Practical Technology

When I was a kid in the 60s, books such as Miss Pickerell on the Moon, On the Trail of the Space Pirates, and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones had me dreaming of flying rockets to asteroids with my trusty Geiger counter and pick-axe in hand. It was science fiction then. Planetary Resources is on […]

New Orleans: Early in the morning at LinuxCon, Linus Torvalds and the other top Linux developers talked to the Linux faithful about Linux, Microsoft, and other issues. Torvalds was joined by leading Linux programmers including Red Hat’s Ric Wheeler and Tejun Heo; Greg Kroah-Hartman, the master of all things Linux driver related; and Sarah Sharp, […]

NEW ORLEANS: Who writes Linux? Perhaps the better question is who doesn’t write it? At LinuxCon, in New Orleans, The Linux Foundation revealed in its latest report “Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, What They Are Doing and Who is Sponsoring It.” that the largest collaborative project in the history […]

Initially it looked like the “Hand of Thief” (HoT) Trojan would be the first successful Linux Trojan. However, further investigation by RSA, the Security Division of EMC, reveals that the Hand of Thief is just another in a long line of so-called Linux malware that’s more bark than bite. Linux “HoT” bank Trojan: Failed malware. […]

Just how broken are fundamental Internet security technologies such as Secure-Socket Layer (SSL), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), and Transport Layer Security (TLS)? We still don’t know for certain. But, it’s clear that the National Security Agency (NSA) has broken many kinds of  Internet encryption technologies… including the ones we use every day. Has the NSA […]

When I was a kid, I liked reading Dick Tracy comics. This was during 1960s when the strip took a science-fiction turn and Tracy, who had long sported a two-way radio wrist-watch, started using a two-way wrist TV. It was fun then to think about high-tech electronics in a wrist-watch. That was then. This is […]

For decades, Microsoft was a software company. Now, with the purchase of Nokia’s phone division, Microsoft has officially shifted to being a serious hardware company as well. Microsoft: The hardware company. More >

Once more, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a pro-Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad organization, has struck on the internet. This time, SEA hit The New York Times (NYT), Twitter, and other popular sites. Unlike previous attacks that relied on phishing attacks to gain password information from the target site’s authorized users, SEA is using the weak […]

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation recently claimed that thanks to the National Security Agency (NSA) spying programs, US cloud providers would lose at least 10 percent of its foreign market, $21.5 billion, to European or Asian competitors. Others are considering abandoning American Internet companies and e-mail providers in favor of European providers. But if […]

Everyone uses virtualization, but almost no one talks about benchmarking it. It’s easy to understand why. It’s hard to do. Fortunately, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), recently released a new benchmark for datacenter-level virtualization, SPECvirt_sc2013. New virtualization benchmark for clouds and datacenters. More >

On a regular basis I use five different Linux different distributions. Over the decades, I’ve used pretty every much every major Linux distribution out there… and I haven’t even touched more than 10% of all available Linux distributions. If I, who’ve made something of a career of tracking Linux, can’t keep up with all the […]

There I was, at perhaps the biggest hard-core, open source conference of them all these days, OSCon. The buzz was that everyone, and I mean everyone, was looking to hire. So I thought to myself, “Are they really?” I set about asking every OSCon exhibitor, more than a hundred of them, if they were indeed […]