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Two weeks ago, I asked for reader aid in getting documentation on early 1990s System VR4 Unix to help understand what things can be done with Linux today but could not be done with AT&T System VR4. The question was naive and I need more help (and aspirin) in struggling toward a better answer tha...

Holiday shopping sure has changed. This year, my shopping list includes all things digital -- a TiVo box, some DVDs, perhaps even a digital camera. A generation ago, consumer goods did not come with microprocessors. Back then, once you bought something, you owned it. You could use it however you ...

Every four years, the fall sport becomes following U.S. presidential politics. As any sports fan knows, you have to know the lingo to understand the talking heads. I take politics seriously, so after hearing the expressions "red-state" and "blue-state," I did my research and learned that red is th...

Back in 1976, Bill Gates wrote an open letter to hobbyists. He asked, "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three years into programming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product, and distribute it for free?" Today, Gates has to eat those words because the...

Gupta Technologies announced today that its SQLBase(R) 9.0 for Linux has been certified "Novell Ready" for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and 9. The Novell Ready designation means that the product has been designed to work with Novell's Linux family of enterprise-class software products. "GUPTA has ...

As con men the two pitiful rascals in "Huckleberry Finn" made their living by pretending to be what they were not, and then charging the gullible to share the illusion. A cynic might see parallels to Red Hat here: pretending to open source ideals while actually charging the MSCE community for the pr...

During a break in a series of discussions on US HIPAA compliance for Canadian health care players, one of the attendees regaled the group with a long brag about how his company's techies had defeated a phishing attack. According to the story, the company's wizards had discovered a phishing attack ba...

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), creator of the open-source Apache Web server, noted that it will not support the proposed antispam standard, called Sender ID, because Microsoft's licensing terms are antithetical to the spirit of open source. Sender ID is designed to identify whether an e-mail'...

The use of electronic voting in this year's U.S. elections has the makings of the greatest IT-related disaster yet. Barring a miracle, this is a done deal, a disaster unfolding as we watch. The problem, unfortunately, is that it's too late for alternative technologies to come in while a number of ju...

At this week's Crypto 2004 conference in California, several papers were presented that demonstrated vulnerabilities in algorithms that are often used to create digital signatures. Although the results are preliminary, many in the security community are concerned about what such weaknesses might mea...

For the last three weeks I've been talking about the impact the new Sony, Toshiba and IBM cell processor is likely to have on Linux desktop and datacenter computing. The bottom line there is that this thing is fast, inexpensive and deeply reflective of very fundamental IBM ideas about how computing ...

What is the safest advice an intellectual property attorney can give clients concerned about potential litigation? "Do absolutely nothing." The truth is that making or selling any products might get you sued for patent infringement. Advertising might get you sued for trademark infringement. And don'...

Two years in the making, the Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) this week debuted online, providing the public with a constantly updated catalog of the Internet's ever-changing security vulnerabilities. The project is sponsored by Digital Defense and Winterforce and is available at osvdb.org...

In their ongoing, worldwide tit-for-tat battle over a name, Windows maker Microsoft and Linux desktop player Lindows have been in courtrooms in a handful of nations, with a U.S. case set to begin later this month. In the latest chapter of the ongoing saga -- which Microsoft depicts as an abuse of it...

What really are the most fundamental differences between Windows variants like 2003/XP and Unix variants like Linux? From a practical perspective, cost is an obvious differentiator, as are access to source and the ability to run outside the Intel processor environment. But it's possible to argue tha...

Mohandas Gandhi, a master of the tactics of civil disobedience against civilized foes, once had this to say about the stages of a successful campaign for an idea whose time has come: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." Advocates of open-source software...