OStatic

IBM Internet Security Systems is out with its X-Force 2008 Mid-Year Trend Statistics report. This is an extremely exhaustive look at security vulnerabilities in both proprietary and open source software. It highlights trends in malware and phishing, and ranks vendors, open source projects, and even languages by security breach disclosures. With the rise of open source software, including much more adoption in enterprises, it's no surprise to see some open source platforms arrive on the top ten most vulnerable list, including one in second place, sandwiched between Apple and Microsoft. Which open source projects qualified--for the first time?

Our sister blog jkOnTheRun has a good story about eeebuntu, a new Ubuntu Linux distribution that is specifically customized for Asus' popular Eee PC laptops. You can go with the snazzy Compiz Fusion enabled GNOME version or go plain-vanilla with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix packages. You can get the distro here, and you can quickly return to the Eee PC's normal Xandros Linux if you want. Quite a bit of open source software comes with eeebuntu, including Working WiFi, OpenOffice, Pidgin, Skype, Firefox 3.0.1, and the VLC media player. Those little Eee PCs are a steal at around $350, by the way. I have one. Check out jkOnTheRun's thoughts, with video.

We've written about Microsoft's pledges to become more interoperable, and I've agreed with other observers that much of Microsoft's motivation for these new moves comes from the trouble it's gotten into with the EU and the Justice Department. As part of complying with the EU's demands, the company has released the specifications for the Microsoft Office interfaces, and now we're seeing some of the benefits spill over into open source. Alfresco, which makes open source enterprise content management (ECM) software, has added SharePoint interoperability to the beta of its Labs 3 offering, downloadable now. Microsoft SharePoint is a browser-based collaboration and document managment platform, and I like it. Here's the upshot.

The K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project has released KDE 4.1, which we covered when it was in beta, here. In addition to new features, version 4.1 serves up a number of new applications within the environment. These include the personal information management suite KDE-PIM with its e-mail client KMail, the planner KOrganizer, a new RSS feed reader, a newsgroup reader and many more components. There are also a number of bug fixes to version 4.0. You also get the Dragon Player media player and the KDE CD player, in addition to updates to the Konqueror browser.

With all the competition there is surrounding mobile operating systems, many of them Linux-based, and increasing convergence between open source and emerging software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, it's not surprising to see standards getting short shrift. Heck, if you look back at many of the classic platform wars in the history of computing and communications, the key competitors didn't even want common standards a lot of the time; instead, they wanted to control their own standards. That's why it's good to see the World Wide Web Consortium releasing its very first standards for mobile web site design.

Are digital living rooms the next frontier for open source? I've had my eye on some interesting developments in this area recently. Ars Technica has a good analysis of the announcements from Neuros last week at OSCON about how open source set-top boxes are headed our way. And Matt Asay has a good item up about Open Remote and Control4--both focused on open source home automation. How far can embedded Linux and other open source offerings go in the digital living room and home automation spaces?

After dragging its feet, Hewlett-Packard is stepping up with an answer to cloud computing by inking a partnership with Intel, Yahoo and three universities to create a cloud computing testbed. The cloud will comprise six physical locations where mostly HP servers containing between 1,000 and 4,000 mostly Intel cores will run Apache Hadoop. Hadoop is the open source infrastructure for taking advantage of huge clusters of computers to produce fast results for queries. It's behind much of Yahoo's search, as we covered here. Today, GigaOm offers complete analysis. Check it out.

Mozilla's Firefox browser is among the most popular of all open source applications, and one of the reasons is that it is so extensible and customizable. You probably have lots of favorite Firefox extensions and have picked up some tips, but continuing to add to your arsenal makes lots of sense. Since the inception of OStatic, we've tried to do lots of tutorials and tips posts on Firefox, and recently a reader wrote in and said it would be useful to have them all compiled in one superguide. So here you go--our superguide to working more efficiently with Firefox.