One of the world’s most popular file-sharing sites was shut down, and its founder and several company officials were accused of facilitating millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content.
In spite of a constant drumbeat of news about hacking and cracking computer accounts, users still are employing extremely common and obvious phrases as passwords. A compilation of the most commonly used — and potentially most insecure — passwords seen over the past year was recently drawn up by Splashdata and reported in Mashable. Splashdata found that incredibly enough, the leading password in use today is the word “password.” Interestingly, number 4 on the list, the keyboard lineup of “qwerty,” is counterbalanced by item number 23, “qazwsx,” which is the first three rows of keys typed vertically.
Microsoft and Mozilla have announced a special release of Firefox that integrates with the Bing search engine. The build, which is called Firefox with Bing, is available for users to download from a Microsoft-hosted website.
When Firefox 4 was released last year, it added Bing as one of the available options in the browser’s built-in search box. Google remained the default, but Bing became easily accessible to users who prefer Microsoft’s search engine. Microsoft and Mozilla also took the opportunity to establish a revenue-sharing agreement around the search integration.
Just three months after the Linux kernel pushed the odometer past the 3.0 milestone, Linus Torvalds has pushed out another stable kernel. The 3.1 Linux kernel has several new features, additional hardware support, and a little help for programs that were hard-wired for the 2.6.x numbering scheme.
Las Vegas (CNN) — The racing world was in mourning Monday after two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Dan Wheldon — a Brit with a ready smile and engaging manner — was killed Sunday in a multi-car crash at the Las Vegas Indy 300.
The Linux kernel archive website, which is located at kernel.org, was compromised by attackers last month. According to a statement posted yesterday on the website, unauthorized parties successfully seized root access to several kernel.org servers and planted a trojan. The site hosts the source code of the Linux kernel, and a number of other projects.
Earlier this week, Mozilla released Firefox 6, the latest version of its popular web browser. This new refresh wasn’t intended as a major update although it had lots of improvements and changes under the hood. But a possible small change in upcoming versions of the browser has a lot of its users in an uproar. Mozilla is considering to no longer show Firefox’s version number when you bring up the About section in the web browser’s client.
An animation that Microsoft made to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Linux kernel was shown this morning during Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin’s opening keynote at LinuxCon. The video comically depicts the rivalry between Linux and Windows, but concludes with the suggestion that peaceful coexistence is possible.
Today is a big day for the Linux community. Users, SysAdmins, developers and business executives have gathered for the third annual LinuxCon and the official celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Linux.
This week is about celebrating as a community the accomplishments of the last 20 years and to collaborate on how we advance Linux for another 20 years. We’re lucky to have the foremost experts on these topics on hand at LinuxCon: Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, legal authority Eben Moglen, IBM Linux leader Dan Frye and others. Renowned Internet and society author Clay Shirky will share how Linux and collaborative development have spread into other areas of culture and what that means for the future of technology. These are just a few examples of the speakers and content we’re looking forward to today through Friday.
The Debian Project is pleased to mark the 18th anniversary of Ian Murdoch’s founding announcement. Quoting from the official project history: “The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a ‘distribution’ of Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.”
Microsoft sent Mozilla a congratulatory cupcake on Tuesday for shipping Firefox 6.
The software giant continued its tradition of sending cakes to Mozilla by shipping an Internet Explorer 9 cupcake to the team. Mozilla shipped Firefox 3 in 2008 and the Internet Explorer team sent a cake, Microsoft also sent a cake to Mozilla in March after they shipped Firefox 4. Microsoft then shipped a smaller cupcake to Mozilla in June after the company shipped Firefox 5.
Earlier this year, Mozilla decided to take a new and interesting approach to developing its Firefox web browser. Instead of waiting several months or even a year between versions, we are now seeing major new versions of the Firefox browser being released within weeks of each other. Indeed, Final version of Firefox 6 has been already released in their FTP servers. But Mozilla’s creators are already working on the following version, Firefox 7.
Mozilla officially confirms that Firefox 6 final is finalized and will be released this Tuesday on August 16. (A month ago, Firefox 6 was moved to beta channel on July 8th, 2011.)
In 2001, Microsoft launched Windows XP, the latest version of its Windows operating system. The OS launched at a time when the PC was at its peak in terms of sales for both consumers and businesses and it didn’t take long for the majority of PCs to have Windows XP running things inside. Microsoft took six years before it released its successor, Windows Vista. However Vista had lots of launch bugs and driver issues and as a result not as many people decided to take the plunge to upgrade. It took the release of Windows 7 to finally eat into Windows XP’s market share.
Mozilla, the creator of the world’s second most popular web browser, Firefox, has revealed some of the latest user interface designs through its nightly builds program. From the version numbers that Mozilla have published on their website, the refreshed design of the internet browser will be seen in Firefox 8, which, based on the current release cycle, will be released in the early stages of 2012.
