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Picture this: after school, your kids come home and ravage the pantry. Detecting the now-empty cupboards, your home's electronic inventory assistant emails you an urgent shopping list: pick up more Cheez-Its, Cap'n Crunch, orange juice, milk, eggs, and Eggo waffles

Security has long been an important computer issue, but it's become increasingly relevant as the number and severity of threats has risen. One security risk of great concern is network data sniffing. When data is passed over a local network wire or when it's passed between networks, the potential exists for parties other than the sender or recipient to intercept the data. Sniffing can give miscreants access to your passwords, sensitive documents, or even just a peek into your link.

If you've administered any remote Linux machines, then you're probably already familiar with SSH. As you may know, SSH provides secure, encrypted network communication. Utilities like ssh and sftp, which are based on SSH, protect remote login sessions and file transfers, respectively, and have largely subsumed similar but insecure and unencrypted utilities such as ftp, rlogin, rsh, rcp, and telnet. (In fact, if any of your systems still use telnet, put down this magazine at once, go disable telnet, install and enable SSH, and then continue reading.)

On a busy server, it's often hard to keep track of what's running and when, so from time to time, you may find yourself wondering what MySQL is doing. Luckily, MySQL provides a degree of transparency that makes it relatively easy to peer inside and see what's up.

In the previous "Perl of Wisdom," I introduced my templating system of choice, the aptly-named Template Toolkit (TT). Continuing from where I left off, let's look at some of TT's other features.

Whether you work for a large Fortune 500 company or a small start-up, chances are that most of your application engineers are embroiled in the support and maintenance of your online store. And no wonder. Given the complexity of most e-commerce deployments -- mixes of hefty portions of business logic, hardware, and software -- it's rare to find a company not struggling with heady infrastructure issues such as reliability, performance, accuracy, and cost.

I fancy myself a Linux expert. I was a Unix system administrator before Linux existed, and these days, I run Linux on four servers and four desktops in my home office. But, even so, there are things that I haven't been able to do. The one that bugs me the most is my inability to get Wi-Fi networking working on my Centrino-enabled Toshiba laptop. I know my way around hardware. I know my way around networking. I know my way around Linux. And, despite all that, I can't get a perfectly ordinary Wi-Fi chipset to work with Linux.

This week we have seen numerous reports in the trade press referring to Gartner UK analyst Annette Jump claiming that pre-installing Linux on PCs encourages piracy of Windows. Open Source Industry Australia(OSIA) earlier today issued a press release in which it challenged the validity of Jump's findings. "We dispute Jump's conclusion and her figures. Without a fully specified methodology and a presentation of all the raw numbers and polling methods, these findings are extremely dubious. Additionally, Jump's logic is problematic at best and farcical at worst."

The fight against spam is getting more serious as the net's big players impose conditions on bulk mail senders. From October, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Earthlink and Comcast want those that send lots of messages to their users to comply with new mail standards...Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Sender-ID.

Sent into the depths of the Internet, you find yourself dodging pop-ups, fending off Trojans, and running from the behemoth that is Microsoft, you find yourself wandering the depths of ibiblio.org, a repository which holds hundreds of gigabytes of Linux applications, distributions, and documentation. As you venture deeper into the directory structure, you are suddenly stopped by a tired Linus Torvalds. You feel just like Harrison Ford did when he rediscovered the Holy Grail just as Linus speaks, "Choose wisely." You never thought you would ever get this far and as a result never really gave it too much thought. All of the choices lay in front of your eyes. Which distribution of Linux do you go for? You step back to contemplate all of the choices which stand before you. There are the flashy Red Hat, Mandrake, and SUSE with all of their enterprise support and almost idiot-proof configurations sitting next to the sporty young Gentoo, the down-to-Earth Slackware, and the venerable Debian praised for its stability.

The ongoing intellectual property fight between Furthermore and Miro shows the need to address possible IP conflicts before they become public or courtroom battles.

nVidia has kicked ATI hard with the quality of its Linux drivers and all of my Linux-friendly friends tell me how Nvidia is several light years ahead of ATI in Linux driver development. I heard some horrible stories from high end IT specialists, admins and programmers who told me that ATI's driver don't even have hardware cursor and that it's damn hard to install it. I actually tried it and it was a true nightmare.

Sun has made the latest version of Java 2 Standard Edition available, the first new code since 1.4.2 last July and the biggest overhaul since the release of 1.4 over two years ago.

If Microsoft Corp. had any hope of seeing Munich back away from its landmark decision last year to abandon Windows software in favor of open source Linux, that hope faded Wednesday when city officials decided to move ahead with their migration project.

After a re-examination, the U.S. Patent Office has rejected a patent previously granted to Microsoft for a Windows file format.

Expanding the imprint of open-source software, the Apache Software Foundation on Monday will launch an open-source project around business process management server.

An embedded Linux training and services company in the South of France has published 500 pages of embedded Linux training materials and presentations under an open source license. The materials are available in French and English, and have been contributed to the community by Free Electronis, based near Sophia Antipolis.

Instant messaging is everywhere nowadays, but people who use it may be surprised to know how trivial it is to listen in on their private conversations. Snoopers can use tools like tcpdump and aimsniff to tap into the contents of the messages. But with a little free software, IMers can be secure in the knowledge their conversations are, well, secure.

DAYTONA BEACH, FL -- ISP owner Robert Craddock liked Microsoft's recent Sender ID antispam proposal and patent application so much that he came up with a nearly identical system -- except he did it long before Microsoft made its version public. In fact, he started using the system he now calls Mail-Block back in 1998.

Red Hat Inc. has gone scavenging among Netscape's remains, agreeing Thursday to pay America Online Inc. (AOL) up to $23 million in cash for the assets of Netscape Communications Corp.'s Security Solutions unit.