Red Deer Open Source Society

Open Source: It's the Community, Stupid!

The real heart of open source lies in its potential to be greater than the sum of its parts, the capacity to leverage the talent and abilities of an entire community of developers and users who are striving towards a common goal.

Microsoft may charge extra for security software

CNN reports that Microsoft may charge extra for security software. So first they edge their competition out of the browser market, then they tie IE into the OS so tightly that a crash in IE can crash the computer, and then they make IE so vulnerable that just using it is hazardous to the typical computer's health, and now they want to CHARGE users to fix it?

Penn State Tells 80,000 Students To Chuck IE

A public university with an enrollment of over 80,000 put the kibosh this week on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and urged its students to switch to alternative browsers such as Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, or Safari.

Firefox's Share of Browser Market Grows 34 Percent in One Month, According to We

SAN DIEGO, Dec. 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The U.S. browser usage share of Firefox, the upstart Mozilla-based browser that has become a champion of the open source movement, has grown by more than a third over the past month, according to the latest independent study from WebSideStory (Nasdaq: WSSI) (http://www.websidestory.com), a leading provider of on-demand Web analytics

More bad news for WinXP SP2

COMMENTARY -- Within the technology industry, there are such fervent supporters on both sides of many polarizing issues that you'd think these issues are religious rather than technological. Linux vs. Windows, AMD vs. Intel, PC vs. the Mac, proprietary vs. open source are a few examples. But Microsoft's Service Pack 2 for Windows XP?!
Why SP2 deserved every shred of the scrutiny

WinXP SP2 will you roll the dice?

If you are using Windows XP and are thinking about applying the new XP patch, you really need to read this. You better grab a coffee, it is a long one. Here is the link WinXP SP2 = security placebo?

Linux: 40 Love

As the first serve rocketed across the net at this week's U.S. Open tennis tournament Monday, millions of Internet users tracked the scores as if they were seated courtside. The powerful eServer i5, IBM's next-generation iSeries server, is providing real-time technology updates to the U.S. Open Web page, allowing fans to keep track of every backhand returned.

More to open source than just bottom line benefits

There is a greater need to consider the social benefits of using free and open source software(FOSS) and not just the economic economic advantages, Alan Levine, CIO of Future Perfect told delegates at last week's Second Open Source Software Africa conference in Johannesburg. Levine said that the use of FOSS should not only be evaluated by project, business case or system. He said the traditional total-cost-of-ownership and return-on-investment models cannot take into account all the business implications of using FOSS.

Meet the Peeping Tom worm

A worm capable of using webcams to spy on users is circulating across the Net.

E-Mail Snooping Ruled Permissible

E-mail privacy suffered a serious setback on Tuesday when a court of appeals ruled that an e-mail provider did not break the law in reading his customers' communications without their consent.

The First Court of Appeals in Massachusetts ruled that Bradford C. Councilman did not violate criminal wiretap laws when he surreptitiously copied and read the mail of his customers in order to monitor their transactions.