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Apple Inc.'s Safari is the juiciest target in the upcoming PWN2OWN hacking contest, last year's winner predicted today. "It's an easy target," said Charlie Miller, the vulnerability researcher who last year walked off with a $10,000 cash prize for breaking into an Apple laptop just a few minutes into the contest. PWNOWN is slated for its third appearance at the CanSecWest security conference later this month in Vancouver, British Columbia. "It might be because I'm biased about the things I'm good at, but it's the easiest browser [to hack]," Miller said. PWN2OWN's sponsor, 3Com Inc.'s TippingPoint unit, will pay $5,000...

The White House press office announced today that Vivek Kundra, the current chief technology officer of Washington DC, will be assuming the position of Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the White House. The appointment of a top CIO is another first: the position did not exist in any previous administrations. Kundra will also have final say on government technology purchases , and will have the authority to overrule his peers at subordinate agencies.

CALLER: Hey, I'm a huge fan of Apple and Steve Jobs, and I'm just so fascinated by this new phone. I went and tried one out, and they're fantastic. But I think what baffles me the most is to see how he aligns himself more often than not with his good buddy Algore. I just don't get that. I mean, for one, he's really a representative, the perfect example of what entrepreneurship in America and greatness is all about. RUSH: You know, it's one of the mysteries of life. It's like Warren Buffett. How can Warren Buffett be sidling up...

If you were looking for any glimpse into the mind of Microsoft, this is it: The company has completely abandoned Windows XP, and it has absolutely no plans to ever ship an XP SP3. My guess is that Microsoft will do what it did with the final Windows 2000 Service Pack: Claim years later that it's no longer needed and just ship a final security patch roll-up. This is the worst kiss-off to any Microsoft product I've ever seen, and you'd think the company would show a little more respect to its best-selling OS of all time. But the reality...

FIRMS WOULD LOVE to have you dump your computer every year, and your accesories, and your MP3 player, and your DVD, and your entire movie collection, and replace it with new ones. The software world is getting closer. I think that "Planned Obsolescence" is sadly here to stay; but there's hope, only one: open source. Microsoft has lately perfected the planned obsolescence game with its decision to make flagship products like Internet Explorer 7 not available for previous OS versions like Windows 2000. Cutting updates and no longer releasing patches for insecure products is not enough.

Youtube links below. Novell's website is very slow

That Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, prefers the current version of the General Public License, GPLv2, over the version in development, GPLv3, is no secret. But in a lengthy E-mail response to questions from InformationWeek, he offers a full explanation of what he thinks is superior about GPLv2. Torvalds says he regrets that the authors of GPLv3 have decided to take aim at political opponents. He has little patience for statements about the "evil and immoral" nature of proprietary code or the "TiVo-ization" of Linux (a reference to set-top box producer TiVo producing a device that runs...

Despite years of success Dell has fallen on hard times. The company who practically reinvented the way people buy computers has been under-performing and investors are worried. The company has been losing market share and no longer has the edge it once had over competitors like HP and Gateway. There has been much talk about Dell taking steps to make up lost ground by selling computers that use Linux for their operating system. This is something many people are interested in but unfortunately not something that will turn around the company. As a Linux user (on a few but not...

Dell Inc. began polling customers about their software preferences on Tuesday as part of an effort by the struggling PC vendor to meet a popular request for desktops and notebooks that run on Linux instead of Windows. Dell posted the survey on a company blog, asking PC users to choose between Linux flavors such as Fedora and Ubuntu, and to pick more general choices such as notebooks versus desktops, high-end models versus value models and telephone-based support versus community-based support.

Microsoft has announced a partnership with Novell and will help promote Linux. This is stunning. This is like Red Sox fans announcing they're going to root for the Yankees. Microsoft has spent ten years bashing the free-of-charge open-source Linux operating system and trying to kill it. Now Microsoft is making nice.

When Bill Clinton made his speech to the Labour Party conference, he bamboozled a few by finishing with the word "Ubuntu".

On August 4th, we found out that Lenovo Group, the company that has taken over IBM's Personal Computing Division, had made a deal with Novell Inc. to preload SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. For the first time, a major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has committed to preloading a Linux desktop.

The great experiment I was going to write up a big thing to post here. I was going to be all crazy eloquent and whatnot… then Chris wrote this as a draft of what he’d like to say. And his words cut to the point incredibly nicely. So here is what Chris has to say (and he speaks for both of us): You have ruined this for us.

The opening of Beta 2 testing at WinHEC for Windows Vista has once again raised serious questions about Microsoft's ability to keep its promises. We have witnessed up until now the inexhaustible reservoir of excuses coming from MS's officials, who have continuously fed us with plenty of reasons for Vista's delay: they're working on security, they're trying to make it more reliable for business, etc. Although it was initially destined to make its public debut way back in 2002, following years haven't shown us more than small bits of what was to become Microsoft's best product in more than 10...