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A quick search of the CVE database turns up 80 CVE numbers related to kernel vulnerabilities so far this year. At one recent conference or another, while talking with a prominent kernel developer, your editor confessed that he found that number to be discouragingly high. In an era where there is clearly an increasing level of commercial, criminal, and governmental interest in exploiting security holes, it would be hard to be doing enough to avoid the creation of vulnerabilities. But, your editor wondered, could we be doing more than we are? The response your editor got was, in essence, that the bulk of the holes being disclosed were ancient vulnerabilities which were being discovered by new static analysis tools. In other words, we are fixing security problems faster than we are creating them.

Firefox 4 is all over over the news and the funny thing is, Firefox 4 final release has not even happened yet. Firefox 4 beta 6 was released recently and it boasts of key performance improvements and a number of new and useful features like Tab Candy. Let's do a quick look at the latest Firefox 4 in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

This tutorial explains how you can integrate ClamAV into ProFTPd for virus scanning on an Ubuntu 10.04 system. This is achieved through mod_clamav. In the end, whenever a file gets uploaded through ProFTPd, ClamAV will check the file and delete it if it is malware.

Performance of your database server is directly tied to how well the underlying operating system is working, and there the performance is driven by the hardware you're using. To fit all of these pieces together—hardware performance, operating system performance, and database performance—you need a good monitoring system.

The simple performance tools on a UNIX-derived system are straightforward to use, and it's easy to show examples of good and bad behavior, the best way to teach how those tools are useful for monitoring. In this article by Gregory Smith, author of PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance, we will cover iostat; Unix's monitoring tool.

Our last review of the Jolicloud 1.0 operating system was very appreciated, and we thought that it will be a very good idea to give you guys a glimpse into the next release, Jolicloud 1.1, which will be available for download/upgrade in November 2010.

While announcing its merger with the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) today, the Linux Foundation launched an open source build system project called the Yocto Project. Based on the Poky Linux build system, the CELF- and Intel-driven Yocto Project aims to provide open source tools to help companies make custom, Linux-based embedded systems for ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86 architectures.

Earlier this week I wrote a quick look over on EOL about Super OS 10.10. Super OS…well…it didn’t exactly live up to its name, though it does have its place among the many Ubuntu remasters out there. I ran into another distro though that does a more credible job of living up to its name. Ultimate Edition 2.8 is the latest release of yet another Ubuntu-based distro.

Last week I was on the road and out of my home office. Even with my little Eee netbook and plenty of spotty wireless access I still managed to get behind in just about everything. My trip was non-technical in nature so a few days away from the high-tech hub-bub was useful. I was not on vacation either. My trip was to attend meetings as part of my work with a local non-profit organization. It turns out that having geek mojo helps outside of HPC as well. I managed to set up a Wiki and an on-line survey that has been received quite well. (As a side note, I used LimeSurvey. It made the job so easy and made me look like and an uber geek. Nice work Lime team.)

After several missteps, MS is dying as a consumer brand. Consumers have turned their backs on Microsoft. A company that once symbolized the future is now living in the past. Microsoft has been late to the game in crucial modern technologies like mobile, search, media, gaming and tablets. It has even fallen behind in Web browsing, a market it once ruled with an iron fist.

The hype is all about cloud and the end of the desktop as we know it. The recent move from a "pure" gnome desktop to Unity by Ubuntu/Canonical is clearly a sign that of a fast-track type of (r)evolution. Why is it good for the key-players (Ubuntu/Debian, Canonical, Gnome and ... the User), what are the risk associated with this somehow bold move ?

Having trouble figuring out why Apache isn't starting, or another program is crashing and burning, and the logfiles are giving no clue? Time to reach for strace. What's strace? The strace utility is used to run a command and display its system calls, so you can see exactly what the program is doing until it exits. Experienced users can work with strace to do performance testing and so on, but even beginners can use strace as a diagnostic tool to see why a program is crashing.

The Microsoft strategy against Android owes less to Ray Ozzie than it does to John Roberts. As I noted at the time, the non-decision in Bilski vs. Kappos gave companies a green light to try and sue innovation out of existence. This nightmare has now come to pass. The problem with software patents, as opposed to those for drugs or medical devices, is that they don’t cover the way you do something, but the idea of doing something.

When I first started to read the title of the motion, I thought with joy that Oracle was dismissing its complaint. But of course, no. That's in my perfect alternate universe, where Oracle comes to its senses and the parties work it all out, in the FOSS community way. Instead, it is asking the court to dismiss parts of Google's Answer -- some of its counterclaims, particularly the ones claiming that Oracle's patents are invalid -- some of Google's affirmative defenses -- which Oracle calls improbable and too vaguely pleaded -- and believe it or not it would like to censor some of the factual background material in Google's Answer. It says paragraphs 7 through 22 of Google's Answer are merely "a long list of self-congratulatory remarks and polemics that have nothing to do with Google’s counterclaims for non-infringement and invalidity." Oracle says they are immaterial and impertinent. It is to laugh, as they say. Silly stuff already, and we're just clearing the runway.

The Linux Foundation (LF) and its smaller embedded Linux counterpart, the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) announced they will merge, with CELF becoming a technical workgroup at the LF. With the merger of the two non-profit groups, the Linux Foundation will expand its embedded computing technical programs, and will launch a new embedded Linux "Yocto Project."

TransGaming, the company behind the Cedega program for running Windows games on Linux (as an alternative to using Wine or CodeWeaver's CrossOver Games) and Cider as the Mac equivalent, has just announced that Adobe is now licensing its SwiftShader Technology for the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR. SwiftShader is TransGaming's pure software 3D renderer that supports features like vertex/pixel shaders, floating point rendering, and other DirectX 9.0 / OpenGL ES 2.0 level features.

As well as documentation for those interested, I sincerely hope that it can raise awareness of the non-security of “electronic mail” and help users to take the appropriate implementation tools. Let’s start with this basic idea: “Email is not a secure media for transmitting information.”

I recently upgraded my trusty Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 netbook from Ubuntu Netbook remix version 10.04 to the recently released version 10.10. Canonical and the Ubuntu community have made some very significant changes to the user interface, but the changes were pretty intuitive, so they did not take a lot of getting used to. In this article, I will reveal some of the insights that I have had over the last several days using the latest Ubuntu, and how I think that Ubuntu is really going to help cloud computing become more popular.

AISL, the Italian Association of Free Software companies, recently debuted at the SMAU exhibit, the Italian leading ICT to discuss items related to digital technologies for business. As results clearly from the FAQ, AISL is born to bring under the same roof Italian IT companies promoting, creating and selling free software-related services. AISL will participate also to the very next event of the “Open Source Focus Group” series, dedicated to electronic purchase of open source services via the Public Administration Electronic Marketplace.

We cannot ignore them — they are everywhere. Lists of things “todo”. Things to buy. Choices to choose from. No mobile environment would be complete without the ability to display a list of choices to a user. Of course, every platform has their own name for them. Android calls its list a ListView and requires an “adapter” to supply the data to the list widget. iPhone developers create lists with the UITableView and flesh out a “protocol” in Objective-C to provide the data via a callback paradigm. For the Java programmers among us, a protocol is similar to an Interface in Java.

It's easy to lampoon Ray Ozzie's farewell memo to Microsoft - Dan Lyons summarised it as "We suck. I quit. Goodbye." - but the departing Chief Software Architect has made some serious points. Tech is changing, and Microsoft isn't changing fast enough. It's not the easiest memo to read, because Ozzie never uses one word when he can use 80 - so we stuck it through Microsoft Word's AutoSummarize feature to find the important bits*.