OStatic

There are many reasons to love the open source approach. The events chronicled in an article on NetworkWorld surrounding an exploit affecting Firefox outlines, quite elegantly, how open code outwardly appears risky, and -- well, wide open -- and how that same quality generates faster fixes and stronger applications.

A security researcher discovered that Firefox is vulnerable to remote memory corruption, enabling attackers to execute malicious (or at least very much unauthorized) code within the context of the browser. While security researchers spend countless hours searching out bugs and vulnerabilities, it's not usually the case that the offending attack finds its way into the public eye. Yesterday, however, this little exploit was published on several security sites. The vulnerability affects Firefox versions 3.0 through 3.0.7, on all platforms. In less than 24 hours, developers issued a patch for the vulnerability, to be included in next week's 3.0.8 release.

LogMeIn offers a wide array of products to remotely access and administer systems -- as long as the system is running Windows, Mac OS, or certain smartphone platforms. According to TechWorld (Australia), this could change later this year.

The reasons that LogMeIn's Asia Pacific General Manager, Seth Shaw, gives for reaching out towards the Linux platform are intriguing -- and heartening.

Songbird, Mozilla's cross-platform media player, got a nice update this week. Aside from a few great performance enhancements like reduced CPU usage during playback, a smaller Mac download size, and configurable library caching, this point release has some dandy new features as well.

Sun CEO: Open source equals free advertising. By being freely distributed, our products build their own audiences, says Jonathan Schwartz.

Another 100,000+ week for Fedora 10. It's been gaining users at impressive rates.

How to install Google Earth 5.0 on Ubuntu. It's not available by default in the Ubuntu repositories, but here's how to manually get it going.

Round two of a long-time Windows user's switch to Linux. The second installment is here, and the first here.

I stumbled across a light, but thoughtful post by David Williams over at ITWire. Williams recounts a situation where he used a Linux distribution on a liveCD (Ubuntu in this case, but there are countless others that can do the job) to rescue files from an ancient machine that was fading fast.

Using live Linux distributions to rescue and reset machines is nothing new, of course. Take KNOPPIX, for instance. The Debian based distribution got its (well-deserved) name by developing a user-friendly way to carry around a robust Linux desktop. While that's a great use for a live Linux distro, nothing garners appreciation from tech users of all walks of life quite like using a live distribution to rescue data from an errant machine does.

Late last year I broke down and picked up Rock Band for the resident game console, a Nintendo Wii. From this statement, astute readers can safely make the assumption that neither I, nor other members of my household, are big into gaming. I am, however, better with balance boards and nunchuks than I am any musical instrument, be it a stylized controller or the real deal.

Given the humbling experience Rock Band (continues) to be for me, I wasn't exactly eager to try out the open source rhythm game, Frets on Fire. However, the open source aspect and the advantages that brings to the game's genre, the Guitar Hero-esque focus on one instrument, and the project being chosen as SourceForge's March Project of the Month, I figured my ego might benefit from a slight bruising.

My fingertips aren't raw, but this confirms I won't be joining a band, real or virtual, any time soon. Frets on Fire on an easy setting makes me long for the simplicity of kernel recompiles and the soft whir of a rebooting system.

It's been a long, drawn out, brutal battle on the IT frontlines. Skirmishes can happen anywhere, at random -- in the server room, the board room, the cafeteria, or even, tragically, in civilian populated areas like pubs, restaurants, homes and big box electronics stores. The Mac and Windows battlefront consumes the resources of many foot soldiers, but the biggest, bloodiest conflicts involve the elite, highly trained IT commandos, who must be diplomats as well as fighters, and integrate a number of platforms across a single network.

Overly dramatic? Perhaps, but depending on your work environment and how quirky your mixed network is to configure, maybe not by much. There are several utilities available to promote diplomacy and peaceful interaction between machines in a mixed network. Likewise Software offers its open source Likewise integration applications to keep the peace -- and preserve platform equality and rights -- in a mixed network setting.

The OS Wars are frustrating and costly, but can be resolved with less heartache and far fewer casualties than other conflicts. This is why Likewise is promoting platform peace through t-shirt sales, with the proceeds going to charities supporting the civilian and military casualties of real wars.