Patrick E. Bennett, Jr., Computer Consultant ... computing support for small business

An anonymous reader writes "Ireland's Computer Emergency Response Team differs from what you can find in most other countries, since it's not government-backed and relies mainly on the good will of several security professionals. In this interview, the founder and head of the CERT, Brian Honan, talks about how the CERT was formed, what equipment they use and what challenges they face in their daily work without having a government to back them up."

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Howtoforge: "This article explains how you can use the DNS Templates in ISPConfig3 to allow layman to enter domain data without any previous knowledge on the subject."

Stoobalou contributes a link to this story at Thinq.co.uk, from which he excerpts: "Torrent-tracking site The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable as reports come in of co-ordinated police raids against file sharers across Europe. Police in up to 14 countries carried out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning. According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, the bulk of police action seems to have taken place in Sweden. Swedish Internet service provider ISP, which hosts both The Pirate Bay and whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, earlier denied rumours of a police raid, saying that officers had visited them to ask questions over two suspect IP addresses, and that no computers or other goods had been seized."

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Bradley M. Kuhn: "I'm sorry that I was right about this, but we should now finally learn the lesson: languages like Java and C# are dangerous."

Last month I participated in the third annual CONSEGI conference in Brasília, Brazil. The first CONSEGI conference was organized in 2008, and though it was organized by and for the Brazilian government, it speaks loudly and clearly with an authentic open source voice. In that first meeting, the CONSEGI declaration stated their disappointment in the appeals by several of their ISO/IEC national bodies being dismissed by the ISO and IEC technical management boards in the Standardization of Office Open XML, and criticized the ISO/IEC for "inability to follow its own rules". The declaration called into question credibility of ISO/IEC, with the signers asserting that they will no longer consider ISO standards to be automatically valid for government use. In 2009, CONSEGI hosted the 3rd International ODF Workshop and established the Brasilia Protocol, which commits its signatories to use ODF internally, with each other, and ultimately in their electronic interaction with third parties and the public. (I was a signatory to that protocol representing Red Hat.) And so I was very excited to see what CONSEGI 2010 would set as its agenda.

The "Project Description" of CONSEGI 2010 contained this paragraph which really highlights the answer to the question "why open source?" in Brazil (or in any other Democratic government):

The citizenship vision that goes under CIT (Communication and Information Technology, aka ICT) public politics of the Federal Government has as reference the collective rights and not only the sum of the citizen individual rights.

Think about that for a moment or two...

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BerkeleyLUG: "It seems like nearly every 6 months, Apple redefines just how closed their closed platform can be. Instead of just completely restricting the source and distribution of their own software, they now also limit the kind of third-party applications and content their users can enjoy."

theodp writes "Late on Monday, Oracle announced that ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd has joined the company as a co-president and a director. Hurd resigned from HP a month ago, after an investigation by the board into a personal relationship with a contractor turned up questionable expenses. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a personal friend of Hurd, criticized HP's board at the time, saying it was 'the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs.' 'Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he'll do even better at Oracle,' Ellison said in a statement Monday. 'There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark.' Stepping down to make room for Hurd was Charles E. Phillips Jr., who had some personal relationship issues of his own."

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PCLinuxOS Magazine: OpenOffice Impress, LXDE, Quick GIMP Tip, Meemaw, Linux Market Share...

While the cloud appears to be the ultimate jailbreaker, it is prudent to remember that a freed device is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the phone becomes a truer handheld computer, fully enabled to exceed native carrier and device restrictions. On the other hand, the phone becomes a miniature computer prone to mega security problems. "For most enterprises and consumers today, mobile and cloud security are viewed in a pretty straightforward way -- don't assume there is any," said Russ Dietz, CTO of SafeNet.

When you're a fan of Linux, any blog post entitled "27 Good Reasons to Love Linux" is going to be impossible to resist. No wonder, then, that a recent post with just that title has created endless fodder for conversation in the Linux blogosphere of late. Among the reasons listed in said post were the usual arguments in favor of Linux's attractive price and superior security, of course. In addition, however, the list refers to the ease of installing new software, the compatibility with older hardware, and Linux's environmental friendliness, among other virtues.

During Apple's media announcement last week, CEO Steve Jobs said two critically important things about Apple TV, the first of which was this: Apple TV owners love their Apple TVs. "They absolutely love them -- and use them a lot," he stressed. I'm one of these Apple TV lovers, and I have been for the last three-plus years. My old 40 GB Apple TV is simple, elegant and just works. For non-Apple TV lovers, the product is an HDTV bridge device that lets you buy or rent movies and TV shows, watch podcasts, view photos, and listen to music -- all through the big-screen TV.

When you're a fan of Linux, any blog post entitled "27 Good Reasons to Love Linux" is going to be impossible to resist. No wonder, then, that a recent post with just that title has created endless fodder for conversation in the Linux blogosphere of late. Among the reasons listed in said post were the usual arguments in favor of Linux's attractive price and superior security, of course. In addition, however, the list refers to the ease of installing new software, the compatibility with older hardware, and Linux's environmental friendliness, among other virtues.

everyday linux how2s: "Recently, I wrote a post about the KDE 4.5 SC release candidate. In that post, I was a little bit critical about the discoverability of desktop activities."

The Wine development release 1.3.2 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

An Oracle was a person or agency considered to be a source of wise counsel or prophetic opinion. How can that particular definition be applied to Oracle the company? It can't. In fact I would claim that Oracle, the company, is quite the opposite of "wise" or "prophetic".

telomerewhythere writes "Michael Strano and his team at MIT have made a self-assembling and indefinitely repairable photovoltaic cell based on the principle found in chloroplasts inside plant cells. 'The system Strano's team produced is made up of seven different compounds, including the carbon nanotubes, the phospholipids, and the proteins that make up the reaction centers, which under the right conditions spontaneously assemble themselves into a light-harvesting structure that produces an electric current. Strano says he believes this sets a record for the complexity of a self-assembling system. When a surfactant is added to the mix, the seven components all come apart and form a soupy solution. Then, when the researchers removed the surfactant, the compounds spontaneously assembled once again into a perfectly formed, rejuvenated photocell.'"

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If a quick test of the beta by LinuxTrends is any indication, this new Ubuntu version could be the most user-friendly, full-featured desktop Linux distribution ever.

Of the 12 new changes to the standards, the best part of the new PCI DSS rules is a change to rule 2.2.1, which specifically allows for virtualization. Such as using a VPS running Linux with Xen.

Tech Drive-in: "Songbird is still open source, but developers behind Songbird have decided to discontinue support for Linux and the concentrate on Mac and Windows versions of Songbird."

An anonymous reader writes "I bought a bunch of old Wing Commander games for Windows, but they use DirectDraw, which Microsoft has deprecated. They don't work too well under Windows 7, so I ended up reimplementing ddraw.dll using OpenGL to output the games' graphics. I wrote an article describing the process and all the fun workarounds I had to come up with, and released all related source code for others to hack on."

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