Linux users love to chat, and few topics are so prevalent among users as distributions. A big one is a distro's suitability for beginners. Drawing in eager new users is the only way to grow the Linux community. Successful recruitment often hinges on making sure that newcomers start with a distro that will give them an ideal experience...
We neglect our OS at the risk of radically underutilizing the incredible tools that it enables our device to be. Most of us only come into contact with one, or possibly both, of two families of operating systems: "House Windows" and "House Practically Everything Else." The latter is more commonly kn...
The information security industry, with all its raging debates, has rallied around a small corpus of best practices. One of the highest on this list is full-disk encryption, which security experts regard as sacrosanct. This is the encryption that ensures that someone who snatches your device won't b...
Russia's Pirate Party wrote a letter to NASA offering to host the agency's website, which is currently out of commission because of the government shutdown. The Pirate Party -- a minority political movement in many European countries predicated on privacy and transparency -- informed NASA that it co...
What happens when Apple and Palm representatives vaguely mention the ability to use and defend their patents, and then one anonymous source from Google vaguely states that Apple asked Google to not implement a certain technology in a recently release product? You get a whole lot of blog headlines ke...
As the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas continued on Friday and through the weekend, it became clear that the official attendance count at this year's gadget fest will likely reflect significant shrinkage. In addition, runaway hits -- things that really managed to shake the ground everyone was...
Kevin Martin has had it pretty rough these last few weeks. The guy can't catch a break -- from being painted as a bully and a bad manager by a House committee report to being dressed down by the Commerce Secretary and called out as crooked by The Wall Street Journal. If I were him, I'd bury myself i...
You can't say you were not warned or that you had no idea of what was happening. The socialization of CRM took a big step forward on Monday when Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told the keynote audience at Dreamforce 2008 in San Francisco that his company has developed technology that will integrat...
Microsoft has angered Chinese computer users with its latest antipiracy move. On Tuesday, during its Global Anti-Piracy Day, Microsoft turned Windows Genuine Advantage loose on the Chinese people. Other users worldwide are familiar with WGA, which famously labeled legitimate users as pirates and dis...
YouTube has pulled some videos posted by the McCain campaign after receiving complaints from news outlets that they were violating copyright. Here's a case in which YouTube has fallen victim to its own fear -- the fear of being sued by media companies as large as itself -- and the Republican preside...
Important to me so I can accept, deny, or customize my preferences before entering a website.
Inconvenient, but a fair exchange for knowing the website operator is likely serious about privacy and compliance.
An endless, unnecessary burden with a minimal effect that I wish was gone.
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