Speed updates...

Some happenings from the Linux world over the past few days:Banshee 0.11.1 was released. Check out what's new in on the release page.The Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft RC (Release Candidate) came out today. (Essentially Beta+1). More release notes on how things are shaping up.A beta of Flash 9 for Linux was finally released. Even more release notes if you're interested. Long story short: A/V sync is fixed.Ubuntu 7.04 = Feisty Fawn. From Mark Shuttleworth himself:The main themes for feature development in this release will be improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies. Ubuntu's Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release...
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NVIDIA Root Explot

The following says it all: The NVIDIA Binary Graphics Driver for Linux is vulnerable to abuffer overflow that allows an attacker to run arbitrary code asroot. This bug can be exploited both locally or remotely (viaa remote X client or an X client which visits a malicious web page).A working proof-of-concept root exploit is included with thisadvisory.Yeah, so apparently we don't need Internet Explorer and Windows anymore to have malicious software silently installed on our computers - we just need NVIDIA's closed-source graphics driver. Update: Fortunately, the bug has been fixed in NVIDIA's 1.0-9625 beta driver. The thing is, you need Xorg 7.1 to run that, so everyone running Ubuntu 6.06/Dapper Drake is still vulnerable.On that note - are there any analogous driver exploits in Windows like...
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Portland, TC:E, GWoot, Automatix 2, Mute

First off, it's been quite a busy couple of weeks for me and I'd like to apologize for the lack of news. Luckily, the world doesn't revolve around me and so some interesting stuff happened in the last few weeks:The Portland project made their first release. The Portland project is a kind of vague teaming up of various desktop environment developers with the aim of making it easier for software vendors to create Linux software that worked consistently across the various desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, etc.) out there. The first release consists of a daemon that applications can interface with through DBUS and some command line tools to perform...
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Freespire's sketchiness and a word on DistroWatch

Linspire's sister distribution Freespire is reportedly using sketchy tactics to inflate their rank at DistroWatch... again.I have to admit that I've seen the advertisement in question on Linux Revolution, but the URL pointed to the Freespire wiki.DistroWatch's ranking index provides a rough sketch of the relative popularity of almost all of the various Linux distributions out there. Why would you want to be near the top? DistroWatch's 50,000 hits/day seems like a decent reason (it makes my blog look like, well, a blog). After keeping an eye on it for many years, it seems like at least the top three distributions are probably correct in their...
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Firefox Copyright Dilemma

"I used to be cool"There's been quite a bit of noise in the Linux community lately over this 'bug' in Debian. That's right, the Mozilla Firefox name goes under the same crappy copyright license as the artwork, so Debian isn't "allowed" to use the name. (This is why Ubuntu and Debian ship Firefox with that uninspiring blue globe icon instead of the Firefox icon.)So what's Ubuntu going to do about it?Well, the users clearly want the official logo in addition to keeping the name, and I don't blame them. Firefox made the transition from Windows to Linux quite a bit easier for myself, and I'm sure others have found the same thing. The matter is still...
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OT: Fake USB Drives - I was right

In the last week, three people have come forward and posted comments on my fake USB stick article saying they're had similar experiences at Factory Direct (the retailer I bought it at). If there was any doubt in my mind that it was really false advertising and not just a faulty USB stick, this cleared it up.The weird thing about this is that the guys who branded the USB keys in California probably didn't even know they were fake. My theory is that the original manufacturer sold these to various companies who branded them and resold them. One (sketchy) guy ended up counterfeiting them by branding the Sony logo on them, and that's why there's all these fake Sony ones around that look exactly like the one I had. Other companies, like the one who branded mine got screwed because they bought the...
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Skype 1.3 (Linux) Released

Skype 1.3 for Linux has finally been released, now with ALSA support. Still no video support, but I'll take what I can get. (More details over here)If you've been using the 1.3 betas, not a whole lot has changed with the official release, but if you're using an older version, you'll be quite thrilled with the new version. There's a detailed changelog available for anyone who's interested in that as well.People always rant about Skype and say "use OpenWengo instead", but the problem is that nobody uses OpenWengo (relatively speaking), so who am I going to talk to with it? The fact that it's open source means nothing if the software is useless...
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