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readers asked me to comment on A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, by Peter Gutmann. The essay characterizes the DRM in Vista as so draconian that it is going to piss off the market and ultimately hurt (possibly even destroy) Microsoft, itself. Except it won't.

Wall Street investors greeted Red Hat’s fiscal third quarter earnings report with a whopping 25 percent jump in the Linux software firm’s stock on Friday.

Oh, those Linux hackers. Sure, they're constantly endeavoring to put Linux on every device possible, from PDAs to open-source PVRs. But what about building desktop Linux clients for popular consumer devices, like say the Slingbox?

Most programmers today leaving college with Electrical Engineering or Computer Science degrees are fairly well versed in programming on a Linux desktop platform. When these programmers need to take the leap to programming embedded Linux systems, they are often surprised and bewildered that the program they wrote on their desktop will not run their Linux embedded system.

A vulnerability has been identified in Yrch!, which could be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary commands. This issue is due to an input validation error in the "yrch/plugins/metasearch/plug.inc.php" script that does not validate the "path" parameter, which could be exploited by remote attackers to include malicious PHP scripts and execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the web server.

Red Hat's next version of its premium Linux product is supposed to be shipped on February 28.

Last year Gefen announced a wireless USB hub with a 30-foot range. Of course it didn't work as it was supposed to like many other wireless USB devices.

Open Source software (OSS) may be gaining popularity in the Philippines, but many small business owners are still unaware of how this technology can impact and improve their businesses. A majority of the 1,908,893 registered Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) are still unaware of what open source is or how it can benefit their business. In contrast, industry giants Jollibee Foods Corporation and Mercury Drug Corporation are some examples of large enterprises in the country already making use of open source.

A vulnerability has been identified in HLstats, which could be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary SQL commands. This issue is due to an input validation error in the "hlstats.php" script that does not validate the "killLimit" parameter before being used in SQL statements, which could be exploited by malicious users to conduct SQL injection attacks.

BLAKE ROSS, one of the key people behind the Firefox browser, says that he is losing faith in the antics of the search engine Google.

A tip sent to SlashGear has noted that porting Linux to the Zune is very much alive in the Zune community. “Yes, I’ve been working on it for quite awhile,” says Mys Videl, on ZuneBoards.com. “[It] has a lot of bugs to work out and a lot of features to work out.”

For many in the world, it's the time of year for wrapping up the old and moving ahead with the new. That's not necessarily the case for Linux, though. For the Linux kernel, what's old is new again with the new releases of the 2.6.16.37 and 2.4.34 kernels.

This article, fifth in a five part “Building a CDT-based editor” series, shows how the C/C++ Development Tooling (CDT” performs code completion. Learn to understand how the CDT performs code completion. This is one of the CDT's most useful capabilities because it reduces the amount of code the user needs to type and remember.

At the start of 2006, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was largely inward-looking, focused on the GNU Project and high-level strategic concerns such as licensing. Now, without abandoning these issues, the FSF had transformed into an openly activist organization, reaching out to its supporters and encouraging their participation in civic campaigns often designed to enlist non-hackers in their causes. Yet what happened seems to bemuse even FSF employees.

After several days of effort, Linus Torvalds tracked down and posted a patch for a low level data corruption bug [story]. In a series of emails, Linus thoroughly explained the thought process involved in isolating the exact problem.

Welcome to another Fool Fight. Grab your ringside seat, please. Our last bout, which featured Amazon and eBay, resulted in a knockout for eBay, thanks to several passionate Motley Fool CAPS players. Today, we're back on the Left Coast for a ka-powie in Silicon Valley.

I usually write about chemistry, often mixed in with various technical topics, including Open Source. But this particular problem had haunted me for some time and I never found a really good article outlining how to solve it. So, after finally figuring it out I thought I'd write it down for anyone else having the same problem.

The latest reports say that a dude who goes under the name, "MysVidel" has managed to get the Linux operating system up and alive on Microsoft's Zune.

Fantastic article by Jem Matzan provides the background and specifics on why support for Wi-Fi in open-source, GPL, and free operating systems is so problematic:

In a couple of fascinating threads on thelkml, Linus Torvalds has been working with several other kernel developers to try and track down a difficult data corruption bug [story]. Linus posted a test-program that's capable of consistently triggering the data corruption, so it's a matter of time before the bug is found and fixed. "I think the page-writeout is implicated," Linus explains, "because I do seem to need it, but the page-cache flush does seem to make corruption _easier_ to see. I now seem about to trigger it with a 100MB file on a 256MB machine in a minute or so, with this slight modification. I still don't see _why_, though. But maybe smarter people than me can see it." Earlier it was thought that new page balancing code added in the 2.6.19 kernel was to blame, but using Linus' test-program the data corruption has been reported as far back as the 2.6.5 kernel. "It's not actually a new bug at all," suggested Linus, "it's just that the dirty page balancing causes writeback to happen _earlier_, and thus is better able to _show_ a bug that we've likely had for a long long time." Before heading out to dinner to celebrate his birthday, Linus sent out a patch for tracing the areas of the kernel where the corruption bug is happening, "in the hope that somebody else is working on this corruption issue and is interested." He went on summarize the current status of the debugging effort:"What we need now is actually looking at the source code, and people who understand the VM, I'm afraid. I'm gathering traces now that I have a good test-case. I'll post my trace tools once I've tested that they work, in case others want to help."(And hey, you don't have to be a VM expert to help: this could be a learning experience. However, I'll warn you: this is _the_ most grotty part of the whole kernel. It's not even ugly, it's just damn hard and complex)."

As FLOSS has become more prominent in the computer industry, many speakers have tried to differentiate FLOSS from software released under other license terms. That’s fine, but some people have unfortunately been trying to use the term “commercial” as something distinct from FLOSS.