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At this time of year it's irresistible to take a look back. It was an interesting and fun year, and it was also a year full of events that left me scratching my head and wondering if any grownups are in charge.

Ideas that grew in the last year and need to grow a lot more in the upcoming one.

In this paper I will try to explain the philosophy behind the Security Enhanced Linux (SE Linux). I will however try to explain the concept with an example but to keep the length readable I will restrain myself to go into much of implementation details for e.g. commands and similar stuff.

[Ed- FYI, You need to download a pdf file -bstadil]

The Power Architecture zone is still fairly new for IBM’s developerWorks. Since its launch in late 2004, it has drawn lots of attention. From the Mac Mini to Xbox 360, see the top ten articles/series of 2005.

China's Guangdong Linux Center (GDLC) and 27 universities last month set up the Guangdong Leadership of Open Source University Promotion Alliance (GDLUPA) to promote Linux in China's universities.

So I am truly psyched about the advent of Performancing, a Firefox extension that integrates a full-featured blog editor right into the browser. Just hit F8 to call up the editing window, whip up a post, and shoot it right off to your Wordpress, Movable Type or Blogger blog. I don't have any blogs running on MT anymore but I set up several Wordpress blogs and an old Blogger blog in all of about 2 minutes -- it's dead easy. Then, you can choose to author in WYSIWYG or source mode, quickly switch over to a live preview and back again, add it to whatever appropriate categories and push the post out to your blog when you're finished. It does what it's supposed to do, simply and well. I absolutely love it.

Get the cameras ready to roll. Firefox is heading for Tinseltown as Mozilla prepares to give its open source browser the star treatment and calls for budding, enlightened filmmakers to start working on a screen treatment.

After announcing last month that it was embarking on its biggest-ever marketing drive, aimed at getting "thousands or tens of thousands" of videos out promoting Firefox 1.5, the company said on Thursday that it was launching a campaign to get the best emerging filmmakers working on the open source trail.

Ok. This is getting a bit out of hand for us right now. We at TechWhack love to use Opera. And we have been following the development of the company since quite sometime. The people at Opera have always claimed to have a specific goal and that goal does not include getting acquired by a bigger company. Some days back the media was mocked for having spread the rumor around that Google had possibly acquired the Norway based Opera Software ASA and now the same rumors are back again but with Microsoft being named as the new owners of the company.

America Online entered the market of free web mail service late but plans to catch-up with the dominating players in the market fast. Microsoft has MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! has Yahoo! Mail, and Google has Gmail. Now AOL is trying to popularize its AOL Web mail service and is testing out a browser toolbar for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Happy Holidays! This week, advisories were released for dropbear, nbd, phpbb2, OpenLDAP, Xpdf, cURL, CenterICQ, digikam, apache2, sudo, kernel, netpbm, udev, gpdf, kdegraphics, cups, and perl. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva, and Red Hat.

If you just can't bear to part with Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, or Quicken, but want to make the switch to Linux, relax -- CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office has you covered.

The European Commission turned up the heat yesterday on Microsoft, the world's largest software company, threatening to fine it more than $2 million a day unless it agrees to share more technical information with competitors.

The commission's warning is the latest salvo in its increasingly acrimonious dispute with Microsoft over just what the company must do to comply with a 2004 antitrust ruling by the European Union. But the move also points to the growing gap between the antitrust policies of the United States and Europe.

[Ed: Europe can make this an anti-American issue if it wishes. Whatever it takes to break-up Microsoft works for everyone, especially in the United States. - tadelste]

In the "Christmas and Winter Holiday Gift Guide" category plus a light review of Knoppix, MozillaQuest Magazine (MozillaQuest.Com) asks and answers: "Would you like a better computer operating system than Microsoft Windows -- plus hundreds of great applications and an easy to read and follow user's guide for less then $30? Then grab a copy of Knoppix for Dummies . . . [It] is an excellent introductory tutorial for the Knoppix distribution of the GNU-Linux operating system. It includes a live DVD with a bootable version of Knoppix.

Joy to the world, the browser has come.

Such is the holiday sentiment that nonprofit Mozilla Group is asking its customers to share in the name of promoting its latest open source Web browser, Firefox 1.5. The Mountain View, Calif.-based organization launched its first official marketing campaign ever on Wednesday, an initiative that will ask existing Firefox users to make short films about their experiences using the software to convince other people to try it.

The deadline arrives for SCO to file with the courts whatever evidence the company has found that there's Unix code in Linux.

This article presents a view on some of the biggest events of 2005 with comments by Bruce Schneier, Howard Schmidt, Dr. Gerhard Eschelbeck, Mikko H. Hyppönen, Ira Winkler and Fyodor.

Shares of computer-related companies Research In Motion Ltd. and Red Hat Inc. gained after they reported results that exceeded analysts' estimates. Albertson's Inc. fell after the New York Times said the grocery chain rejected a takeover bid.

The SCO Group's revenue continued to fall in the fourth quarter and during fiscal 2005, as Unix sales slumped. Management, however, tried to put a positive spin on the results, released after Thursday's market close, saying that cost-cutting measures have made SCO's Unix business profitable again and adding that plenty of cash remains to continue a legal battle against IBM.

Linux Networx announced last week that it had signed an OEM agreement with IBM to distribute IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS).

Stephane Eranian posted an overview of theperfmon2 interface, highlighting key features. He begins, "the goal of the perfmon2 interface is to provide access to the hardware performance counters present in all modern processors." He goes on to explain, "the interface is designed to be builtin, very generic, flexible and extensible. It is not designed to support a single application or a small class of monitoring tools. The goal is to avoid fragmentation where you have one tool using one interface. Because we want the interface to be an integral part of the kernel, special care is taken to make it robust and secure. The interface is uniform across all hardware platforms, i.e., it offers the same level of software functionalities on each platform." The full document can be found below.

2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton reviewed the document commenting, "thanks for putting this together. It helps." He included comments throughout, then noted in summary, "overall: I worry about excessive configurability, excessive features." Stephane acknoweldged these comment explaining, "in general I am not a big fan of putting stuff in the kernel just because it's cool to be kernel developer. Quite to the contrary, if I could get out of the kernel development, it would certainly make my work easier. Every feature that is supported by perfmon was put in there because of user needs and because there was no better way to implement them in user space and yet provide the same level of efficiency or simplicity."