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If you use an Android-powered device, you should take note. Lookout, a mobile security outfit based in California, USA, is reporting that GGTracker, a new Android Trojan, can be automatically downloaded to your phone after a visit to a fake Android Market. According to Lookout: The Trojan targets users in the United States by interacting [...]

Think that cloud service is save? Think again. According to a study conducted by Scientists from the Darmstadt Research Center for Advanced Security (CASED), and report by ScienceDaily: Among 1100 public Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), which are used to provide cloud services, about 30 percent are vulnerable, allowing attackers to manipulate or compromise web services [...]

There is ongoing battle between two German firms that involves the Linux kernel. The companies are AVM Computersysteme Vertriebs GmbH (AVM), and Cybits AG (Cybits). According to a report by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE): The case was brought to court by AVM with the aim of preventing Cybits from changing any parts of [...]

XBMC is a media center application for Linux and BSD desktop distributions. It comes pre-installed on a handful of distributions, but is available in the repositories of many. The project has a logo, but not a mascot, so the developers started a mascot contest about a month ago. Yesterday, the result was announced and the [...]

Máirín Duffy has a long but informative article about redesigning Anaconda, the installation program for Fedora. Anaconda has more advanced features than any other Linux or BSD distribution, but a common complaint about it is it has too many steps. Here;s what Máirín said about a possible new Anaconda interface: The installer today is a [...]

A data breach today, another tomorrow, and before you realize what’s going on, your mobile phone is caught up in the mess. But in real terms, what does it mean for your phone and your personal data it holds? According to Lookout, a smartphone security outfit based in California, USA, it: Can lead to phishing, [...]

Cloud computing is all the buzz, but if you use a public cloud provider, do you trust the outfit? According to anecdotal evidence, the trust percentage is not very high. Matthew Gardiner has a few suggestions that public cloud providers may take to improve their trustworthiness. The first step is to: Avoid being a black [...]

The Calligra project has announced the second snapshot release of Calligra, a cross-platform Office productivity suite forked from KOffice, the office suite for the K Desktop Environment (KDE). The Calligra Office Suite includes Words, Kexi, Plan, Flow, Tables, Karbon, Krita, and Stage. According to the release notes: While most work has gone into the layout [...]

FreeSWITCH has released mod_rtmp, a RTMP solution for open source VoIP and telephony. FreeSWITCH is a “scalable open source cross-platform telephony platform designed to route and interconnect popular communication protocols using audio, video, text or any other form of media.” From the announcement: The FreeSWITCH team is pleased to announce that we have officially released [...]

Staying informed about security issues is just as important as applying available security updates. So, if you use an Android smartphone, I think you should know that Lookout is reporting that: A legitimate application called “Holy ***king Bible” was found to be repackaged with malware and distributed in alternative markets. Once an Android user downloaded [...]

If you use a cloud-based service, you should be just as worried as some companies who “are wary of handing data to third parties, fearing hacking, accidental data loss, or theft by rogue employees of cloud providers.” But where there is a problem, there is always an opportunity for some bright minds to propose a [...]

Remember SPDY? Yep, it’s pronounced “SPeeDY.” In case you forgot, or have never heard about it, it’s a Google project designed “… to reduce the latency of web pages.” Well, it has gone into limited commercial production. Erica Naone of Technology Review has an article about it. She writes: Website optimization company Strangeloop has built [...]

Chakra is a Linux distribution I recently reviewed (see Chakra GNU/Linux review). I have also written a tutorial on GPT partitioning on it here. An update has just been released and the lead developer emailed with the following: Again thx for your great review of Aida. Now we released the first respin of it. Most [...]

Mageia is a new Linux distribution forked from Mandriva. The first stable release was at the end of May, 2011, and I am just about to publish a review on the main site. This blog post is just to show what happened when I tried to play a video DVD on the GNOME desktop. Inserting [...]