On April 1st, the Conficker worm, perhaps the most wide-spread malware program in history, is set to activate. We don’t know what Conficker will do, but it’s a safe bet it won’t be anything nice to the hundreds of thousands of Windows PCs that have been infected with it. Will it strip out every credit-card number within these PCs? Launch a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack? Subscribe you to PETA porn!? We don’t know.

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In case any of you were wondering why there has been a fairly notable upswing in the attacks happening on SIP endpoints, the answer is “script kiddies.” In the last few months, a number of new tools have made it easy for knuckle-draggers to attack and defraud SIP endpoints, Asterisk-based systems included. There are easily-available tools that scan networks looking for SIP hosts, and then scan hosts looking for valid extensions, and then scan valid extensions looking for passwords.

Is there such a thing as a perfect Linux or BSD desktop distribution? If so, what features and functionalities would such a distro have for it to have attained that high state – of perfection (on the desktop)? And perfect for what group of users? Geeks or non-geeks? In order to answer these questions, we set out here the most important features we expect a modern Linux or BSD desktop distribution to have.

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PCLinuxOS is a an APT-ified, Mandriva Linux-based distribution. It is a Live CD distro, with the option to install to a hard disk once you’ve decide that it meets your computing needs. Like most Linux desktop distributions, installation is via a graphical installer.

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PCLinuxOS is a Linux distribution based on Mandriva Linux. The most recent update, and the first since the last update in 2007, was released last week. This review will be the very first review of PCLinuxOS on this site.

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The uncertainty surrounding Net Neutrality has given rise to a technology known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) that offers Internet service providers unprecedented control over Internet content, according to a new paper released today by Free Press. Deep Packet Inspection: The End of the Internet as We Know It? argues that the use of DPI technology by Internet service providers should raise serious concerns for both users and lawmakers.

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This afternoon, the MIT faculty unanimously adopted a university-wide OA mandate. Here’s the resolution the faculty approved (thanks to Hal Abelson, MIT professor of computer science and engineering, who chaired the committee to formulate it):

Join the Free Software Foundation and FLOSS Manuals March 21st-22nd book sprint, “Introduction to the Command Line”

The Free Software Foundation and FLOSS Manuals are joining forces in a sprint to write a new textbook introducing GNU/Linux newbies to the command line. Join us as we sprint to release a new book by Monday March 23rd!

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Linus Torvalds (you know him, right?) has this post on his blog:

So 2.6.29 isn’t quite out yet, but I’ve merged the new Tuz logo, so now my laptop boots up with two of these guys showing. See an earlier post about the plush version of this that I got while in Hobart for LCA 2009.

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Zenwalk is a Slackware-derived Linux distribution. The latest upgrade – Zenwalk 6 – was just recently. If you have not done so already, you may read a review here. This goal of this tutorial is to help those new to Zenwalk make their desktop a little bit more, let’s say, user-friendly. If you are an experienced user, you probably know how to do this already, but if not, please read on.

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Zenwalk 6, the latest upgrade to the Slackware-derived Linux desktop distribution, was recently released to the public. As with every major distro release, Zenwalk 6 comes lots of changes, and to make it easier for you to decide whether this distro is worth trying out, we offer this review.

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Qt software has released the first batch of Qt solutions licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). According to the release announcement, this first batch will be followed in the coming weeks by the release of the full set of Qt components. The components that made it in this first batch are:

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One of the advantages of using free and open source operating systems like Linux and BSD distros is that users have a wide range of applications to choose from. And we are not just talking about half-baked applications, but high quality software that rivals and in many cases are better than their proprietary equivalents. That holds true for the Office Suite category of applications (including standalone word processing and spreadsheet applications).

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Linux and BSD desktop distributions have several PDF readers in their repository that any user may download and use. PDF, an acronym for Portable Document Format, is a popular format (designed by Adobe) to publish formatted text and documents. The most popular reader is, of course, Adobe Acrobat Reader. However, it is a proprietary software.

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Editor’s note: Most people write about Linux as if it’s the only free and open source operating system in use. They seem to forget, or are ignorant, or have no knowledge of the BSD operating systems. I am referring to OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, and a few others. If I wrote this article, I would have titled it “10 ways to go green with Linux and BSD operating systems.” But I am not the author, so we are stuck with the title.

1: Reduced landfill

With Linux, you can keep using that older hardware even while using the latest version of your distribution. When you use Linux, you don’t have to throw away ugly packaging that typically comes with software. And there are no transportation costs required to ship distributions from a warehouse to your retail store. According to a UK study in 2004, Windows users are required to upgrade their computers twice as often as Linux users: “Industry observers quote a typical hardware refresh period for Microsoft Windows systems as 3 – 4 years; a major UK manufacturing organization quotes its hardware refresh period for Linux systems as 6 – -8 years.”

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