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This week we look at the CIO's hierarchy of needs, five monumental cloud project missteps, and the growing irrelevance of Microsoft.

At the Def Con hacker conference early next month, O’Connor, a security researcher who runs the consultancy Malice Afterthought, plans to unveil Creepy Distributed Object Locator or CreepyDOL, a system of Linux computers that cost less than $60 each and are designed to be hidden around an urban or suburban area. The little black boxes can wirelessly track the movements of cell phones or other mobile devices, feeding the information they collect into a database where an administrator can monitor targets on a map-based interface. A proof-of-concept version of the system that O’Connor has built includes ten of the spy nodes, each capable of reading the wireless signals of nearby devices and communicating back to a central server by piggybacking on any available Wifi network.

In part 1, we covered what Suricata is, why we are using it, and how to install it to our system. It wasn’t hard, and the following won’t be much worse, either. Now we are going to do some basic configuration of the program and get it working!

It took a few good weeks of testing, but since yesterday (July 25), the Arch Linux operating system uses the stable Linux 3.10 kernel packages.

If you are using a virtualization package, your main concern will be its performance, or in another word, its virtualization overhead. This article presents performance evaluation of two most popular virtualization packages, VMware Player and VirtualBox.

We are pleased to accept nominations for this year's Readers' Choice Awards! Please peruse the following list of categories and write in your favorites to nominate them. We will accept nominations until August 18, 2013. Voting will begin on August 26, 2013, so please check back at that time to cast your vote.

Geeksphone has started taking pre-orders for its first commercial smartphone running Firefox OS. The Peak+ offers double the RAM and offers better battery and graphics performance than the original Peak developers phone, and it runs the latest Firefox OS 1.1 build.

Elizabeth Leddy gave the next talk I attended entitled, Wish I Knew How to Quit You: 10 Secrets to Sustainable Open Source Communities. Elizabeth works with Plone but wasn’t really involved in open source until about five years ago. With open source we often start by working at a company that supports a specific open source application and there are two paths we can take. One path is that you start to get annoyed with the way things are going and so you jump to another open source project. Or you can get involved in the open source community so thoroughly that you can move from one related company to another (this is what I have been doing with Koha so I totally understand this path).

A perennial challenge faced by standards advocates is how to quantify the economic benefits they contend standards can provide.

After a long delayed and divisive Fedora 18, how has the latest Fedora shaped up

Humans have always wanted to know what the weather has in store for them, and have come up with a whole load of ways to predict what’s coming; some better than others. Weather forecasting as we know it began in earnest in the nineteenth century, when the invention of the electric telegraph revolutionised long-distance communications and made it possible for information about incoming weather to travel faster than the weather itself. Since then weather forecasting has become ever-more accurate, with improvements in the technology of reporting and communicating, as well as in the predictive models, making it possible for us to know the future weather in greater detail than ever before.

I got introduced to Linux in 2006. My first distributions were Kubuntu, then PC Linux OS. Until eventually I arrived to Mint Daryna.

EncFS provides an encrypted filesystem in user-space. It runs without any special permissions and uses the FUSE library and Linux kernel module to provide the filesystem interface. It is a pass-through filesystem, not an encrypted block device, which means it is created on top of an existing filesystem. This tutorial shows how you can use EncFS on Debian Wheezy to encrypt your data.

The newish AMD Catalyst 13.6 driver — now in beta — handles my AMD APU and its AMD Radeon HD 7420g graphics perfectly.

This is a review of the lesser known Linux Mint 15 with the XFCE desktop. Linux Mint has a consistent look and feel across all its releases but how well does the Linux Mint brand work with XFCE?

And the Google taketh away. So it is with Google Reader. A while back, Google discontinued its Google Wave product, because it never gained traction as a social-media platform. This surprised approximately zero people. More recently, Google announced it would be closing Google Reader on July 1, 2013. Far more people were surprised, myself included. In this article, I want to explore some options for those left in the lurch.

Today, access to mobile development platforms and cloud services means if you can think it you can develop it without the cost associated with building your own infrastructure.

Here's how you can install Facebook for your Ubuntu 13.04 desktop. This tip also works for Linux Mint 15, but not for 12.10. Some will probably wonder why you should bother with a desktop version of Facebook instead of the web site. Well, sometimes it's a bother to keep a web browser open just to keep up with Facebook.

With half a billion Android smartphones shipping worldwide in 2012 alone, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine that the global population of Android devices is nearing one billion. What if their idle CPU cycles could be harnessed for the good of humanity? With that in mind, the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project has just launched its first official Android app.

While 64-bit Linux desktop support has been in good shape for years, it seems there's a surprising number of Intel/AMD Linux desktop users undecided whether to use the 32-bit or 64-bit installation images of their favorite Linux distribution. For the latest perspective on 32-bit versus 64-bit Linux performance, here are said benchmarks from the latest Ubuntu 13.10 development state.