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Now it's Ecomstation TODAY MARKS the 25th birthday of OS/2, which IBM announced on 2 April, 1987.Initially intended as a protected mode successor to PC-DOS, OS/2 became the first serious PC operating system rival to Microsoft Windows. For a while, IBM and Microsoft collaborated on it, until Microsoft withdrew its support for various reasons and focused its efforts on Windows NT instead. OS/2 has never fully recovered from Microsoft's abandonment of it, nor has Windows.However, throughout most of the 1990s, OS/2 was a much more stable, secure and reliable PC operating system than Windows. It was capable of running Windows...

FOSS for OS/2: Keeping the flame alive Thursday February 16, 2006 (06:00 PM GMT) By: Bruce Byfield After a decade of neglect and increasingly reluctant support from IBM, the manufacturer, the OS/2 community persists. Where users of GNU/Linux or FreeBSD have turned to free and open source software (FOSS) for political and philosophical freedom and software quality, the surviving OS/2 community has been turning to FOSS as a means of defending members' right to use the operating system of their choice. The result is a small but surprisingly diverse collection of projects that, to a GNU/Linux user, is a mixture...

Fans of IBM's OS/2 operating system are petitioning the company to open source the discontinued operating system, or least portions of it. A petition on the OS/2 World website, which is signed by over 8000 people, argues that an open source version of OS/2 will ensure that current users will be well served. "Customers that are willing to continue using OS/2 will get the benefits of an open OS that will be continuously developed by individual developers and/or software companies, their ownership fees will decrease and they will have the enhanced security of an OS that will continue to be...

Experts: International domain names may pose threat The new trick is a variation of the 'homograph attack' The new trick is a variation of a known technique called the "homograph attack" and takes advantage of loopholes in the way some popular Web browsers display domain names that use non-English characters. It could allow malicious hackers and online identity-theft groups to trick unsuspecting users into divulging sensitive personal information, according to an advisory from The Shmoo Group, a hacker collective, and from Secunia. snip For example, attackers could register a Web domain "bloomberg.com," which looks identical to the popular business news...