This lengthy and highly technical primer provides a gentle yet thorough introduction to elliptical key cryptography (ECC), said to be ideal for resource-constrained systems because it provides more security-per-bit than other types of asymmetric cryptography. The paper is from Certicom, which markets Security Builder toolkits targeting various popular desktop, server, and embedded OSes.

Preston Gralla, a well-known technology expert and windows user for a long time, tries Linux after his son suggests it to him. I found his testimony brief but very honest.

The 0.77 final is out for MenuetOS with the following features: Dosbox, ScummVM and Doom I ports; 3Com and Sis900 ethernet drivers; Improved protection, hd and floppy support.

Microsoft Corp. has expanded the Source Licensing Program under which its Most Valued Professionals get access to the source code for the Windows operating system. The Redmond, Wash., company said on Monday that all the MVPs within the Microsoft platforms community and living within the 27 eligible countries worldwide will now be able to access Windows source code at no cost.

The OpenPKG project released version 2.1 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform Unix software packaging facility.

Opera Software released today Opera's version 7.53 (download here) with added security fix for all supported platforms (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and MS-Windows). Changelog for each platform can be viewed here. In addition Opera is offering a tool which allows users to make Opera look like IE or other browsers before you delve into Opera's more advanced features: Opera one-click setups.

This paper addresses operating system hardening in terms of patching, administration roles and setting passwords. It also provides information on Apple Macintosh OS X network security: namely, basic firewall configuration and hardening of network services such as FTP, SSH and the Apache web server.

If you work on large-scale development projects, then you're familiar with the advantages of writing modular code. Well-structured, modular code is easier to write, debug, understand, and reuse. The problem for Java developers is that the functional programming paradigm has long been implemented only via specialized languages such as Haskell, Scheme, Erlang, and Lisp. This article, shows you how to use functional programming constructs such as closures and higher order functions to write well-structured, modular code in the Java language.

A new UI website just opened its doors. As part of it's opening, they've posted a Gnome 2.6 usability review that includes fairly detailed user experience surveys.

Bob Ratliff of IPKonfig reviews SuSE 9.1 PRO (with screenshots).

Rudolf Cornelissen coded for Haiku/BeOS support for AGP cards (AGP cards were previously working on PCI-mode on BeOS) while Siarzhuk Zharski has released a module that allows USB storage devices to be used with BeOS 5.x (however some libraries from Dan0/Zeta are needed for the module to work).

Almost exactly one year after the idea of porting Portage to MacOS X came up - and the joint Metapkg initiative between Fink, Darwinports and Gentoo took off - a 20-head-strong developer team around Pieter van den Abeele (strategic lead) and Daniel Ostrow (operational) is now ready to release an extraordinary beast into the wild: Gentoo MacOS.

Here is Christopher Blizzard's report from the DesktopCon.

The Firebird Project announces the release of Firebird V1.5.1. this relese represents a committment by the project to develop and deliver ongoing improvements to this popular open source database engine.