commercial office suite be judged to a different standard and possibly be considered adware?

The highlight of SCALE 6x for me so far has been meeting Robert Shingledecker, whose Damn Small Linux is one of the best distributions out there for hardware that's seen better days. I won't go into all we talked about, but in the way of news, Robert told me that Damn Small Linux will soo go beyond the 2.4 Linux kernel and put out a release based on 2.6 at some point in the near future.

With graphical user interfaces becoming more and more friendly and easy to use, new users of GNU/Linux and the BSDs can now get their daily work done without having to tinker around (very often) with a terminal. However, many users don't like to use a GUI for every task, and find that they necessarily need to depend on some terminal, or shell. Sometimes, one has to log in to a remote machine, without a GUI. At other times, we just have to run a `console' based application. Under such situations, there are several ways in which a utility like screen can be put to efficient use.

Yahoo Inc.'s board will reject Microsoft Corp.'s $44.6 billion takeover bid after concluding the unsolicited offer undervalues the slumping Internet pioneer, a person familiar with the situation said Saturday. The decision could provoke a showdown between two of the world's most prominent technology companies with Internet search leader Google Inc. looming in the background. Leery of Microsoft expanding its turf on the Internet, Google already has offered to help Yahoo avert a takeover and urged antitrust regulators to take a hard look at the proposed deal.

Have you ever dreamt about booting Linux in less than one minute? Now this dream can come true: in less than 40 seconds after pressing the power button, you will have a perfect fully-functional operating system, exactly as you left the last session. Even better than you thought, right? Now you could say: "Crazy boy - I don't believe you!" Well then, check it out for yourself.

The "L" in SCALE may stand for Linux, but each of the three major BSD projects has a table at the Southern California Linux Expo. While the FreeBSD booth was giving away PC-BSD CDs (they still have about 500 left, so have at it, people), the OpenBSD booth was selling Version 4.2 CD sets for $45, and the NetBSD people were selling T-shirts for $15. I spent a lot of time talking to Kevin Lahey, a developer for NetBSD who is also a programmer for the Information Sciences Institute under the auspices of the University of Southern California.

Introduction to the Philosophical differences between Open Source, Free Software and Proprietary.

I'm filing this from the SCALE 6x "E-Mail Room" in the Los Angeles Westin. They've got a little thin-client network going, with little client boxes from Solar Systems PC running Fluxbox. And since the browser is Iceweasel, I figure it's Debian based.