First time accepted submitter eljefe6a writes "On September 23 at 2:30 PST the A Million Amazonian Monkeys project successfully recreated A Lover's Complaint. This is the first time a work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere. From the article: 'For this project, I used Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Linux. Since I don’t have real monkeys, I have to create fake Amazonian Map Monkeys. The Map Monkeys create random data in ASCII between a and z. It uses Sean Luke’s Mersenne Twister to make sure I have fast, random, well behaved monkeys. Once the monkey’s output is mapped, it is passed to the reducer which runs the characters through a Bloom Field membership test. If the monkey output passes the membership test, the Shakespearean works are checked using a string comparison. If that passes, a genius monkey has written 9 characters of Shakespeare. The source material is all of Shakespeare’s works as taken from Project Gutenberg.'"

eldavojohn writes "The Metasploit Framework has come a long way and currently allows just about anyone to configure and execute exploits effortlessly. Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide takes current documentation further and provides a valuable resource for people who are interested in security but don't have the time or money to take a training class on Metasploit. The highlights of the book rest on the examples provided to the reader as exercises in exploiting several older versions of operating systems like Windows XP and Ubuntu while at the same time avoiding triggering antivirus or detection. The only weak point of this book is that a couple chapters refer the reader to external texts (on stacks and registers) in order to meet requirements for crafting exploits. The book also gives the reader a brief warning on ethics as many of these exploits and techniques would most likely work on many sites and networks. If you're wondering how seemingly inexperienced groups like lulzsec constantly claim victims, this would be an excellent read." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Scott James Remnant, the former Ubuntu Developer Manager at Canonical and current Ubuntu Technical Board leader, has proposed a new monthly release process for Ubuntu Linux. He acknowledges that with the six month releases there are features that end up landing way too soon, leaving them in a sour state for users. With his monthly proposal, Remnant hopes to relieve this by handling alpha, beta, and normal releases concurrently. It's unknown whether Canonical will accept the policy at this time."

koinu writes "Phoronix has published benchmarks comparing 3D game performance on Ubuntu Linux 11.04 with the FreeBSD Linux ABI emulation on the 8.2 release of PC-BSD, which is a desktop variant of FreeBSD. Most results show that the emulated Linux layer on FreeBSD performs better than Linux natively. It's pretty interesting, because most people would expect that an additional abstraction layer would generally slow down the execution of binaries."

shibashaba writes "Mandriva 2011 is out. Look around for ISOs or click here if you already have Mandriva installed. [Or use the 32-bit torrent.] Mandriva may not be as popular as Ubuntu, but they came long before and had an easy to use (and powerful) desktop back when it was almost unheard of."

First time accepted submitter phonewebcam writes "Here's something to liven up your weekend: a video of the Raspberry Pi running Quake 3. We're still working on ironing a few kinks out (specifically, there seems to be a library issue which means our framerate, while good, isn't quite as spectacular as we know it can be; we're working on it as I post this) – but this is what test boards are for, and we're making great progress getting the boards running smoothly."

mike_cardwell sends in a detailed writeup of how he went about protecting a Ubuntu laptop from attacks of varying levels of sophistication, covering disk encryption, defense against cold boot attacks, and even simple smash-and-grabs. (He also acknowledges that no defense is perfect, and the xkcd password extraction tool would still work.) Quoting: "An attacker with access to the online machine could simply hard reboot the machine from a USB stick or CD containing msramdmp to grab a copy of the RAM. You could password protect the BIOS and disable booting from anything other than the hard drive, but that still doesn't protect you. An attacker could cool the RAM, remove it from the running machine, place it in a second machine and boot from that instead. The first defense I used against this attack is procedure based. I shut down the machine when it's not in use. My old Macbook was hardly ever shut down, and lived in suspend to RAM mode when not in use. The second defense I used is far more interesting. I use something called TRESOR. TRESOR is an implementation of AES as a cipher kernel module which stores the keys in the CPU debug registers, and which handles all of the crypto operations directly on the CPU, in a way which prevents the key from ever entering RAM. The laptop I purchased works perfectly with TRESOR as it contains a Core i5 processor which has the AES-NI instruction set."

MrSeb writes "With the latest Windows 8 build (8064) that has been delivered to Intel, it's clear that the company is taking strides to make sure that its upcoming OS isn't quite so easy to pirate. For starters, the generic volume license keys that were so easily exploited during the early days of Windows 7 leaks will no longer be an option for pirates. Product keys also won't be shipped in the prodkey.txt file included in the build packages. Instead, installers will need to retrieve a unique key from a Microsoft web page. There's also a good possibility that the recently-surfaced fast booting patent could come into play as well. If Microsoft does indeed have designs on using a remote server to push OS code to systems at boot time, that code would be a very clever place to embed activation-related programming. Even if a crack was discovered, it would be neatly undone during a subsequent start-up sequence — similar to the way Microsoft's now-idle Windows Steady State could turn back the clock on an entire Windows installation after rebooting." Microsoft has also indirectly confirmed in a recent blog post that Windows 8 will make use of an app store.

An anonymous reader writes "In an extensive interview, GNOME 3 designer Jon McCann talks about the future of GNOME 3 — why it's all about the apps and why he is convinced that KDE and Ubuntu are actually different operating systems. He also reacts to the outspoken criticism against GNOME 3, which has been making the rounds lately."

chefwear writes "I am thinking of donating retired computers to a local charity for kids. What OS do you think would be best for this? From reading tips regarding the donation of computers, it's widely recommended to keep with the currently installed OS (which is Windows XP in this case). Since XP will be unsupported in about two years, I'm not sure I would be setting the little ones up for success. Would anyone suggest donating a computer with a Linux distro like Ubuntu to a local charity for kids?"

dkd903 writes "Roberta Nilerud of Canonical has announced that their cloud storage service – Ubuntu One – has hit the one million users mark. Ubuntu One is a cloud storage service from Canonical that is very tightly integrated into Ubuntu. Although Ubuntu One is installed by default in Ubuntu, it is also available on Windows and Android."

deadeyefred writes "Even though it's still only in alpha, it appears as though the forthcoming version of Ubuntu, version 11.10, will be much faster than earlier versions, according to this story. Quoting: 'After installing the OS onto a PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3.00 GHz and a hard disk drive, we stop-watched boot-up time at 12 seconds — more than three seconds faster than the previous best time we’ve measured.' It looks as if the switch from GDM to LightDM will have a significant impact as Ubuntu gets closer to 'instant on' status."

dkd903 wrote in with an interview with Chris Dibona in Der Standard. Within, he declares Android as "... the dream come true. It's your Linux desktop, it's the ultimate success story of Linux that I've been working on personally since 1995." There's lots of other good stuff on Google's internal use of GNU/Linux: "If you'd look at laptops it's maybe 70 percent Mac OS X and most of the rest is Linux, we are a huge customer of Apple. Engineering Desktops are overwhelmingly running on Linux. We have our own Ubuntu derivative called 'Goobuntu' internally for that, integrating with our network — we run all our the home directories from a file server — and with some extra tools already built-in for developers."

An anonymous reader writes "Coinciding with the recent release of Mozilla Thunderbird 5 and its 400 performance and stability fixes, Canonical has decided that it's now fit for adoption in Ubuntu — and as of version 11.10, Thunderbird will replace Evolution as the default mail program. You can download the second alpha of Ubuntu 11.10 today and give Thunderbird a whirl."

anymooseposter writes "My mom is taking a computer class at the local Community College. she asks: 'I need to download a Linux OS and try it out for class. The assignment is to use an OS different from what you normally use. Well, since I use Windows and OS X, the assignment suggests Linux. But, my question is, what is the easiest version based on Linux for me to put on CD and try? I saw several on the web. Any thoughts off the top of your head?' What Linux Disto would be easiest to set up without having to resort to dual booting and/or driver issues?"

An anonymous reader writes "For a long time what x86 users took for granted was just 'the future' for ARM devices. Now that time is over. Linaro — a non-profit engineering organization funded by ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments — released a first port of Ubuntu Unity 3D experience and Compiz. If you have a pandaboard, go ahead, download, install the Linaro 11.06 LEB/Ubuntu images and try it out! It's just a few minutes away."

kai_hiwatari writes "According to an email in the Ubuntu-Devel mailing list, AirPrint support is now available for Ubuntu 11.10 'Oneiric Ocelot' and Ubutnu 11.04 'Natty Narwhal' as well — although it is in the testing phase for now. Developer Till Kamppeter sent an email to the mailing list inviting testers to test out his patch that enables AirPrint in Ubuntu."

An anonymous reader writes "Now that the big Linux kernel power regression has been solved it looks like Ubuntu 11.04 can compete with Microsoft Windows 7 in terms of overall power usage. New tests revealed by Phoronix show the power consumption of Ubuntu 11.04 vs. Windows 7 operating systems. On a range of different systems, the power consumption of the Linux OS was comparable to that of Windows except for a few select workloads and systems."

An anonymous reader writes "For the Linux kernel power regressions that were found a few months ago, and hit in Ubuntu 11.04, Phoronix has found the regression that's still present in the Linux 3.0 kernel. The power regression is caused by a change in ASPM, the Active-State Power Management, for PCI Express support."

An anonymous reader links to a story at Techie Buzz according to which (quoting): "When Canonical started developing the Ubuntu Software Center, I knew that a time will come when it will completely replace Synaptic. The Software Center is a noob-friendly replacement for Synaptic where users can discover new applications more easily. Unexpectedly, Canonical has decided that it is time for the Software Center to replace Synaptic as well. So, in the next daily build of Ubuntu 11.10, Synaptic will no longer be installed by default. The Ubuntu Software Center still lacks many important features that are present in Synaptic."