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Scott Crenshaw: "Pundits around the industry are using the repeated – and successful -- attacks on Sony’s Playstation Network as proof clouds aren't secure. But what's 'cloudy' about PSN?"

To help us celebrate the 100th issue of Linux User & Developer, Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, agreed to take the reins from our regular Ubuntu columnist (Dave Walker) and take us through why he believes it was the right decision for Ubuntu to embrace the future with Unity…

At work we use a lot of Firebird databases, and so far our system admins checked the availability of a Firebird Database by simply trying to connect via telnet to the port 3050 and see if they would get a response.

Syncany is a brand new open-source file sync software (similar to Dropbox, or Sparkleshare). "Oh no, not another Dropbox alternative" you might say. Well Syncany is different and has the chance to become better then other such applications. Read on!

This article describes how you can upgrade your Fedora 14 system to Fedora 15. The upgrade procedure works for both desktop and server installations.

Time to be honest here for a minute. The open source community really has outdone themselves coming up with some very obscure names for packages. Let's take this list of packages for instance: emacs, gimp, gcc, mutt, grub, kyle rankin, parted, tar, mutt, vim. Nine times out of ten, a common person is going to look at that list and become utterly confused over what package does what. That's just the beauty (and beast) of naming software in the open source community. But every so often a tool comes across my screen with such a blatantly obvious name that I just have to run a 'man' to make sure my eyes are not deceiving me. In this case, it's ethtool. Yes, a simple name, for such a powerful utility. The name itself tells you what it does, an Ethernet Tool. Tada! That's it, ethernet tool.

digiKam makes it relatively easy to tag photos. Select one or several photos, expand the Caption/Tags right sidebar, tick the tags you want, and press the Apply button. You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to the often-used tags to speed up the tagging process.

Having suspended disbelief for as long as I could, my ability to take Microsoft at their word over Skype was shattered yesterday on hearing the announcement by Digium, sponsors of the widely-used Asterisk VoIP project, that they have been told they can no longer sell their Asterisk-Skype interaction module after July 26. That means it will become impossible for this VoIP PBX to connect to Skype.

Google has announced that Gmail and Picasa as well as its Chrome browser are now using WebP, the image compression format it open sourced last fall in an effort to replace the aging JPEG standard.

Blackbuntu CE 0.2 Released: Blackbuntu is distribution for penetration testing which was specially designed for security training students and practitioners of information security. The Blackbuntu team is a small team of computer security lovers from Thailand, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Brazil.

The 24th of May 2011 was an important day for Linux community. This was a day of first ever official release of Linux distributive featuring GNOME 3 as default. This distributive is Fedora 15. Of course, Fedora has lots of "spins" which include other desktop managers, but who can lose an opportunity to play with new toy?

During the course of running the beta for Fedora 15 KDE — Fedora 15 is out now, by the way, and you can get this outstanding release here — I had many problems with connectivity on some hardware running the beta, which forced me to look at alternatives.

Fedora Linux not for everyone. If you’re an experienced Linux user who wants an easy-to-use desktop Linux, I recommend Mint 11. If you’re new to Linux and just want something that’s easy to pick up and use, I think you should give Ubuntu 11.04 a try. But, if you’re a Linux expert, and want to explore the outer limits of what’s possible with Linux, then Red Hat’s new Fedora 15 Linux is the distribution for you.

Linus Torvalds has indicated on the kernel developer mailing list that he will probably finish merging major changes for the next Linux version derived from the main development tree on Sunday evening, in advance of a trip to Japan on Monday. He had previously suggested that this might be the case in the release email for last week's Linux kernel 2.6.39 release, with the aim of ensuring that subsystem maintainers were able to submit their changes on time before the closure of the merge window, which opens the development cycle.

One of the challenges free and open source software projects have that proprietary software doesn't is determining the best method for accepting developer contributions to a project from a legal perspective, not an engineering perspective. In proprietary software, where all of the developers work for the employing entity, the copyright in their work belongs to the employing entity under the “work for hire” doctrine found in 17 U.S. Code §101.

It seems that Google is working with carriers that are requesting the removal of third-party tethering apps from the Android Market. If you ask me, having to pay an extra monthly fee for that service isn't very fair, considering customers already pay a data plan fee for either unlimited data access, or limited access with an extra per-MB fee after the limit is met. Why should it matter how they're using the data?

Recent news in the world of Android is that Google is blocking their movie renting service from being used on rooted devices. Thats right - if you are using a rooted Android device that means you must be doing so because you are doing illegal things and intend on stealing films. While I don't agree with this in the slightest, it is fully within Google's rights to block such access.

Now that the transition to the new Alioth server is complete, The Debian Mozilla Team’s http://mozilla.debian.net site is back, as is the repository. I know because I got an Icedove update this morning.

Here is a look at everything that is offered with the stunning new release of Kubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. With the Stability of Ubuntu and the powerful KDE software selection, this distribution is ideal for desktops and laptops.

In a message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List today regarding the shortened merge window for the Linux 2.6.40 kernel, Linus Torvalds brings up that there's already been many Linux 2.6 kernel releases and that he could end up tagging this as the Linux 2.8.0 kernel.