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Don’t you trust the websites you’re visiting? Thanks to Qubes, you can visit them in disposable virtual machines and isolate many other applications from each other

The latest version of Firefox, version 16, has returned to Mozilla's servers with the release of Firefox 16.0.1 after the discovery of vulnerabilities caused the organisation to remove the just-released open source web browser from circulation.

Trinity, the fork of the classic version of the KDE desktop which appeared in wake of the backlash against KDE 4.0, is still being developed and, after a year of work, a new stable release, version 3.5.13.1, of the desktop environment is now available. Trinity is a fork that continues development of the old 3.x branch of the KDE desktop and which has been enhanced with additional features but is also designed to be both compatible with newer hardware and responsive on older systems.

Clay Shirky has done it again. In a fascinating TED Talk, Shirky examines the impact that collaboration tools developed for and by open source communities will have on the way citizens participate in public life and how they can steer the political processes.

Censorship is practised for all kinds of political, social and commercial reasons, and all societies have limits on acceptable behaviour, but the point of the web is that there are no walled gardens and no limits to what we can access. If information wants to get out there, it will.

Dot Categories: Sprints“From the hacking rooms, we hear the whistle of the train as it travels up and down the Matter Valley. Most of us arrived on that train, and soon will be leaving. Another amazing mass KDE sprint is coming to an end, and again a lot has been accomplished.”

Vsftpd is one of the most secure and fastest FTP servers for Linux. Usually vsftpd is configured to work with system users. This document describes how to install a vsftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine.

If you are using a multi-monitor setup in Ubuntu, here are a few tips which should help you fix some annoyances, like: get full screen flash videos to be displayed on any monitor, get flash videos to remain full screen while working in the other desktop, a tweak to move windows to a different display using keyboard shortcuts or how to extend the wallpaper across monitors or use a different wallpaper for each monitor.

TruthLogik, a New York based hip hop artist, says that in a million years he could not have imagined he would be recording an album using entirely free software. When he first stumbled on open source music-making tools, he thought about the computer classes he took in school. He had never been exposed to the idea that free software could be so well-made and uniquely useful. Making music using open source tools and software has been gaining some traction, so we sat down with TruthLogik and asked how he created a hip hop album solely using open source software.

This week we look at why Apple should try to buy Nokia, if computer science majors need more practical training versus learning underlying theory and advice on how to ship great apps.

Quick! Click this link to Bank Of America. There’s nothing fishy about it at all! I promise! Go ahead — hover your mouse over the link to see where it goes. You’ll find that it’s a completely normal link to https://www.bankofamerica.com. There is only one way to find out if I’m telling the truth — just click the link already!

Up to this point if you have wanted to monitor the start-up/boot performance of a Linux system, namely how long it takes the Linux kernel to boot, you have had to use an independent utility like Bootchart. Now with work done by the Linaro project, there is an in-kernel measurement capabilities via a new "Boottime" patch...

Slashdot, the 15-year old popular technology discussion site, recently had their readers come up with a list of their top questions to ask Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator. The results were interesting.

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is a replacement for BIOS, and it is very likely that any computer or motherboard you buy today will have UEFI instead of BIOS firmware.

Poor 3D support and lack of OS integration features hurt VirtualBox the most. Our Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion shootout took a deep dive into the two most successful commercial virtualization products for the Mac, but many of you had questions about VirtualBox, the free and open source desktop virtualization software currently offered by Oracle. Both Parallels and VMware offer plenty of features for home and business users, but is VirtualBox an acceptable alternative for the cash-strapped?

Canonical has announced earlier today that they released a Beta client of their Ubuntu One service for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system.

The Debian GNU/Linux project has yet to decide on the method whereby it will ensure that the Linux distribution it produces can boot on computers that are certified for Windows 8.

In late June, following a lawsuit filed by Apple earlier this year, a California court granted an injunction against Samsung that banned the sale of the Galaxy Nexus in the United States. The two companies have been undergoing a massive worldwide judicial battle over patents for several months. “We hold that the district court abused its discretion in determining that Apple established a sufficient causal nexus,” the court wrote on Thursday.

The Linux Foundation and its Technical Advisory Board (TAB) have presented a plan to provide an easy way to start Linux systems where UEFI Secure Boot is active. The plan involves the very simple "loader" pre-bootloader that will be signed with a key from Microsoft. Typical Secure Boot PCs will come with the corresponding public verification key that allows them to start Windows 8 in Secure Boot mode – they should, therefore, also be able to start the mini-bootloader for Linux when Secure Boot is active, unless the Loader is included on the DBX blacklist that is maintained by the UEFI firmware.

The slide that defense lawyers showed to the jury read: “This isn’t new.” In a patent case, it could have been a smoking gun—after all, it was written by the inventors themselves. They were describing their business, Nexchange, to a San Francisco conference back in 2000; it was three years before they received their first patent and turned their focus to litigation. But hours later, inventor Daniel “Del” Ross Jr. was on the stand, and he seemed none too concerned that the crux of his idea was old—if not ancient. He had a patent, twice reviewed by the US Patent Office, and a simple story to tell: “The big difference is, we invented this for the Internet,” he told the jury.