People often think that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks-you know like the ones that knocked the Department of Justice, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and Universal Music recently–require hundreds of attackers generating gigabytes of traffic per second to pound a Website down into the ground. Ah, [...]

Some of my die-hard Windows friends are very excited by Windows 8 arrival later this year. Others fear that Windows 8 will be a repeat of Microsoft’s Vista disaster. Me? I know Windows 8 will be a Vista-sized fiasco. Before jumping into why I think far most PC users will still be running Windows 7 [...]

I like Apple products. God knows I own and use enough of them. But, I hate their out-sourcing business practices and their world-wide anti-Android lawsuits. So, when I learned this morning that Motorola Mobility had won a permanent injunction against Apple’s iCloud service in Germany because of a patent violation and Motorola had followed that [...]

Aaron Seigo, one of the KDE’s lead developers, and a leader of the Spark free-software Linux tablet development effort, has reveled more about the Spark, including, alas, that the Spark won’t be available until May 2012. Seigo explains, “We have a lot of pieces to coordinate, and not just technical issues like the OS image [...]

President Barack Obama recently held a Google+ video Hangout; Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich promised to have a permanent U.S. moon-base by 2020; and fellow Republican Mitt Romney, along with Gingrich and Obama, are against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA). So, as politicians go, these guys are all pretty tech-savvy [...]

Open-source software and Linux, thanks to Android, is well represented on tablets. But, if you didn’t want to deal with proprietary firmware and software, you were out of luck… until now. Aaron Seigo, one of the KDE’s lead developers, and his team are just about ready to roll-out the first tablet based entirely on Linux [...]

Over the last few years, we’ve seen radical changes to the Linux desktop. Some, despite initial opposition, such as the KDE 4.x re-start, took a while to gain favor, but eventually became popular. Others, such as GNOME 3.x have alienated many users and first Ubuntu’s Unity and now it’s Head-Up Display (HUD) have not been [...]

I’m a big believer in “It’s not broke, then don’t fix it.” So is leading Linux company, Red Hat. The company has just announced that it is extending the production lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6 from seven to 10 years in response to enterprise customer demand and Red Hat’s hardware [...]

In a brief note, Ed Brill, an IBM product line manager, announced that IBM has likely seen its last release of Symphony, its OpenOffice fork. Later, in the blog’s discussion thread, Eric Otchet, Symphony’s product manager, seemingly confirmed that this was the end of the road for Symphony when he wrote about Apache OpenOffice the [...]

Google has unified its privacy policies, Facebook is rolling out its Timeline feature, and the FBI is looking for help to monitor all the social networks. All that has people feeling a little twitchy about the personal information they’ve placed online. And, now some people have noticed that LinkedIn, the business and jobs social network, [...]

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski recently announced a plan that would expand the Universal Service Fund’s Lifeline program to include broadband Internet service. The concept of universal service dates to the Communications Act of 1934 and was expanded by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Today, the Lifeline program provides land-line telephone service to [...]

When Ubuntu announced that it was going to switch to Unity for its primary Linux desktop, some users were outraged by Ubuntu’s shift to a new interface. Many turned to Linux Mint in place of Ubuntu. So, when Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu would be moving from Unity to Head-Up Display (HUD), I [...]

In Ubuntu Linux’s new Head-Up Display (HUD ), menus come second. Instead your primary interface is the search bar. A first look at Ubuntu Linux’s Head-Up Display (Gallery) More >

Clement Lefebvre, lead developer of Linux Mint, has announced the first “fully stable” version of its new GNOME 2.x-like “Cinnamon 1.2? fork of the GNOME 3.x desktop environment is now available for not only Mint, but for Ubuntu 11.10, Fedora 16, OpenSUSE 12.1, Arch Linux, and Gentoo. The Cinnamon interface looks and works a lot [...]

The U.S. Department of Justice working in conjunction with New Zealand’s law enforcement agencies has taken down the popular file-storage and sharing site Megaupload. So, since Megaupload has been shut down, Internet piracy has gone down significantly, right? Right? Well, probably not, NPD market researcher Russ Crupnick said, “Only about 3 percent of the U.S. [...]

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has announced that Ubuntu will be adopting a radical new change to the interface that will do away with the “menu” in the Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer (WIMP) interface, which has defined the desktop for the last thirty years. Shuttleworth states, “The menu has been a [...]

The Internet-based hacker and protest group Anonymous is still ticked up by the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) takedown of Megaupload. Last week, Anonymous took down the DoJ, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and Universal Music with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Over the weekend, [...]

Apple’s iBooks2’s reinvented textbooks really are something. They’re gorgeous, they’re fast, they’re real-time interactive with up to date information and they’ll only cost $14.99 or less. But, to use them, you’ll need an iPad–minimum list price: $499. Can you afford that for your kids? Can your school board? I could, but I’ve been lucky enough [...]

Picking a Web server used to be easy. If you ran a Windows shop, you used Internet Information Server (IIS); if you didn’t, you used Apache. No fuss. No muss. Now, though, you have more Web server choices, and far more decisions to make. One of the leading alternatives, the open-source NGINX, is now the [...]

When the U.S. Department of Justice working in conjunction with New Zealand’s law enforcement agencies took down the popular file-storage and sharing site Megaupload and arrested its executives, they never counted on the Internet-based hacker and protest group, Anonymous, attacking the Department of Justice (DoJ), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of [...]