Winch Gate Properties Ltd has announced the release of the official native GNU/Linux client for the massively-multiplayer online science-fantasy role playing game, Ryzom. To celebrate the release Ryzom is hosting an in-game contest with a grand prize of a ZaReason Terra-HD Netbook.

A fork bomb is simply a line of some characters entered into the command line of a Unix system, and when the enter key is pressed, within seconds the computer will crash... The little program we entered in to the bash shell act as a process & make multiple copies of itself, setting off a chain reaction and thus quickly exhausting the system’s resources.

The Symbian Foundation expects its web sites to be shut down on the 17th of December. The source code for the Symbian operating system will continue to be available on the open source organisation's site until then. Thereafter, it will only be available on request

jeffhoogland.blogspot: There is namely one issue: Canonical does not review any of the packages that are uploaded to PPAs. Because of this adding software from various PPAs wily nilly in reality is more dangerous than installing software on Windows.

Matija Šukle writes: "Exactly three months ago I wrote that I'm migrating to XMPP/Jabber and slowly leaving all proprietary IM protocols. In that blog post is also an example message I'm leaving my contacts why I'm doing it."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a new version of HTTPS Everywhere, a security tool that offers enhanced protection for Firefox browser users against "Firesheep" and other exploits of webpage security flaws.

strace is a useful little utility – installed by default on most Linux systems – which allows you to find out what a program is doing under the hood by tracing the system calls it's making.

"So we all know that users who are new to the command-line find it intimidating, no matter what operating system, they just find it intimidating. These users are the kind of people who never used early Unix or MS-DOS, they were introduced to computers with graphics and point-and-click interfaces. And I've been wondering: What's so intimidating?"