ExtCalendar version 2.0 Beta 2 suffers from a cross site scripting vulnerability.

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Archbang, like Crunchbang Linux – but Arch and Openbox, is now available for the first time with an installer.

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One of the worst moments almost every hacker has experienced is a hard drive inexplicably dieing. And of course, its at the most inopportune time and you’ve had no chance to backup!
Recently there has been an influx of Seagate hard drives (specifically the 2700.11s) kicking the bucket with firmware errors 0LBA and BSY. The good [...]

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Which online video companies will get bought in 2010?   Venture capitalists are desperately looking for exits while the usual suspects are sitting on more than $80 billion in cash: Microsoft ($20B), Apple ($40B), Google ($15B), Amazon ($3B), and Yahoo! ($3B) just to name the cash positions of a few potential acquirers.  Theoretically, it should be a match made in heaven, but the sheer number of venture-backed video startups is staggering so when the music stops, not everyone will find a dancing partner.

Once you assess what drives companies to merge or acquire one another, however, it seems like we’re about to enter a period of mergers between video competitors and see a series of acquisitions by larger companies looking to accelerate their video strategies, with a common theme being increasing both monetization and margins.

With that in mind, let’s look at those 10 potential deals.

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In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Debian Lenny server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like “We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly.”), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

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A look at the first ever Gnome Shell themes and how to install (or even create your own) a Gnome Shell theme.

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I wouldn’t put Microsoft software on any of our computers now, even with a gun to my head…but that’s not the point. Are we, as charitable and community service-driven organizations, subject to their whim and multi-month grant requests for their software? It would appear so. If Free Software were to be “discouraged” by the US Government (not likely but possible) then we would either have to come to these companies with out hands out, pirate the software or purchase it.

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High-Availability Storage With GlusterFS On Fedora 12 – Automatic File Replication (Mirror) Across Two Storage Servers

This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (Fedora 12) that use GlusterFS.
Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and
files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The
client system (Fedora 12 as well) will be able to access the storage as
if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system
capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage
bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large
parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any
commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and
Infiniband HBA.

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Editor’s note: Earlier this month, BrightRoll raised a $10 million Series B for its video ad network. In this guest post, CEO Tod Sacerdoti shares some of the lessons he learned trying to raise that money in the current environment.

As Peter Drucker once wrote, “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it and exploits it as an opportunity.” Put more simply, change is good . . . of course, that’s unless you’re trying to raise capital in these trying times.

After my company BrightRoll recently closed its Series B round of financing, we took a step back to digest the lessons we learned from pitching and negotiating with a handful of VCs over our 6-week fundraising effort.

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The coverage of the Winter Olympics on NBC has been painful to watch. In addition to the tape delays which ruined the outcomes for anyone paying attention to any other news, sports or social media outlet other than NBC, there are a lot of other complaints. In between the hard-hitting reports of polar bears in the Canadian North and life among the lumberjacks, NBC did manage to squeeze in some actual Winter games, which were matched in quantity by the constant loop of the same handful of commercials on heavy rotation for McDonald’s, Visa, AT&T, Diet Coke, and NBC’s upcoming shows Parenthood and the Marriage Ref. (Thank goodness for DVRs).

We already know that NBC’s handling of its Olympics coverage sucks, if only because everyone on Twitter says so. Right now, Twitter Sentiment shows that 73 percent of Tweets about “NBC Olympics” are negative. But what are they complaining about exactly, and is it just Twitter? Some new data from Crimson Hexagon, another sentiment analysis service for brands, shows the breakdown of hate:

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Canonical developer Robert Ancell is working on Simple Scan, a great little program that does exactly what it claims – it makes scanning things simple! Simple Scan is now the default scanning software in Lucid.

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[Anders] tipped us off about his hack that re-purposes a smoke alarm as a burglar alarm. Unfortunately, he came home in the middle of a burglary but wanted to be ready the next time someone tries to break in. By cleverly patching into the test button on an old smoke detector he created a circuit-trip [...]

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A chunky Visual Studio 2010 releases soon, packing more features and representing perhaps more hours of development than any other single-vendor’s development tool. How could you resist? And yet many do resist such highly automated and powerful productivity tools and continue to favor Emacs or other text editors and command lines for their development. Ruby, the fastest growing language ecosystem, has evolved primarily without IDE tool support. What explains this love/hate relationship with the IDE among developers and the companies that make them. Will we ever all get on the same page?

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I have much love for Wordle. I’ve used the text cloud generator dozens of time for use in presentations, TechCrunch posts and random stuff ever since I discovered the tool.

But as of yesterday, the application is no longer available, and the website only displays the message copied above. In a notice and a blog post, Wordle developer Jonathan Feinberg says he’s been forced to take the service offline due to a trademark claim against his use of the word “wordle” and states that he’s looking for pro bono legal advice from IP lawyers to fend off the infringement claim.

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I was out of the country for much of 2009, so it wasn’t until I spent two months back in San Francisco that I noticed a big change in the Web community. Babies. I’m not talking about whiny Millennials coming out of college and demanding venture capital for their iPhone app. I’m talking about actual babies. The ones that crawl around the house wearing diapers.

In 2006, I co-wrote a BusinessWeek cover story on the then-burgeoning Web 2.0 movement, and one the hallmarks of the scene was a sense of having been burned by the dot com boom and bust. That was when many of the leaders, investors, and foot soldiers of the Web 2.0 movement had moved to Silicon Valley and had their first taste of startup life. As a result many of them, like Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide or Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter, had lived a rollercoaster of wild life experiences when it came to business—takeovers, ousters, commanding millions in venture capital, but not much in the way of traditional “life experiences.” You know marriage, kids, and the like. Despite having net worths in the millions of dollars, many of them didn’t even own a house. Many didn’t think they had time.

My, how that has changed. The 30-something Valley generation that moved to the Valley fresh after college, stuck out the crash and got in early on the Web 2.0 movement are now married and having babies. Lots of them.

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New York Times: The Wired Repo Man – Hes Not As Seen on TV

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c|net: U.K. bill would ‘outlaw open Wi-Fi’

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PC Pro: Five GPS games to play with your smartphone

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(Posted 28 Feb 2010 by Ray)

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I’ve been an avid Linux user for quite some time. In all that time, I have toyed with making my own distribution, and for me there were many problems. One of those problems was honestly wanting to maintain ownership and control of my code. I felt it would be bad policy to release an OpenSource system that contained a large amount of proprietary code… even if the software remained kostenlos. To that end, I use my code on my own machine, and simply do not release it. Others aren’t quite as thoughtful. The distribution that is currently bringing this to mind is Igelle.

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Phil Muncaster, V3.co.uk, Sunday 28 February 2010 at 08:15:00

The cyber criminals who hacked into Google’s systems may have attacked more
than 100 other companies, according to new information from security consultancy
Isec Partners.

Google
announced
in January that its systems had suffered a hacking attack, indicating at the
time that “at least 20 other large companies from a wide range of businesses,
including the internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors, have
been similarly targeted”.

Other estimates put the figure at more like 30 companies, naming Symantec,
Adobe and Intel as potential victims.

However, Isec Partners estimates the number of affected companies to be more
than 100, having discovered a larger number of command and control servers
involved in the attack.

“Further investigations have uncovered that more than 100 companies may have
been targeted, although it is difficult to ascertain how closely related these
attackers are to Google’s assailants,” said Alex Stamos, a partner at Isec
Partners.

Details of the hack are emerging all the time, and much of the focus has
centred on whether it was sanctioned by the Chinese government. The latest
reports seem to indicate that a known security researcher wrote the hacking code
and posted it on a forum, where it was picked up by Chinese officials.

However,
recent
remarks by Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggest that it makes no difference
to Google whether the Chinese government was responsible for the attack or not.

“I think that the Chinese government has tens of millions of people in it. If
you look at the army, the associated army and whatnot, that’s larger than most
countries’ by far,” he said at a recent conference in California.

“So even if there were a Chinese government agent behind it, it might
represent a fragment of policy as it were.”

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Novell executives said this week that it’s seven-year-old Linux business has finally broken even — making good on promises made a year ago. But it hasn’t been an easy trek to begin making money off of Linux, and one factor may way against Novell’s Linux business going forward: The waning revenue from its landmark 2006 agreement with Microsoft to begin reselling Linux support subscriptions. This week, Novell reported its first-quarter fiscal 2010 earnings for the quarter ending on Jan. 31. Net revenues came in at $202 million, a decline from the $215 million reported for the first quarter of 2009. On the net income side, things are a bit brighter. Novell reported GAAP net income of $20 million, or $0.06 per share, an increase over the $11 million or $0.03 per share it reported for the first quarter of 2009.

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LinuxCertified, Inc. announced its next two day, hands-on course that provides attendees with experience in creating Linux kernel source code within various subsystems of the Linux kernel. This course teaches attendees to acquaints developers with the fundamental subsystems, data structures, and API of the Linux kernel

This class is scheduled for March 8th – March 9th, 2010.

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by Linda Milazzo
<b>UPDATED: Feb, 28, 2010/2:25AM (local Chile time)</B>
The death toll in Chile is now confirmed at 300.
<B>UPDATED: Feb, 28, 2010/12:00AM (local Chile time)</B>
CNN reports there have been 67 aftershocks in Chile, many over 6.0 and thus far over 240 people have died in the quake.
Japan is preparing for possible tsunamis, employing extreme precaution having [...]

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State officials have let employees amass vast amounts of leave time and end their careers with six-figure payouts – one topping $800,000, an investigation has found.

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First of all, I want to thank Haiku, Inc. for giving me the opportunity to concentrate fully for a while on the WebKit port and browser! This is an awesome chance that I intend to make full use of. At the moment, I have mixed feelings. Not about writing blogs. Not about working on WebKit. But about using the new WebKit browser to write the blog entry, haha! I’ve seen it crash, although in the last days, it has become pretty stable. After we upgraded to a newer WebKit version as the basis for the port, the frequent random crashes have almost disappeared and I saw only one crash in three days. Compared to one every few minutes before.

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Android’s been around for more than a year, and in that time developers have whipped up some great apps. Whether you’re a new Android owner or a pro looking for new tools, these 10 great and free apps belong in your arsenal.

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This could turn into a very big story.  According to this Associated Press story written by Suzanne Gamboa Saturday, every person with a Puerto Rican birth certificate will need to get a new one this year.  A law passed in December invalidates all birth certificates issued by the Commonwealth as of July 1 of this [...]

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