News (72)

Fedora reboots updates after hack

The Red Hat-supported Fedora Project has started issuing updates to its Linux distribution again, after a hiatus of several weeks caused by a hacker break-in. Read more »

Stephen Fry kicks off GNU's 25th birthday party

The Free Software Foundation is beginning celebrations of 25 years of GNU with the release of a video presented by actor and comedian Stephen Fry. Read more »

Open source licence victory in model-railway case

A federal appeals court in the US has upheld the right of a copyright holder to distribute software under a free or open source licence while preventing such code being used commercially without following the licensing conditions. Read more »

Aussies play down DNS disaster

One large Australian organisation and a local computer security advisor have played down the importance of a security flaw in the global Domain Name System (DNS) that has led to panic in some security circles around the globe. Read more »

Drizzle: MySQL slims down on Aker's diet

Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL. Read more »

Microsoft fixes DNS flaw but warns of Word attacks

Microsoft is warning that a Word flaw is being used for targeted attacks, and has also issued four 'important' patches, including one for a potentially serious DNS flaw in the latest Patch Tuesday bulletin. Read more »

Gmail gets free Yahoo phishing protection

Google on Tuesday said it is now using an email authentication technology to keep phishers from luring Gmail users to fake eBay and PayPal Web pages in order to steal usernames and passwords. Read more »

Gates is gone but the fight goes on: Stallman

To pay so much attention to Bill Gates' retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers. Read more »

Stallman: Linux used to track Londoners

Free-software advocate Richard Stallman has spoken out against the association of open-source software with London's "unethical" Oyster-card system. Read more »

Q&A: Debian leader on not being in it for the money

The Debian GNU/Linux operating system continues to generate interest from developers around the world, keen to sign up and contribute code to the open-source project now in its 15th year. Read more »

Features (56)

Symbian's research chief on going open source

We caught up with Symbian's research chief, David Wood, at the Symbian Smartphone Show at Earls Court in London, to discuss the complications of such a process, as well as what the next few years holds for smartphone technology. Read more »

Get started with GnuPG

GnuPG is an open replacement for PGP Corporation's PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption tool, and based on the OpenPGP standard. What GnuPG (or GPG for short) does is allow for the encryption and decryption of files using a public/private keypair. Read more »

Why qooxdoo falls short on its goal of simplification

The days of building Web applications from scratch are over, as a variety of JavaScript libraries are freely available to provide a solid foundation. Qooxdoo is an open source AJAX Framework that simplifies building Web user interfaces. Read more »

Configure GNU Screen to handle multiple terminals

GNU Screen is a fantastic terminal "window manager" in that it lets you handle multiple terminals from within one -- not only that, but what you run under Screen can be shared with other users or used remotely if you start a Screen session and then ssh into your box and resume the session. Read more »

Using FileZilla on Linux

Recently, the open source FileZilla FTP client became available for Mac OS X and Linux. Previous versions of FileZilla were only available for Windows. Read more »

Create encrypted loopback filesystems on Linux

Using the loopback filesystem interface, you can create encrypted filesystems very easily. These filesystems are great for storing sensitive documents be it SSH or GnuPG keys, financial documents, etc. Read more »

Encrypt any file with symmetric cryptography using GPG

Encryption lets you keep your sensitive data, banking information and conversations safely protected by code. Learn how you can use the free GPG utility to protect your data. Read more »

10 things you can do to give old servers a second life

Often, you can give old servers a new lease on life by upgrading to a bigger hard drive and adding RAM. The nature of your network will dictate what's best for you, but here are some ways you might get additional mileage from an old server. Read more »

10 shortcuts to master bash

The unassuming Linux shell program bash hides some powerful tools and shortcuts, here are 10 to get you started. Read more »

Use lbdb to combine contact sources for easy address lookup

Address book storage varies by e-mail client; many keep contacts in their own storage format that makes them inaccessible to other clients. One program, called the Little Brother's Database, can bring many of these together to make it easy to search for contacts outside of your e-mail client. Read more »

Video (1)

25 years of GNU with Fry

The Free Software Foundation is beginning celebrations of 25 years of GNU with the release of a video presented by actor and comedian Stephen Fry. Read more »

Blog (6)

Chrome is just another browser

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Hands up if you missed the Chrome release -- didn't think anyone did. Google's browser arrived with all the fanfare and hype that only Google can produce. Read more »

Mandriva, Turbolinux enter Linux alliance

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Forgive me if I sound skeptical, but during the nine years I've covered Linux, not once have I seen a favorable outcome to the partnership of the type Mandriva and Turbolinux announced Wednesday. Read more »

Wireless theft -- what's the harm?

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Hand up if you have logged in to use some poor schmuck's unprotected wireless connection to overcome a bandwidth drought? Read more »

GPL 3 -- a bridge too far?

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Now it's time to create a new phrase: "free as in free software," meaning the freedom to make adversaries of potential partners -- the kind of freedom one has when one's work must be carefully excluded from other people's projects. Read more »

Open source Java imminent

Brendon Chase [blogs:codemonkeybusiness] -- It's finally happening, Sun are releasing Java ME and SE under an open source licence -- the GPL. Read more »

Sun considering GPL for Java

Brendon Chase [blogs:codemonkeybusiness] -- Sun Microsystems is poised to release "significant parts" of the Java Standard Edition(JSE) under a free or open source licence by the end of 2006 -- possibly under the Gnu General Public Licence(GPL). Read more »

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  • Staff Crying, mooning and leaving

    In this week's roundup we see that continuous whining can get results, Linux users get 64-bit Flash and Moonlight previews, the latest in the Yahoo/Microsoft relationship and Senator Conroy ducks and weave in Senate Question Time. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

  • Brendon Chase Sun eye Web developers with Netbeans 6.5

    Despite the recent employment axe hitting Sun the company has pushed out a new release of its Netbeans open source IDE with an eye to appeal more to Web developers. Read more »

    -- posted by Brendon Chase

  • Renai LeMay BarCamp buzz: Let the hacking continue

    Attending last weekend's BarCamp in Sydney, it was hard to escape the conclusion that a certain "dot-com bust" flavour had seeped into the kool aid previously being drunk by Australia's web 2.0 and early stage start-up sector. Read more »

    -- posted by Renai LeMay

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