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MIT President Rafael Reif e-mailed the members of the university community this morning to address the situation, despite Swartz never having a formal affiliation with the school. Reif emphasized he was compelled to comment not only because of MIT's role in the JSTOR incident, but also because Swartz was beloved by many within the MIT community. The president's tone was clear throughout: "It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy."

In light of such an acknowledgement, Reif appointed professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of the school's involvement, "from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present." Reif asked Abelson to outline options MIT had plus the decisions the institution made, and he promised to share the report with the MIT community once it's received.

I was the expert witness on Aaron’s side of US vs Swartz, engaged by his attorneys last year to help prepare a defense for his April trial. Until Keker Van Nest called iSEC Partners I had very little knowledge of Aaron’s plight, and although we have spoken at or attended many of the same events we had never once met.

Should you doubt my neutrality, let me establish my bona fides. I have led the investigation of dozens of computer crimes, from Latvian hackers blackmailing a stock brokerage to Chinese government-backed attacks against dozens of American enterprises. I have investigated small insider violations of corporate policy to the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and have responded to break-ins at social networks, e-tailers and large banks. While we are no stranger to pro bono work, having served as experts on EFF vs Sony BMG and Sony vs Hotz, our reports have also been used in the prosecution of at least a half dozen attackers. In short, I am no long-haired-hippy-anarchist who believes that anything goes on the Internet. I am much closer to the stereotypical capitalist-white-hat sellout that the antisec people like to rant about (and steal mail spools from) in the weeks before BlackHat.

I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.

With the significant prevalence of Linux web servers globally, security is often touted as a strength of the platform for such a purpose. However, a Linux based web server is only as secure as its configuration and very often many are quite vulnerable to compromise. While specific configurations vary wildly due to environments or specific use, there are various general steps that can be taken to insure basic security considerations are in place.

Many risks are possible from a compromise including using the web server into a source of malware, creating a spam-sending relay, a web or TCP proxy, or other malicious activity. The operating system and packages can be fully patched with security updates and the server can still be compromised based purely on a poor security configuration. Security of web applications first begins with configuring the server itself with strict security in mind.

The open-source AMD "R600g" Gallium3D driver is slowly but surely closing in on OpenGL 3.3 support for this open-source Linux graphics driver that supports from the Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 6000 GPUs...

David Tavares had the pleasure of announcing a few days ago that the first maintenance release of the stable Pear Linux 6 operating system is now available for download.

Dimitris Tzemos proudly announced earlier today, January 13, the immediate availability for download of the stable release of the Slackel 1.0 Openbox Edition Linux operating system.

The suicide of American online activist Aaron Swartz has ignited a debate about the cost of academic journals and access to information. Swartz, 26, known for his work on RSS and co-founding social news website Reddit, took his life over the weekend. He was facing charges for allegedly downloading millions of academic journal articles from the subscription-only academic database JSTOR, using a laptop hidden in the basement of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A protest over his prosecution was held on Sunday afternoon (local time) at MIT in Massachusetts.

This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on Ubuntu 12.10. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

With its patch update next Tuesday, Oracle plans to close a total of 86 holes in its software. 18 vulnerabilities were discovered in the free MySQL relational database alone; two of these can be exploited without authentication

For someone new to Linux, or a veteran user who hasn’t yet found their “perfect” distro, there’s a new distribution in town that can meet their needs: elementary OS.

A mix of adventure classics like Megaman and the legend of Zelda with a unique art style and story driven horror-adventure experience.

Canonical CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, discusses Ubuntu for Android and the full Ubuntu Phone OS convergence experience.

The Evince developers have announced earlier today, January 12, the immediate availability for download and testing of the fourth development release of the upcoming Evince 3.8 document reader for the GNOME 3 desktop environment.

Replay Games is happy to announce that it will be releasing two popular titles on Linux!

Replay Games has written into Phoronix to talk about two commercial game titles that they will be bringing to Linux...

The Steam beta for Linux has been running for little over two months now, and there has been a slow trickle of new titles being added to the list. Here’s a look at a few titles.

Many of the current games are ones that featured in the Humble Indie Bundle previously, so I imagine sales figures for those would not be that great, but it is nice to now be able to have these games as part of Steamplay, the buy-once-play-anywhere feature of Steam.

An internet forum application is an online discussion site where individuals hold discussions in the form of posted messages. This type of software is a very powerful tool to run online communities, to disseminate information, share experiences and ideas, receive online support, interact with others learning new intercultural skills, and much more.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

Decided to do a short video review of Rebellin Synergy which can be downloaded at a cost. Rebellin Synergy is super fast! It’s faster than Windows and what’s more, it’s faster than several other major Linux distributions out there! Feel the nimble response of the Synergy kernel.

Well now this interesting a new Unity3D game popped up on Desura called Frozen Nightmare, I contacted the developer about possible Linux & Mac ports and I am pleased he has now confirmed them and even said thanks to me for it!