Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) has successfully tracked down and arrested six people in what the CIBTaiwan CIB believes to be the biggest personal data breach in Taiwan to date. Apparently, the group also managed to obtain personal data on Taiwan’s current and former presidents :

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Struggling to keep control of your growing collection of digital photos? Breathe easy — you’re not alone.

With digital cameras making it easy to take images of just about every aspect of daily life, budding photographers are left wrestling with the best way of labelling them so they can be saved and shared with friends and family.

While file names, key words and captions can help with the process, a new technique promises to change the way photos are stored and viewed — it’s called geotagging.

As the term suggests, geotagging involves attaching tags to digital photos that describe exactly where they were taken. It’s a simple concept, but it opens up an exciting range of new ways in which such tagged photos can be used.

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Suppose someone wants to send you a large file. They could try to send it via email, but many email servers impose limits on file size. They could try sending it over during an instant messenger or Internet Relay Chat session, but that’s slow, as the file actually gets transferred twice: once to the chat server, then to your machine. File transfer services like RapidShare and MegaUpload are fine, but not for confidential information. Of course, you could set up an FTP server on your box, but you don’t want to leave that door open all the time. Luckily, there’s now an easy solution: droopy.

Easy file uploads with Droopy

Morgantown, WV, Aug 26, 2008 — Warren announces the first MEPIS Beta, version 7.9.70. The MEPIS beta offers up to date user applications delivered on top of the new Debian (Lenny) core.

Some of the important packages included with the beta are: 2.6.26.2 kernel, Xorg 7.3, KDE 3.5.9, OpenOffice 3.0beta2, Firefox 3.0.1, Sun Java 6.0, Amarok 1.4.10, mplayer 1.0.rc2, libglib2.0 2.16.4, libgtk2.0 2.12.11, and QT 4.4.0.

ISO images are in the ‘testing’ subdirectory at the MEPIS Subscriber’s Site and at the MEPIS public mirrors. To support the ongoing development of MEPIS, please go to the MEPIS store and become a MEPIS subscriber.

Red Hat issued a security advisory Friday notifying customers that some of its servers were compromised last week due to a network attack. The company called the advisory critical and said it sent out the alert primarily for those who may obtain Red Hat binary packages via channels other than those of official Red Hat subscribers. The servers — for both the company’s commercial products and free versions of Linux — were breached; however, immediate action on the part of Red Hat prevented the attacker from gaining access to Red Hat Network, according to the company.

Hackers Get Under Red Hat’s Skin

Vista’s death march picked up some pace yesterday, after a metrics researcher revealed that nearly 35 per cent of PCs built to run the Windows operating system have been downgraded to XP. In a survey of more than 3,000 computers, performance testing software developer Devil Mountain Software estimated that more than one in three new machines had either been downgraded by vendors such as Dell, or by customers once they bought the PC.

Well this proves it Vista really does suck, On the plus side for Vista if you have tons of memory and tons of time to wait it does work and has lots of eye candy beyond that nevermind, Baldy

 

A third of Vista PCs downgraded to XP

Open Office vs. MS Office – the Other Key to Windows/Linux Transition – Jamie’s Random Musings on Video IM – J.A. Watson’s Blog at ZDNet.co.uk Community

Open Office vs. MS Office – the Other Key to Windows/Linux Transition

Posted by J.A. Watson

As I have been going around alternately prodding my friends and family to try Linux, or asking them if they thought it would be possible, one thing I have heard repeatedly is that a lot of people use Microsoft Office and are concerned about their Office documents on Linux. I should also mention that a lot of them are very angry that Microsoft has changed the default document format in Office 2007 (again), such that it is incompatible with previous Office versions. Yes, of course, I know there are converters and such, but it’s just one more thing for users to have to worry about – and in general they aren’t confronted with it, or sometimes even aware of it, until they send a critical document to a colleague and discover that the colleague can’t open it…

IBM pushes “Microsoft-free” desktops

IBM announced a partnership with Canonical, Novell, and Red Hat to sell “Microsoft-free desktops,” says an eWeek story by Chris Preimesberger. The Linux software giants will work with hardware manufacturers to market custom-designed PCs preloaded with Lotus word processing and collaboration software, says the story.

Canadian Huynh wins gold – Yahoo! Canada News

BEIJING (Reuters) – Carol Huynh gave Canada its first gold of the Beijing Olympic Games on Saturday in the women’s 48kg freestyle wrestling event.

Huynh, 27, defeated Japanese two-time world champion wrestler Chiharu Icho who took silver in wrestling’s lightest weight class. The score was 3-1.

Finally!

And now you know why you shouldn’t mess with Canadian Women

Lost in the shuffle of this month’s Patch Tuesday barrage is the fact that a critical vulnerability in the ever-present Windows Media Player (WMP) was not fixed “because of a last minute quality issue.”

Microsoft originally listed the WMP update in the advance notice for August but, when the patches dropped on Tuesday, it had slipped because of patch-quality concerns.

The explanation from Redmond:

* Microsoft has heard from customers that the quality of updates is very important and, as part of the process at the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), Microsoft tests these updates continuously until they are ready for distribution to customers through our regularly scheduled security bulletin release.

This effectively means that millions of Windows users — WMP ships with every version of the desktop operating system — are exposed to a critical, code execution vulnerability that will not be fixed for at least another month.

Oh oh seems as if maybe Linux is a tad faster at fixing bugs, but that is just my humble opinion, Baldy