KDE 3.4.1 released

  Submitted by Philipp Esselbach KDE 24 Comments
KDE 3.4.1 has been released. It is a maintenance release which "provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and greatly enhanced support for existing translations and new translations. "
Read More

IBM Gives Your Information to the Government

  Submitted by Anonymous Privacy, Security 13 Comments
Software developed by S.R.D. (Systems Research and Development), recently acquired by IBM, allows huge collections of personal data (travel manifests, medical data) to be compared with other databases, such as terrorist watch lists, while not actually disclosing the data between two entities. What's actually compared is a one-way hash, and any "hits" between two lists, would identify a record number that would presumably lead to a request for the whole record. S.R.D. was originally funded by the CIA's In-Q-Tel venture capital arm.
Read More

Sun Microsystems’ Extreme Makeover

  Submitted by Michael Oracle and SUN 21 Comments
Sun Microsystems is embarking on a $50 million ad campaign, associating its products and services with some of its prominent customers such as eBay, General Motors, and Major League Baseball. Responding to declining sales and influence in the industry, Sun is revamping its image, down to their packaging, office decor and even on-hold music.
Read More

Stallman on Nokia’s Patent Announcement

  Submitted by Anonymous Legal 30 Comments
In an editorial at Newsforge, Richard Stallman notes that, unlike IBM's announcement last year granting open source software authors amnesty from 500 patents, Nokia has only made its recent pledge about the Linux kernel, leaving the door open for an attack on other software projects. Meanwhile, Nokia continues to push for more software patent protection from government. He says their gesture isn't nothing, but it's next to nothing.
Read More

Desert Spring-Time: An OCaml OS

  Submitted by Jonathan Roewen OS News 12 Comments
Desert Spring-Time (DST) is an OS based on the OCaml runtime+native code compiler. Their goal is to build a robust system through extensive use of OCaml language features, such as static type checking. Currently, this is only a prototype, and is best tested with qemu. More information can be found here.
Read More

FreeBSD: Fix for Hyper-Threading Vuln. Considered Non-Trivial

  Submitted by HassleB0f Privacy, Security 1 Comment
KernelTrap reports: Colin Percival continues the discussion regarding the shared-cache vulnerability inherent in multi-core processors, offering potential mitigation techniques in the form of fixes to the FreeBSD schedulers. Based on Percival's original discovery, information leakage between threads which share a processor core and the subsequent opportunity to monitor memory access patterns can be prevented by eliminating the co-scheduling of threads that have differing privileges.
Read More

New CPU from VIA, The C7

  Submitted by Ryan M. Graham Hardware 61 Comments
VIA issued a press release on Friday announcing their new C7 Processor. Noteworthy PVR related features include its low power consumption (2.0GHz at 20W, idle at 0.1W) and support for SSE2 and SSE3 (in addition to existing MMX and SSE support). In the crypto department, they've expanded their PadLock™ hardware crypto/security suite with this CPU by adding in full hardware SHA-1 and SHA-256 (20BGps), hardware assisted RSA (hardware Montgomery Multiplier), a beefed up RNG that feeds directly into the SHA units, and the NX bit.
Read More

Balancing Power, Cooling, and Performance

General Development 11 Comments
Power consumption, supply voltage, junction temperature, system cooling requirements, and processor clock rate are all physically and thermodynamically related. By understanding the relationships, system cost and complexity trade-offs, and resource requirements, system designers can strike a better balance between requirements. See how you can incorporate emergent cooling and adaptive power control methods into embedded system designs.
Read More

Find Linux Torrents Quickly

  Submitted by torrentnerd Linux 15 Comments
If you're on the hunt for Linux ISO Torrents you might want to check out the long list of recently released distro torrents over at LinuxISOtorrent.com. They've got frequently updated torrents from A (Arch) to Z (Zen). The site only does one thing, but does it well - helps you get the latest Linux distros downloaded via BitTorrent, quickly.
Read More

Table of Analogs to Windows Software in Linux

  Submitted by Fiodor Sorex Linux 54 Comments
One of the biggest difficulties in migrating from Windows to Linux is the lack of knowledge about comparable software. Newbies usually search for Linux analogs of Windows software, and advanced Linux-users cannot answer their questions since they may not know much about available Windows software. This list of Linux equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software is based on our own experience and on the information obtained from the visitors of this page on English, Russian, Italian, Spanish, French & German.
Read More

Using Tiger Technologies

  Submitted by Hakime macOS 20 Comments
Artist Futurismo Zugakousaku has posted some creations on his web site that he made with Quartz Composer, a new great technology in Tiger. (the videos are apparently only visible using the latest version of Quicktime in Tiger) If it makes you feel inspired, here a small tutorial that will help you get started with Quartz Composer and to develop a customized RSS Screen Saver.
Read More

KanaalZ on Open Source

  Submitted by Tyr Open Source 11 Comments
Since most of OSNews' U.S. readers are enjoying their Memorial Day holiday weekend still, here's something for a segment of our Eurpoean readership: Belgian business-oriented tv channel KanaalZ has a (dutch) report on its website on open Source. Two case studies are explored, one of which is the town of Schoten's switch to FOSS for its intranet solution. The opposing case is presented by a Microsoft spokesman.
Read More

Microsoft vs Unix: Its a Tie for the First Time

  Submitted by Bob In the News 32 Comments
The Financial Express reports that, for the first time, sales of servers running Windows matched the revenues of Unix servers: Revenue for Windows servers grew 12.3 per cent to $4.2 billion in the quarter while unit shipments grew 10.7 per cent. Unix servers saw 2.8 per cent revenue growth to $4.2 billion while unit shipments increased 5 per cent. HP made gains on leader IBM, Dell posted huge growth, and Linux made up an ever larger share. It appears that both Windows and Linux continue to chip away at proprietary Unix from both ends.
Read More

No ELF Vulnerability in Linux Kernel (Updated)

Privacy, Security 44 Comments
Update: It appears that we mischaracterized the conclusions in our title and our summary on this story. Greg KH was referring only to the ELF vulnerability in this story. Whether we were deliberately mislead by the submitter of this story or not, we regret the error.

The original story: According to "Greg KH," co-maintainer of the 2.6.x.y series of important stability and security fixes, the Linux kernel does not suffer from the much-hyped hyper threading vulnerability that affected the BSDs: " The main reason there have not been any updates, is that there really isn't a problem for the 2.6 kernel. The original author has admited this finally, no one was ever able to reproduce it on a 2.6 kernel. The only reason I released a kernel update, was at the time, we thought there was an off-chance that there was a problem. However in further testing, it has not been the case." This confirms Linus's earler assertion.

Read More

Intel Adds DRM to Chips

  Submitted by David Intel 101 Comments
If you though the subject of DRM and Trusted Comouting had gone away, think again. Intel is adding DRM capabilities to its new Pentium D chipsets, but as with AMD, they're not that keen on talking about it. Aside from DRM, there's also this gem: Additionally, AMT also features what Intel calls "IDE redirection"...allow administrators to remotely enable, disable or format or configure individual drives and reload operating systems and software from remote locations, again independent of operating systems.
Read More

The First Apple

  Submitted by Saad Apple 47 Comments
The first computer Apple released was also its cheapest until the release of the Mac mini.  It was an innovative machine.  Unlike its peers, it included a keyboard interface and onboard graphics, options that cost hundreds of dollars on other platforms.  It even included mass storage: the machine had a built-in cassette interface.  Read the article at MLAgazine.
Read More