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The US and the EU have totally different approaches when it comes to IT policy. Which will be the right one this time around?

In October, 2000, when Microsoft was presumably working on what would become XP, they were hacked. Somebody broke into their systems and managed to at least look at source code for Windows and Office. The folks in Redmond dutifully called in the FBI, examined their code and found it hadn’t been compromised. Or so they said.

Today in Open Source: Linux Mint 16 KDE and Xfce released. Plus: SteamOS beta updated, and Enlightenment 18 released.

Back in June, we were ready to announce the immediate availability for download of a new Linux distribution, called Unity-for-Arch, which used Ubuntu's Unity user interface on a basic Arch Linux Live CD.

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 16 'Petra' Xfce. Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment which aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly. This edition features all the improvements from the latest Linux Mint release on top of an Xfce 4.10 desktop.

One of routine tasks for system admins is to update installed programs with the latest patches and hotfixes, as well as upgrade software to a more recent release with new bells and whistles. The latest MySQL 5.6 was released early this year, targeting better performance and scalability. For those of you wanting to try out the latest bleeding edge MySQL, this tutorial describes how to upgrade MySQL server on Debian or Ubuntu.

Cryptolocker and Ransomware are the latest tools used by cybercriminals to part us with our hard earned cash. The following is a list of things you can do to beat Cryptolocker and any other Ransomware kits that are going to be the weapon of choice in 2014.

It's not yet Christmas, but Linus "Santa" Torvalds came down the chimney and announced that the fifth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.13 is now available for download and testing, for all you good Linux geeks out there.

After almost a decade of litigation, on 14 November the Southern District Court of New York has ruled on the class action Authors Guild v Google. Judge Chin, who had rejected in March 2011 the agreement proposing to settle the case, found that the activities carried out in the context of the Google Books project do not infringe copyright. In a nutshell, the ruling affirms that reproducing in-copyright works to make them searchable on the Internet is a fair use under US law.

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 16 'Petra' KDE. KDE is a vibrant, innovative, advanced, modern looking and full-featured desktop environment. This edition features all the improvements from the latest Linux Mint release on top of KDE 4.11.

Today I'm happy to announce that eAndora is finally feature complete enough for me to stamp something as a "1.0" release.

For those that may have extra time this holiday season to devote to open-source tasks, the GIMP graphics program still has many features they're after and aren't yet up to their v2.10 release...

Just one year after the long-time coming official release of Enlightenment 0.17 (E17), Enlightenment 0.18 has been released!

The new release features 242 individual changes and a host of new features and bug fixes. One of the more interesting changes is the the compositor has now been merged into core and is no longer optional (ie. be toggled on and off).

This year was a great one for seeing open source affect new and exciting aspects of our lives. We saw open source reach from science to gadgets, from music to gaming, and much more. Here are some of our favorites from the Life channel in 2013.

A few days ago I delivered some benchmarks from the Xubuntu-powered Lini PC, a Linux-friendly $500 small-form factor PC that happens to be using the G3220. For those interested more in the Haswell Pentium performance, there are more benchmarks in this weekend Phoronix article. The Intel Pentium G3220 is a dual-core 3.0GHz processor (without any Turbo frequency), features 3MB of cache, SSE 4.1+4.2 instruction set extensions, based on a 22nm manufacturing process and other shared Haswell features, and has a 54 Watt TDP. The G3220 also boasts Haswell HD Graphics with a top frequency of 1150MHz. The Pentium G3220 premiered this past September and is currently retailing for about $70 USD.

Just one week after doing the first public beta release of SteamOS, Valve Software has released the second beta public ISO image. This new release has various package updates and fixes, including graphics driver work.

Mozilla developers continue to optimize everything they can with ASM.js to deliver the greatest performance possible inside Firefox.

The GNOME developers have announced recently yet another development release towards Eye of GNOME 3.12, the default image viewer application for the upcoming GNOME 3.12 desktop environment.

Beyond the Zenbook Prime SSD tests, some more performance data to share this Sunday from the ASUS UX32 ultrabook is of the battery power consumption when running some NVIDIA Optimus Linux tests and kernel comparisons.

Here are some tweaks I used on Ubuntu 12.04.