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Firefox 1.0 PR (pre-release version) is here. It sports some previously announced new features like Live Bookmarks, the information bar (borrowed from Internet Explorer SP2), the Find Bar, which provides a better non-intrusive interface for searching within a web page, whitelists to mark trusted sites you want to allow to install extensions and minor tweaks to the default Winstripe theme.

France is doing a lot of business in China these days. French president Jacques Chirac is coming home on Tuesday with an armful of new deals struck between French and Chinese interests. At least one of those has to do with semiconductors and open source software.

There's a new rivalry brewing between Seattle and Portland, and it makes the Sonics and Trail Blazers look like kissing cousins. Portland has quietly become the world hub for Linux, computer software that's now the biggest threat to Microsoft.

Whether you're wardriving, vacationing or building a Car PC, a Global Positioning System is a handy tool. Interacting with your GPS via your PC makes for an even better GPS experience. As a Linux user, GPS/PC integration can be somewhat sketchy. Vendors don't write software and drivers for Linux; it's probably safe to assume that the good folks over at Garmin would say something along the lines of "Lih-what?". Have no fear! Using your GPS with Linux isn't impossible! Check out this review over at LinuxForumsDOTorg of two fairly robust GPS navigation programs for Linux.

Hewlett Packard Co has completed the certification of Linux on its servers and workstations with evaluation assurance level 3 of the Common Criteria security evaluation and is now looking to the next level.

Dressed in costumes or wearing shirts promoting "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," hard-core computer fans drifted in and out of convention rooms at the Red Lion Inn on Friday night, looking for games, science fiction and computer innovations. Welcome to Linucon 2004: Austin's first festival devoted to Linux, sci-fi and anime.

Internet users starved of a strong Open Source alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser have flocked to Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox. But for those still using earlier Firefox versions, there's a more important reason to upgrade to the new Preview Release. Previous Firefox versions contain several critical vulnerabilities, ranging from moderate to high risk, which could allow a hacker to execute malicious code on user PCs, the US-based Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) has warned.

Linux evangelists will be pleased that a second analyst report which says that the use of open source software can result in savings of about 30 per cent has just been published.

Emerging file systems aim to relieve pain of Linux storage bottlenecks.

Fedora Core 3 test 3 is now available. This is the last planned test release before the final release.

An important consideration in the creation, deployment, and use of Web services is the message itself. Since Web services rely on the transmission and receipt of SOAP messages, the ability to verify the integrity and authenticity of these messages should have a rather high priority associated with it. Further, since Web services are often used to present commercial transaction interfaces to potential customers, message non-repudiation plays a key role in these scenarios. The XML Signature specification, a W3C/IETF effort, addresses these problems by providing a digital signature framework for XML documents based on standard public key cryptography notions, as discussed in an earlier article.

ST Microelectronics said it is joining in with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, the French Atomic Energy Commission and Bull to push the Open Platform initiative.

While members of the open-source community are generally supportive of software diversity, flame skirmishes sometimes erupt between devotees of competing projects.

A large part of the software industry has never heard of the science of quality assurance - or if it has, it doesn't believe in it. Thus spake Alan Cox, Wales' most famous Red Hat employee and one of the most influential voices in the IT world. Currently wrapping up his MBA at Swansea University, it's clear that Cox has been spending a lot of time thinking about what the software world can learn from everyone else about quality.

Australia's open source software community appears set to lose one of its most powerful and outspoken champions in the wake of the federal election. Democrat spokesperson for information technology, Senator Brian Greig, today said that it appeared highly unlikely the party would retain its West Australian seat in the Senate.

MontaVista Software has launched an open source project aimed at bringing "hard real-time" performance to standard, native Linux, and has seeded a fledgling "Open Source Real-Time Linux Project" with a reference implementation claimed to improve real-time responsiveness of the 2.6.9rc3 Linux kernel by "orders of magnitude."

Portage hit 100,000 files last week, - a reason to celebrate, finds the new Gentoo Weekly Newsletter. Other news this week include donated desktop computers from Freescale, Inc., Gentoo penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, and the usual community coverage, bug rankings and a quick introduction on setting up an OpenVPN tunnel to your home LAN. Finally, 'Gentoo in the press' has a remarkable volume of references this week.

Leading chipmaker chosen as partner in Chinese Open Platform Initiative; ST to co-develop hardware/software platform, based on Linux, for use in servers, PCs and mobile terminals

Steve Buer, resident coding hero at Secureworks, sure seems to be having a good time helping his company develop a little Linux-based security device called iSensor. Buer writes the software for the appliance, which sits between the network and the Internet, looks at the traffic, and filters out malicious packets, while at the same time sending alerts back to Secureworks' security operations center. While his boss now calls him "the father of our technology here," Buer didn't even know Linux until after he started working at the company after getting his college degree four years ago.

Do we want, or should we even tolerate a defacto standard GNU/Linux distribution emerging simply because hardware OEM's choose to back one Distribution over others for pre-installation ? Should marketing prowess, mergers, acquisitions, or having loads of cash be the determining factors in what is considered software excellence ?