Information freedom for open source users.

Once thought to be unhackable, the Android phone is anything but, according to researchers presenting at Black Hat 2010.

Once thought to be unhackable, the Android phone is anything but, according to researchers presenting at Black Hat 2010.

MakeTechEasier: “Basket Note Pads is a multipurpose note-taking application for KDE. Business people can use it to keep track of important tasks and notes. Writers can use it to organize their thoughts.”

Stealthy, targeted attacks aren’t just for defense agencies and high-tech giants like Google, according to researchers from managed security services firm TrustWave’s Spider Labs research grou

The Lieberman, Collins, Carper cybersecurity bill would do nothing but slow down real progress and undercut Howard Schmidt’s authority, former State of Pennsylvania CISO Robert Maley warns.

The VAR Guy: “First, let me pose a question: Why don’t other industries have the same black/white mentality?”

Hackers appear to be increasingly counting on configuration problems and programming errors rather than software vulnerabilities in order to steal information from computer systems, according to a new study from Verizon.

IT News: “Oracle has shut down servers Sun Microsystems was contributing to the build farm for open source database software, PostgreSQL, forcing enthusiasts to scramble to find new hosts to test updates to their software on the Solaris operating system.”

On the heels of the highly-anticipated release of Wine 1.2, CodeWeavers, Inc. today announced the simultaneous release of CrossOver 9.1 and CrossOver Games 9.1 for both Mac and Linux.

Milian Wolff: “Dominik asked me to blog about a feature in Kate that is still (sadly!) pretty unknown and seldom used: Kate Scripting. As you should know you can script KatePart completely via JavaScript.”

Hackers appear to be increasingly counting on configuration problems and programming errors rather than software vulnerabilities in order to steal information from computer systems, according to a new study from Verizon.

TuxRadar: “We’ve looked at three Linux-based phones that give the iPhone a run for its money. There’s the Palm Pre, running WebOS; Nokia’s Maemo 5-based N900, and the HTC Legend, running Android. Each is a strong challenger to Apple’s device, and they beat it today in significant areas. So, which is best for you?”

Bash has had multi-processing for a long time, via job control, the $! environment variable, and the “wait” command. Judicious use of parentheses for sub-processes, and pipes where necessary, can put comparatively long-term procedures into the background. Bash 4 now provides a new multi-processing paradigm for shell scripting, via the “coproc” statement.

The Microsoft Vulnerability Research program said Wednesday that third party developers have patched less than half the bugs it reported to them over the past 12 months.

Even though most Android users are still waiting for Android 2.2, details about the next version Android 3.0, or Gingerbread are starting to emerge. Android 3.0 release date is looking like Q4 of this year, possibly around October. And Gingerbread may already be in some testers’ hands – Phandroid has shown an unverified photo of a test build of Android 3.0 running in the wild.

Cyber Cynic: “I get that Apple’s iPad is hotter than hot with over three million sold so far, but to say “Apple has won the battle for tablet computing already” is really overreaching.”

NCR announced two compact POS (point of sale) devices that run SUSE Linux for Point of Service, as well as a number of Windows operating systems. The RealPOS 40 and RealPOS 60 use Intel Atom and Celeron processors, respectively, offer enhanced energy efficiency, and provide both four powered serial ports and up to eight powered USB ports, the company says.

eSecurityPlanet: “Starting with Bouncer 6.0, the company is moving to a software appliance model powered by Ubuntu Linux.”

The Linux Mint development team have issued the KDE Edition of version 9 of their Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, code named “Isadora”. Linux Mint aims to be user friendly and to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, and various plug-ins and media codecs.

Basket Note Pads is a multipurpose note-taking application for KDE. Business people can use it to keep track of important tasks and notes. Writers can use it to organize their thoughts. Students can use it for note taking. And generally anyone can use it as a virtual paste bin or clip drawer. Basket was one of the last KDE 3 programs to be ported to KDE 4. While the development appeared to have stalled for some time, it has picked up again, and the developers have released a beta version for KDE 4.