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Hardware fails, that is a fact. Nowadays, hard drives are rather reliable, but nevertheless every now and then we will see drives failing or at least having hiccups. Using smartcl/smartd to monitor disks is a good thing, below we will discuss how some lesser issues can be handled without actually having to reboot the system – it is still up to a sys admin’s own discretion to judge circumstances correctly and evaluate whether disk errors encountered are a one time incident or indicative of an entirely failing disk.

Now that companies are closing-out their books on the old year, it’s becoming evident that Linux devices were a big hit in 2013.

On Friday, CNET’s Brooke Crothers reported that Chromebooks, those nifty laptops running Google’s Chrome OS that let the cloud do the heavy lifting, accounted for 21% of all laptop sales last year. As impressive as that may be, the numbers get even better when Android tablets are added to the mix. According to market research company NPD Group, January to November saw 1.76 million Chromebooks and Android tablets sold, up from only 400,000 during all of 2012.

LinuxSecurity.com: The leaking of classified documents detailing the data collection activities of the U.S. National Security Agency earlier this year reignited some long-standing concerns about the vulnerability of enterprise data stored in the cloud.

As they do every year, unfortunately, the good folks at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke have put together a depressing list of what should have entered the public domain yesterday. As you hopefully know, until 1978, the maximum amount of time that work in the US could be covered by copyright was 56 years (you initially received a 28 year copyright term, which could be renewed for another 28 years). That means, back in 1957, everyone who created the works in that list knew absolutely, and without a doubt that their works would be given back to the public to share, to perform, to build on and more... on January 1, 2014 at the very latest. And they all still created their works, making clear that the incentive of a 56 year monopoly was absolutely more than enough incentive to create.

Terasology is an open-source survival and discovery game with influences from Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, and Dungeon Keeper. The game is in a pre-alpha state, but it's already fun to play!

Linux won, the penguin has achieved world domination, and the usual commentarians completely missed it even after years of predicting it. Because it's not something that happened in a single flashy event, but rather has been the product of years of hard work and steady improvement. 2014 is the year that Linux starts to win the desktop, which is the final Linux frontier. And it is the year of exponential growth in every arena.

Multiple vulnerabilities have been found in memcached, a high-performance memory object caching system. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies a number of issues.

In room-size metal boxes ­secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.

Could the Chromebook knock out Windows on the desktop? Don't bet against it. Chromebook sales numbers have come out of nowhere a year ago to challenge Windows.

Ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week in Las Vegas, Google has managed to rope in a large number of hardware vendors ranging from ARM to NVIDIA that will be begin supporting VP9 hardware acceleration in Google's push for VP9 to dominate the Ultra HD / 4K space.

The popular Eschalon Book RPG series is due to get it's third and final instalment this year with a beta test due to start very soon!

An unsafe use of temporary files was discovered in Puppet, a tool for centralized configuration management. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability and overwrite an arbitrary file in the system.

PlayOnLinux 4.2.2 lets you run Windows applications and games in Ubuntu 13.10. Here's how you can install it.

"Why don't academics discuss research before starting the work?" In a recent blog post, Jack Kelly asked this simple question, and it is a striking one for those of us who are familiar with collaborating at high levels as part of an open source community. One of the pillars of the open source way is rapid prototyping and the idea of: release early, release often.

It can do “log analysis, file integrity checking, Windows registry monitoring, centralized policy enforcement, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response.”

DNF, the next-generation yum package manager spearheaded by the Fedora project, is now ready for end-user testing ahead of its expected use out-of-the-box by Fedora 22...

This wasn’t the first time he had problems with his dad and his dad’s computer. It’s been a running gun battle between the two for quite a while. Nick is a Linux guy, but even with his dual degrees and six figure job, he can’t talk his dad into switching from Windows. He has put every safeguard on the computer he could and his dad still finds a way to mess it up. Mostly it’s from “games of chance” sites that he seems to enjoy visiting.

There are times when you are stuck using a locked-down machine. As long as you have a browser, though, you can still connect to your remote machines. Here’s how…

The story of Drupal's beginning sounds like a story ripped from the pages of a cyberpunk novel. It was in a small apartment during college that Dries Buytaert created what would become one of the most widely-used open source content management frameworks. As a forum for his friends, early-Drupal was used as a communication tool for monitoring the group's fragile Internet connection, which was expensive and being spliced between them.

The biggest story to come down the wire this year ubdoubtedly had to do with Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s bag of dirty tricks. Even those of us who have long understood that the Internet isn’t necessarily a place to expect privacy were suprised at how deeply the NSA has managed to reach into the Internet. Odds are, if you’ve been using social networks, everything you’ve posted is now on file with the NSA. What’s worse, every email you’ve sent probably has a copy resting on a NSA server somewhere.