What's the easiest way to ensure that GPS tracking technology doesn't become the tool of an evil elite? Make sure everyone has access to it! For people already thinking along these lines, the availability of tracking technologies such as RFID tags and (GPS) chipsets is confirmation that we're all living in a Panopticon. The saving grace is that the CIA and the Trilateral Commission don't have a monopoly on these technologies -- maybe we can turn a world of mass observation to our benefit.

Shortly after announcing the merger of Mandrakesoft and Conectiva into Mandriva, the newly combined company released a transitional "limited edition" GNU/Linux distribution to bridge the gap between the two parent distributions. Mandriva Limited Edition 2005 may look a little different, but it's the same great Mandrakelinux desktop distribution that you're used to.

OneStat.com today reported that Mozilla's browsers (all Gecko-based browsers except Netscape) have a total global usage share of 8.69 percent. The total usage share of Mozilla increased 0.24 percent since February 2005. Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates the global browser market with a global usage share of 86,63 percent which is 0.65 percent less as at the end of February.

Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge (Aq), Ade Bradshaw, and Matt Revell talk about Linux and whatever else comes along, including The Seth, the Nickell, the Seth Nickell, on usability, interaction design, the Gnome project, and lots of other stuff.

Wow! With Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems has done a marvelous job of bringing Solaris fully into the x86 world. Gone are the days when Solaris only runs on Sun hardware or when it only runs well on Sun hardware. Solaris 10 comes with greatly expanded off-the-shelf x86 hardware compatibility and a license that is hard to beat. It's a binary right to use and Open Solaris, the open source version is soon to come. IT Managers that have been wanting to bring a stable, scalable Operating Environment into their network infrastructures, but who have been unwilling to commit to the Sun hardware platform, for various reasons, are now free, pun intended, to bring Solaris on board and to run it on the hardware of their choice.

In a move that could rankle privacy advocates, Microsoft said Monday that it is adding the PC equivalent of a flight data recorder to the next version of Windows, in an effort to better understand and prevent computer crashes.

Microsoft has further watered down the Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) technology that will ship with its forthcoming Longhorn operating system. Many systems which Microsoft claims are "Longhorn ready" will not be able to support the security technology, vnunet.com has learned, and only part of the original security vision will be ready in time for the operating system's launch.

The code examples in these tutorials are in Python and C, but translate well to other languages. Part 1 covers the basics, such as an echo server and client, which connect over TCP/IP, fundamental network, layer, and protocol concepts. Part 2 is an intermediate level tutorial that demonstrates how to write UDP sockets applications.

This could be a decisive moment for the software market. Microsoft's big cash cow is the Windows/Office combo. If you look through the company's financial reports, you'll see that profits come mainly from Windows and Office. This means that Windows sales support the existence of other products and services. An unexpected drop in demand of Windows could cause a domino effect. At the moment this seems highly improbable because Windows desktop market share is over 90%, even though there is an increasing interest in MacOS X and Linux.

Flexbeta.net has got a few screenshots showing off the new Longhorn build.

Microsoft finally told Web developers what they've wanted to hear for years, promising support for graphics and style sheet standards.

Version 2.1 of CRUX, the lightweight keep-it-simple Linux distribution, has been released. It's based on the 2.6.11.7 kernel, Glibc 2.3.5, GCC 3.4.3 and X.org's X11 6.8.2. Changelog.

Welcome back to another issue of my reviews of Linux distributions. Not really surprisingly, this time I decided to take a close look at the second version of the most popular Debian offshoot, Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu's performance probably was the biggest surprise that 2004 had in store for Linux users. Just 9 months ago, almost noone even knew that there was a new project underway, but then things went really fast: after a preview version in mid-September, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released version 4.10 in October. Being based on Debian, Ubuntu has a solid base and, despite not being supported officially, all the (18.000) Debian packages available. Ubuntu 4.10 proved to be a decent operating system (especially for a first try) and had overall pretty positive reviews (here's mine).

Long-awaited versions of the operating system geared for speed finally see the light of day. Order it here for free to replace your 32bit version, or download a trial. A review is here.