"After a long and arduous journey that included a suspended validation last year, the Open Source Software Institute has announced that OpenSSL has regained its FIPS 140-2 validation and is now available for download. The validation process, which normally lasts a few months, took an astounding five years to complete, and those involved with the projects say they are already devising ways to avoid such long delays in future validations."

When it comes to troublesome Linux peripherals, WiFi takes the cake. Sparked by the Portland Project's efforts to bring standardization to the Linux desktop, the Linux wireless developer community tackled this problem at its second Linux Wireless Summit last month in London.

With the Sonnet library for KDE 4, developer Jacob Rideout hopes to reinvigorate the field of desktop linguistics by adding automatic language detection and other innovative features. Sonnet is to be for KDE 4 what KSpell 2 is for the current version of the K Desktop Environment, providing spell-checking facilities to applications as diverse as the Konqueror Web browser, Kopete instant messenger, and KWord office software. Unlike KSpell, however, it will also provide grammar checking, multilingual tools, and perhaps even translation, dictionary, and thesaurus functionality across all of KDE.

YouTube has cool video showing Windows games using DirectX running inside VMware Fusion for Mac OS X. This is demonstrating full DirectX 8.1 support inside Windows XP virtual machines.

Samsung is following Apple, MS & LG in the trend where cellphones involve "big, wide touchscreens" as their main look and feel. Their Ultrasmart F700 phone has a qwerty keyboard, 2.8" widescreen, 5 MP camera and 3G support. We are not sure at this point if this is a smartphone which allows you to develop and run native applications or if it's just a glorified "feature phone". The whole interface is based on Adobe's Flash while a recent press release along with the claim of "full HTML browsing" makes us speculate that the phone possibly uses the Opera web browser -- possibly on top of Linux.

Apple plans to crank up the anti-Vista rhetoric at its international chain of retail stores later this week, the latest move in a broader bid by the Mac maker to undermine the new operating system release from rival Microsoft. The campaign, set to get underway this Saturday, will include new store displays and employee t-shirts gently mocking Vista as little more than a washed-up attempt at a modern operating system, those familiar with the matter say. In a multi-page training manual made available through the company's internal retail system this week, Apple challenged its employees to learn and tout the Mac's many existing advantages over Vista-equipped Windows PCs.