Federal and state police now have the power to use computer spyware to gather evidence in a broad range of investigations after legal changes last week. The Surveillance Devices Act allows police to obtain a warrant to use software surveillance technologies, including systems that track and log keystrokes on a computer keyboard. The law applies to the Australian Federal Police and to state police investigating Commonwealth offences. Read More ("smhguy/pass" to access)

Sun Microsystems' new Sun Ray Server 3.0 might actually bring thin clients into the ready for prime-time category. The big breakthrough is the bandwidth management software that allows these clients to run across standard high speed internet connections. Though they're still targeting large organizations, this new version opens up the home market, via internet providers. A company like AOL could market a totally managed thin client with a monthly service fee.

This tutorial outlines how to speed up Debian by using hdparm, getting sound and video to work, and finally wrapping it up with printing. Read more at Linuxtimes.net

IBM and Novell have teamed together to provide Independent Software Vendors and Linux developers with the opportunity to try out SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 (SLES 9) for IBM POWER, including 90 days of online updates. You can request a free evaluation kit.

The Xfce project finally finished the second release candidate for the upcoming Xfce Desktop Environment 4.2. This second release candidate is expected to be the last release candidate before the final release, which is planned to happen in about 2 or 3 weeks. This RC2 includes several bugfixes, esp. the window manager has seen quite a few important fixes, and it is the first release in the 4.2 branch that builds and runs on Solaris out of the box. As usual, prebuilt packages for several plattforms are already available (as a highlight: Debian/amd64 packages) and the graphical installers have been update to 4.2RC2. Please check the Xfce website for further details.

To really understand what is going on in your network, you must do more than deploy security devices, you must also monitor your security situation on a constant basis. Intrusion detection monitoring is a major trend in the security industry.

There's always a lot of excitement when a major Linux distribution has a new release - there's the clamour for the release notes and changelog, as well as the insatiable urge for screenshots and the search for the torrent for the ISOs. The release of Xandros Desktop 3.0 last week was no exception, with OS fanatics everywhere curious just what was in store. Read on for details.

I was happy as an iMac G5 owner, now I am a happy Linux user again: good news is coming from the growing linux-on-mac community.

A "Tiger Technology Overview" has been made publicly available on the Chinese ADC (PDF link): it presents some new features which have not yet been published on the public area of the main Apple Developer Connection site.

A new kernel for an OS caled LSE/OS was developed by a french research laboratory: Epita System Laboratory. This laboratory is specialized in low-level system programming.For more than one year this laboratory has been developing an extremely stable nanokernel with specific features that place it in a very special class of systems. Read on for more. Update: English version here.

Patrick Weber writes "The tutorials on the KDE-Cygwin site are very vague and they dont even have one for beginners. So I went out on my own and wrote my own tutorial. This is for anyone (even the people that have no idea what they are doing). I hope that this article is a help to everyone."

As seen on kerneltrap.org: "In response to a question raised on the dragonfly-kernel mailing-list, Matt Dillon gives an overview of plans to revise the DragonFly userland scheduler, the second of two schedulers that Dragonfly currently utilizes in a layered fashion. Matt explains, 'There are actually two schedulers.. there's the LWKT scheduler, which is as close to perfect as its possible to be, and there is the userland scheduler, which is the one that needs work.'"

yellowTAB announced the immediate availability of the long awaited Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Zeta Neo. This service pack addresses bugs reported in previous versions of Zeta, and offers users the opportunity to enjoy the improvements done to the operating system as development keeps moving towards a Zeta 1.0 release.

Tamura Kent formally unveils his plans to add new functionality to NetBSD's audio framework (audio(9) and audio(4)) - specifically, the addition of an audio converter pipeline and in-kernel mixing. These additions along with audio device cloning would make it possible to natively support hardware mixing without the use of a software based soundserver.