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LAS VEGAS -- The Black Hat Briefings wrapped up yesterday, ending two full days of fast-paced, crowded, sometimes hectic presentations, panels, and Turbo Talks. Many Black Hat attendees, both feds and civilians, will now stay on in Las Vegas for three days of DEFCON.

[Joe has some interesting comments about ethics and bottom lines. -- grouch]

It all started innocently enough. Last Thursday, the Free Software Foundation released the second discussion draft of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. What followed was an interesting and overblown media misunderstanding, though we can hardly say that no one followed the "discussion" very well!

If about a year ago, Microsoft could still afford to look at Firefox with the superiority that its dominant position of Internet Explorer allowed, the things have radically changed nowadays.

The GIMP finally has a documented file specification. The free image editor has long been criticized over the fact that its native image format XCF was not publicly documented. Recently the issue came to a head, sparked unintentionally by discussions over the proposed OpenRaster graphics interchange format. Once the argument cooled off, however, an independent developer decided to tackle the problem head on -- to the benefit of all.

Dextrus Prosoft today announced that it has joined the SpikeSource Solution Provider Program to deliver business-ready open source applications to early stage technology firms. Dextrus Prosoft will offer services to tailor Spike™ Ignited Content Management and Spike™ Certified Customer Relationship Management solutions to meet the requirements of companies that want Fortune 500-class infrastructure at a price that will please ‘Series A’ Investors.

Exadel, Inc., provider of business applications software based on open source and Java technologies, announced version 1.0 of Ajax4jsf, an open source project to combine the benefits of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and JSF (JavaServer Faces). Ajax4jsf was sponsored by Exadel on Java.Net, a web-based Java collaboration project.

KDevelop is the premier Free integrated development environment. The project is currently working towards KDevelop 3.4 with a bunch of new features and a major new version KDevelop 4. To find out what's coming up in one of KDE's most important projects KDE Dot News spoke to three of the authors about their current work and future plans.

For Hewlett-Packard, the measures taken to combat software patents in the revised proposal for the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) go too far.

Modernizing cellphone networks are forcing the elderly and handicapped to upgrade from cellphones they have used for years to the new breed of confusing devices with keys too small for aging eyes to see. Email Battles has found a few tricks you can use while you're waiting for America's too-slick cell phone marketers to catch up with the aging Baby Boom.

[This has no direct relationship with GNU/Linux or FOSS, but perhaps some hacker can come up with some solution to some of the problems, using the fact that a lot of cellphones now run Linux. -- grouch]

Foreword -- This article describes a way to build web applications that follow the "Model, View, Controller" (MVC) software architecture popular nowadays among enterprise web application developers, yet are capable of running on a 130MHz ARM processor. The method is based on several popular open source software components.

Blake Ross writes: "In honor of the 200 million milestone, we're pleased to announce The Fox Tales, which tells the stories of other famous underdogs who were challenged, ridiculed and doubted and invites you to contribute to our own underdog story — the Firefox story.

The LinuxThreads project originally brought multithreading to Linux, but didn't conform to POSIX threading standards. The introduction of Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) however, overcame many of these disadvantages. This article describes some of the differences between these two Linux threading models for developers who may need to port their applications or who simply want to understand where the differences lie.

Its a good idea to review the potential impacts throughout the full development life cycle of introducing Ajax technology into Java EE Web applications.

After rave reviews as a desktop OS, Ubuntu Linux is finally attracting the support of developers as a server platform. The expanded sphere of influence for this free operating system is due in part to a renewed effort by developers like Benjamin Mako Hill -- he goes by Mako -- who promote the server side components of the latest Ubuntu release, version 6.06, as a viable alternative to its proprietary counterparts.

You could say Mozilla is one of the first peer-to-peer success stories of the Internet age. Pioneers of open-source development, its Internet products, like the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email utility, were created and are still being enhanced by a dedicated community of users. So it was natural for the company to extend the community concept into marketing.

The Linux initial RAM disk (initrd) is a temporary root file system that is mounted during system boot to support the two-state boot process. It contains various executables and drivers that permit the real root file system to be mounted, after which the initrd RAM disk is unmounted and its memory freed. In this article explore the initial RAM disk for Linux 2.6, including its creation and use in the Linux kernel. In many embedded Linux systems, the initrd is the final root file system.

Basically Mozilla isn't claiming the same number of users as downloads since some people have downloaded multiple versions of Firefox; others have cancelled the download; while yet others download but don't regularly use Firefox.

Freespire is a very well put together distro in RC status, that still has a few small bugs to work out.  Over all I am quite impressed, and am comfortable recommending it to most anyone who is interesting in trying Linux out.
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This article shows how to change a system password using a web based PHP script. This is one the essential tasks that many new sys admin find it little difficult as they are not familiar with PHP. Using concept presented in this article one can write extended edition with any other programming language such as Perl or Python.

Linus Torvalds had harsh comments about the committees organized by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to help it draft version 3 of the GNU Public License (GPLv3). However, so far as NewsForge can determine, none of those actually involved in the process agree with Torvalds' assessment that the FSF isn't listening to feedback.