Ever wonder why The VAR Guy is so happy running Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux? Perhaps it has something to do with the true cost of spyware — an epidemic problem mostly limited to the world of Windows. So, how does spyware impact user productivity? A new report from CompTIA (the Computing Technology Industry Association) provides some clues.

RMS writes on Canonical's controversial decision to forward local Ubuntu searches to third parties. One way or another there are big privacy implications.

The glorious weather that had punctuated the first two days of the conference held, heralding in the third day in a blaze of sunshine. The conference proper was introduced by a keynote by Benjamin Mako Hill on Antifeatures: Why your software works against you and why software freedom offers hope of a better future.

"More than ten million customers of the UK's three largest ISPs will have their browsing habits sold to a company with roots in the murky world of spyware..."

As everybody knows Ubuntu 10.04LTS Lucid is planned for the month of 29 april 2010, the developers actually are working on softwares that will be included by default in the future Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid, one of the news is that a backup tool will be included by default to the next release. For the moment there are these 2 backup tools are proposed to be as default : Déjà Dup and backintime

The latest version of Ubuntu just came out; Ubuntu 13.04 - Raring Ringtail. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has done a good job setting up a set of defaults for a fresh install, but there are a few things you may want to add or change on your freshly installed OS.
1. Privacy Settings

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Micah Lee gave the non-profit organization some credit for pushing Mark Shuttleworth and crew to implement full disk encryption (FDE) in Ubiquity.

Ubuntu's CEO, Mark Shuttleworth fired one over Microsoft's bow with a statement that the soon to be released Ubuntu 9.10 is ready to go head-to-head with Windows 7 on Netbooks. He also said that Windows XP is still hanging around on some Netbooks as a "ghost." Shuttleworth wants another shot at the U.S. market with his new Ubuntu 9.10 and Ubuntu One offering.

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has finally listened to critics and EFF and said that the much controversial online search feature of Dash will be disabled by default in Ubuntu 13.04, which will be released later this month. Canonical was working closely with EFF, FSF and the EU privacy advisors and found it in best interest of its users.