Security expert Bruce Schneier today wrote about the “Storm Worm” again. Go and read it and become very afraid if you are running the Windows operating system. Become even more afraid if you are responsible for a bunch of them, like in a company. And then get a clue and morph them all into something better, like installing any of the Linux/Unix/BSD variants.

This year's Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) to be held Oct. 15-16 in Portland, Ore., will close with panelists from Microsoft, Sun, IBM and the OpenDocument Foundation weighing in on Open Document Formats.

Three local government shires in Western Australia have adopted the open source Xen virtualization technology to virtualize Windows servers on Linux hosts and reduce its need for physical machines.

The refrain has been that Linux will be ready for primetime when the mythical "grandmother" can use it without issue. Well, I'm about to put that to the test. My 84 year old grandmother has had enough of hearing she needs a computer and finally asked me to set her up with one.

"As if massive privacy concerns and identity theft were not enough reasons to worry about the wide spread use of radio frequency identification technology, now comes word that it it may also cause cancer..."

If you believe some of the headlines, Microsoft just open sourced a bunch of software related to its .Net libraries. Don't be fooled. The definition of open source is very clear. This is not open source. Not even a little bit. In fact, this may actually be an insidious trap (more on that below).

There is a long and somewhat heated argument taking place in the Ubuntu forums over a post by Ian Jackson in the Ubuntu Developers mail list, which is a wrapup of a discussion held on the irc #ubuntu-devel channel. The post advocates a change in the Ubuntu security policy by making it more difficult for new users to install untrusted 3rd party software.

I have a bunch of single-use Gmail accounts for the usual things, like account registrations, site administration, newsletter subscriptions and the like. If you have this same situation, you know that (unless you possess unusual patience) it’s not easy to serially open up multiple Gmail accounts if you have saved the login information for an auto-login.