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Security researcher Jonathan Brossard created a proof-of-concept hardware backdoor called Rakshasa that replaces a computer's BIOS (Basic Input Output System) and can compromise the operating system at boot time without leaving traces on the hard drive. Brossard, who is CEO and security research engineer at French security company Toucan System, demonstrated how the malware works at the Defcon hacker conference on Saturday, after also presenting it at the Black Hat security conference on Thursday.

Tech behemoths enter the ring for four-week bout Apple and Samsung's tit-for-tat patent posturing will finally come to a head in the US today, as jury selection starts on a trial that could kill a massive audience for Samsung stuff, and result in a win (or loss) of billions of dollars for either side.…

A new version, new leadership, new support and a workaround for a bug in JDK 7's InvokeDynamic are the latest developments for the project that lets Ruby on Rails applications run on JBoss's Application Server

Canonical just announced earlier today that the next UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) event for the Ubuntu 13.04 operating system will take place, Copenhagen, Denmark.

I like tea. Well, I'm British. I've just discovered a new brand that I've never seen before. You can't dunk it in a cup of boiling water but it has some powerful features. This article explores two of the best.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

Texas Linux Fest begins this Friday, August 3rd, and there's still plenty of time to register. Or, you can enter to win one of five free passes. You have until 3pm tomorrow, July 31 to enter, so hurry!  We'll post the winners tomorrow afternoon, so you'll still have time to register if you don't win.

A leading GNOME developer thinks the once popular Linux/Unix desktop interface has lost its way.

The other day, when my friend’s laptop spit-up a warning from ZoneAlarm that she was no longer protected, I stood over her shoulder and instructed her to update the firewall. The warning was basically a scare tactic, of course. Without the update she would still be protected, just as protected as she had been the day before. She just wouldn’t have any new whiz-bang features included in the update, nor would she be able to take advantage of any new security enhancements.

We ran the default install. This was Windows, so there had to be a reboot. After that, we opened the browser to find that the homepage had been reset to a ZoneAlarm themed Google search page. We had not opted-in to any such change; the ZoneAlarm folks had just taken it on themselves to hijack Firefox’s revenue, which I didn’t think cricket.

Terry Hancock and Rolasyn Hunter are crowd-funding for a pilot episode of their animated science-fiction series about first colonization of the moon. It will be a fully-dramatized story with many 3D modeled virtual sets and characters, and a cast of speaking roles (seven principals and a dozen or so supporting parts). Time to crowd-fund!

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

While it's paramount that IT pros have the requisite technical knowledge to do their jobs, it's also important that you have softer people skills to work well inside an organization.

Some of you might be slightly confused by this posting since our 2.0.0 release was published just five days ago. No piece of software is perfect and our 2.0.0 release is no exception to this. Since we released last Thursday our 2.0.0 discs have received over 15,000 downloads - a number the Bodhi team and I are extremely happy with. With this large influx of users we have received a piles of user feedback and bug reports - some of which need to be dealt with right away.

The Document Foundation has announced last evening, July 29th, that the fourth and final Release Candidate version of the upcoming LibreOffice 3.6 office suite is available for download and testing.

Patrick Verner announced a couple of days ago, July 28th, the immediate availability for download of the Parted Magic 2012_07_28 Linux operating system for partitioning tasks.

Everybody knows how hard is to push out as much as possible from your webserver(s). In my daily occupation as a hosting engineer that means I fairly often get the same question, "Wow, cool website, but can it cope with big-time traffic?".

Melbourne company admits not every coder is a star, bans "brogrammers" Are you just scraping by coding in Ruby? Are you not prepared to pull infinite all-nighters? Are you less than amazingly fast?…

In recent days there have been updated Mesa 8.1 development benchmarks put out looking at the R600 Gallium3D, R300 Gallium3D, and Nouveau Gallium3D open-source drivers. Those results for the different drivers show that Mesa 8.1 is generally faster than the current Mesa 8.0 stable series, but that does not appear to be the case for Intel at the moment. It looks like there are some active regressions that are lowering the Intel Ivy Bridge graphics performance with their Mesa 8.1-devel driver.

Calculate Linux 12.0 released. Major changes: Calculate Utilities 3 are now used to install and set up your system - network client-server solutions via SOAP/WSDL are supported, both console and graphical interfaces are implemented, multiple installations are supported, system settings can now be configured either from the command line or in a graphical environment; Calculate Linux Xfce has a better appearance - the new Adwaita theme

Microsoft’s Windows 8 is taking some heat in the world of online games. Both Valve (builder of the Steam gaming platform) and Blizzard (World of Warcraft) appear to be criticizing Microsoft's Windows Store strategy, and Valve is hedging its Windows bets with a Linux strategy. Why should business partners care? Here’s the update.

What are Red Hat‘s top four priorities for its fiscal year 2013? Sure, driving adoption of key technologies (virtualization, cloud and storage) is one top priority. But what are the other “big three” focus areas? And where do partners fit into the Red Hat conversation? Here are some clues,

Freedreno, the reverse-engineered open-source Qualcomm Snapdragon graphics driver, continues to advance. The latest accomplishment of the Freedreno Linux driver is that it now has its own working shader assembler, which means Freedreno can now work without any binary blob dependence...