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The security world is aflutter over new malware that has been spreading via USB devices and is programmed to steal data from systems running specific software used in utilities and industrial manufacturing plants.

There are a lot of moving parts to this story so we've decided to break them down and tell you what is happening and how it impacts you.

DeVeDe is an application that converts various video file formats into a disc that can be played in a DVD player. Other applications and tool chains can be coaxed into doing this but DeVeDe has the advantage of being a dedicated utility that has been designed for a single function.

At the end of last month the VDrift project did their first snapshot release in more than a year for this open-source drift racing game that's supported on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. The VDrift 2010-06-30 snapshot incorporates a great deal of changes, among which are a rewritten physics engine and a new deferred rendering engine that brings a great deal of visual improvements to this free software game. In this article are some screenshots on this OpenGL racing game and more of the new work found within this release.

A few days back there was the release of two updated NVIDIA legacy drivers for Linux, but only their newest legacy driver (they have three different legacy drivers at present) gained support for X.Org Server 1.8. This support though is needed for the older NVIDIA drivers to operate on newer Linux distributions like Fedora 13 and openSUSE 11.3. On this Sunday evening we have now confirmation from NVIDIA that they have no plans on providing xorg-server 1.8 support for their oldest legacy driver...

At Akademy in Tampere we interviewed Dirk Hohndel, Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist (we would call him 'dude') at Intel. He was present representing Intel and checking out what the KDE community is up to. As he sacrificed spending the 4th of July with his family for this, we were anxious to talk to him. read more

The case began in 2004 over a transfer agreement made in 1995. And finally, thanks to Groklaw, its volunteers and Pamela Jones, whose tireless efforts to follow and explain the twists and turns of this case showed what an obsessive compulsive with a blog can do and helped make the case understandable for those of us happy enough not to be lawyers. - John Oates, The Register

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx is released.

Adoption of Linux server is highest in Asia-Pacific at 25 percent more, driven by small and midsize businesses, finds new study.

"I see it as a loss of control over information you used to have control over," said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I don't see how it's meant to benefit Facebook users. I can see what it will get you is data mining and targeted advertising." - Benny Evangelista, SF Chronicle

Dig deep into the performance of the new 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processor and how to maximize its features for your applications.

Apple ups the ante against Android with iPhone OS version 4 -- but first they have to answer to the 3.3.1 worm.

Bombono is a simple to use DVD authoring program that doesn't have the steep learning curve of many others in its field. Or in the words of the Web site: “Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. It is easy to use and has nice and clean GUI (Gtk).” Also from the Web site, the main features of Bombono DVD are: more>>

Father of Java, son of Canada Oracle's chief technology officer James Gosling, inherited from the take over of Sun, is leaving the company.…

Vimscript is a mechanism for reshaping and extending the Vim editor. Scripting allows you to create new tools, simplify common tasks, and even redesign and replace existing editor features. This article (the first in a series) introduces the fundamental components of the Vimscript programming language: values, variables, expressions, statements, functions, and commands. These features are demonstrated and explained through a series of simple examples.

According to the release plans, the release of X Server 1.8 should take place, and while in reality it will likely not be released today, its release is coming soon. When this release does arrive, it will add a new set of features to the X.Org stack and a number of other minor improvements and bug-fixes.

Taking legal action against *all* companies producing software stacks for smartphones would allow Microsoft to claim with some semblance of plausibility that it was not specifically targeting Linux this time (unlike its previous sabre-rattling statements about patent infringement that were specifically aimed at Linux). But the net effect would be that Linux would be the chief victim of such an approach, since any companies using it in their smartphones are likely to end up doing deals with Microsoft - and hence implicitly accepting its claims - whatever the open source community might think or want. It would be like Novell's pact with Microsoft, writ large and much worse.

With Google said to be working with Intel and Sony to develop a way to bring the best of the Internet to television, industry analysts wonder if the time for a smart TV has finally arrived.

For those interested in the next major update to the GIMP graphics editing application (GIMP 2.8), it now has a tentative release date. GIMP's Martin Nordholts has announced on his blog that GIMP 2.8 is scheduled for release on the 27th of December of this year...

Microsoft has issued Security Advisory (979352) after its own investigations into the highly-organized hacking attack in late December, the one that Google earlier this week insinuated came from China, led the software giant to conclude that a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in Internet Explorer was used by the perpetrators.

For those that may have forgot, at the start of December we launched the Phoronix Kernel Test Farm to begin benchmarking the Linux kernel on a daily basis using the automated tools that we provide via the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. Towards the middle of December we then unveiled the Phoromatic Tracker, which exposes these test results in real-time to the public. Well, it's now been a month of monitoring the kernel's performance and the entire Linux 2.6.33 kernel development cycle thus far, with many interesting findings.