Unixster

Ruben Unteregger discloses how he created a Skype trojan under contract from the German government while working for a Swiss company. Linux users may not be exempt. He has now released the trojan source code under GPL.

Whether you call it Web 2.0, Software as a Service (SAAS), Cloud Computing, or some other trendy buzzword, it still means ceding control of your data and applications to someone else. Bruce Byfield examines some exciting possibilities in KDE4 for incorporating networked functions into the desktop in a different way, one that keeps control in the user’s hands.

Tightening of the belt has seemingly paid off for Novell. The enterprise earned 38 million USD in the last quarter with Linux products. Novell’s turnover for the third quarter this year is lower than that of the third quarter last year, but the figures are still in the black. Novell closed out 2009’s third quarter with a profit of 17 million USD.

Many operating systems can already be booted over the net, especially so for the installation systems of the major Linux distributions, but the netboot.me web service offers a universal boot loader which presents them all in one menu. The boot loader can be installed on a USB stick, burned onto CD, or on a floppy disk. This allows users to start an always current selection of operating systems over the internet using one single boot medium.

Ubuntu Linux may get most of the attention but Mandriva and Fedora Linux are pushing the Linux desktop forward more than most

Back on Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and found it to offer some terrific performance improvements, but at the same time, there were a few notable regressions. Apple engineers have been working hard at pushing technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), OpenCL, full 64-bit support, and other changes to their OS X stack to bolster its performance capabilities and reduce the overall footprint. Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be out in October and does have some performance improvements as our earlier tests have shown, but Canonical engineers have not been exclusively focusing on performance optimizations with this release. Can the Karmic Koala outperform Snow Leopard? Yes and no.

There is a pleasant surprise here shortly so stay with me for a bit. Cool surprises await….or not. Depending on your SEF . (Surprise Expectation factor) What I have to say isn’t necessarily directed at Linux Users…you know what I am about to say chapter and verse…most will anyway. But everyone personally knows a Windows User…lots of them in most cases. Many of you have went as far as to refuse free support for them…as have I. I too have tired of fixing the same problems over and over. So, when my home-care nurse bemoaned the fact that her Windows laptop was not responding, I took a look at it. Like I had a choice? Oh, and just guess what I found?

I’m using my new Ubuntu netbook to write this blog entry. But I’m feeling a little lonely, because only 13 percent of small and midsize businesses plan to purchase netbooks, according to survey results from Spiceworks Inc.

In this article I will show how to prevent brute force attacks with Fail2ban against your SquirrelMail Web login using the Squirrel Logger plugin.