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Apple Macs are secure because they don't get computer viruses, and because OS X, the operating system they run, is based on the rock-solid and highly secure BSD UNIX. These are two popular misconceptions which make many Mac users underestimate the security risk of allowing their computers onto a corporate network. In a presentation at the EICAR conference in Paris this month David Harley, Research Fellow & Director of Malware Intelligence at anti-virus company ESET, his colleague Pierre-Marc Bureau and Andrew Lee of security outfit K7 Computing pointed out that underestimating the risks presented by Macs can make them less secure than Windows machines.

One of the most interesting things to happen in the past couple of years, is Microsoft's embrace of Open Source. This means different things to various people I've spoken with at Microsoft. Some seem genuinely sincere. Some seem less so. What hasn't changed is Microsoft's behavior to the Open Source community at large.

Things in my personal world of Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 are starting to work themselves out, but it hasn't exactly been a smooth ride on my main laptop. If you read to the bottom, you'll find that the hacky-as-hell solution to a bug that has plagued my own desktop is followed by my thoughts (not all good) on what exactly Canonical was thinking about when deciding what goes into a long-term-support release.

HylaFAX on CentOS allows you to send and receive faxes from your server. This tutorial will help you set up so that you can receive faxes and have them converted to a PDF upon delivery to the user.

I summarize in this blog post the questions, challenges and objections that were mentioned during a conference about open source/FLOSS that I gave to about 20 IT directors of Small Businesses (100-500 employees).

I recently came acrossexpect (the expect package in Debian and Ubuntu): a powerful utility that can script interactive operations. If you're not familiar with TCL syntax, you can get autoexpect from Wi-Fizzle.com. This spawns a shell, and then records everything you do in that shell. Hit Ctrl-C when you're done, and then either run the generated expect script as-is, or edit it to tidy it up a bit. In particular, autoexpect records keystrokes one by one, whereas you can put them all in at once. It records the full prompt, where the $ at the end may suffice.

Do you need an extra computer in your family, business or nonprofit organization? You can set up a spare computer with a 23-inch LCD monitor for less than $200.

A full review of Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04. I’ve been reviewing various Ubuntu derivatives and this week I thought it would be fun to take a look at the netbook version of Ubuntu. Ubuntu Netbook Edition used to be called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but Canonical changed the name once this distro became an official edition of Ubuntu.

With the recent trend toward its adoption in a wide variety of companies, business intelligence (BI) software is no longer the enigma it once was. Jaspersoft is one of the BI vendors we regularly cover here at OStatic, on part because of its strong open source business model. We recently caught up with Jaspersoft's President and CEO, Brian Gentile, to get a reading on what's going on in the BI niche and where open source software fits into the mix.

Back in 2008 there was the announcement from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Texas that VIA had joined the open-source driver bandwagon after having abandoned previous open-source attempts. However, for the past two years, this has largely been a media bluff. VIA Technologies did things like appoint an open-source liaison (Harald Welte, who is actually no longer contracted by VIA and didn't even do much for their efforts), launch a VIA Linux web-site (that is ill-maintained and two years later there are still portions of the site "under construction"), but they have done some things like put out some code and republishing old documentation. We're almost half-way through 2010 and it doesn't look like VIA will be doing much this year for their open-source graphics drivers.

Android continues its march towards the top of the smartphone market. We’re in the new economy where every two years we get a new phone, whether we need one or not. And every few months we get a new Android release. Android 2.1 is barely a few months old and it is already time for a new one. Last week at Google I/O the Android team unveiled the much-anticipated Froyo rendition of Android — now officially known as the 2.2 release

Chad Derwent sat alone in his office in Silicon Valley. Outside his open door, rows of empty, silent  It wasn't supposed to end like this.

Google has announced that it has released the source code for its My Tracks GPS application for Android powered devices. The My Tracks app allows users to record GPS coordinates and visualise the routes they take when, for example, hiking, running or biking. The app also features several live statistics, such as time, speed, distance and elevation, and data can be exported to other Google services like Google Spreadsheets or Google Maps.

Landscape 1.5 is being officially announced this week, providing users of Ubuntu Linux with new management and deployment capabilities. The new Landscape follows the debut of Ubuntu's most recent Long-Term Support (LTS) release, the latest edition of the open source Linux distro aimed at providing enterprises with the ability to maintain and upgrade their deployed Ubuntu distributions. Now with the Landscape 1.5 release, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, is extending its management platform as it looks to further grow its enterprise business.

The Puppy Linux project has released version 5.0 of its fast, small-footprint Linux distro, based for the first time on Ubuntu. Puppy Linux 5.0 is built from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx binary packages, and debuts a "Quickpet" application suite, choice of browsers, and a boot-to-desktop feature.

Does closed source software have the quality edge over open source? Michael Hall, former editor of Linux Today, pointed out a blog entry with an interesting take on the recent beating Apple has been taking in the press lately. (Heads up: colorful language ahead.) It was a posting that made me sit back and re-evaluate some of my own views.

Cassandra is a distributed database with a BigTable data model running on a Dynamo like infrastructure. It is column-oriented and allows for the storage of relatively structured data. It has a fully decentralized model; every node is identical and there is no single point of failure.

Most people in the hacking community are well aware that patents represent one of the most serious threats to free software. But the situation is actually even worse than it seems, thanks to the proliferation of what are called patent thickets. To understand why these are so bad, and why they represent a particular problem for software, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of patent law.

We help celebrate ten years of Linux on the mainframe with an exclusive interview with Novell’s senior vice president and general manager of open platform solutions, Markus Rex, discussing the technological and business transformation since it’s introduction…

Millennium Exchange, a Linux and Sun Solaris Unix-based platform, which uses Oracle databases, is being rolled out across all of the LSE’s electronic trading systems, replacing the slower TradElect platform, which is Microsoft .Net based. TradElect had suffered a series of high-profile outages and will be replaced by Millennium Exchange in stages from September.