A couple of days ago, my colleague Andrew Garcia forwarded me what seems like the 20th plea I’ve seen over the past couple of years to call or write my representatives in Congress to Save Net Radio. This latest plea came from Pandora.com, a fantastic Internet-based radio station that holds more claim on my online hours than any single Web purveyor this side of Google. I find it too audacious to hope that Congress will get around to right-sizing our…

The idea that companies and individuals might risk lawsuits for running applications that infringe on copyrights or patents gained popularity when SCO began threatening to run down Linux end users in retaliation for secret (SCO refused to detail them) upstream IP violations. The story was (and still is) that since open source licenses explicitly declaim liability for SCO-style attacks, and since most open source software projects don’t have the resources to pay on lawsuit judgments anyhow, open source software is…

Today while trolling around on Slashdot I came across this open-source development flareup tidbit: Slashdot | Pidgin Controversy Triggers Fork “Pidgin, the premier multi-protocol instant messaging client, has been forked. This is the result of a heated, emotional, and very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of version 2.4, the ability to manually resize the text input area has been removed; instead, it automatically resizes depending on how much is typed. It turns out that this feature, along…

Now that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has enjoyed a few weeks in the limelight in which to entice the “wait-for-SP1” IT shops to jump to Microsoft’s latest and greatest client operating system, it’s time to introduce the OS upgrade we’ve all been waiting for: Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Windows XP SP3. XP SP3 is a rather modest upgrade, one that falls much more in line with XP’s first service pack than with the security feature-packed…

Recently, I came across a blog post about how to install a LiveCD version of Red Hat’s upcoming Fedora 9 release onto a USB stick, leaving space on the stick for data to persist between reboots. Impressed by the persistent USB LiveCD fun and partition encrypting installer improvements, I chose to throw caution to the wind and load up Fedora 9 Beta on my main notebook, replacing the beta Hardy Heron install I’d been running–quite stably–for several weeks. Read on…

Gartner made news April 9 by contending that Windows is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. According to Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald, radical changes to Windows are required. Their prescription: a more modular Windows. Windows is a massive piece of software, and even though it’s not presented as such externally, the operating system is made up of many separate parts. Making the seams between those parts more obvious and providing a way for components to…

I came across an interesting item on OSNews today — a link to a Computerworld story in which Terri Forslof, manager of security response at TippingPoint, explains why Ubuntu Linux was the only OS left standing at the pwn2own contest her firm sponsored at CanSecWest. “There was just no interest in Ubuntu,” said Terri Forslof, manager of security response at 3Com Corp.’s TippingPoint subsidiary, which put up the cash prizes awarded at the contest last week at CanSecWest…. “It was…

Today, eWEEK’s Clint Boulton is reporting on the latest efforts to save the Sprint-Clearwire nationwide WiMax wireless data network scheme. However, while the WiMax effort from Sprint et al would appear to help cover the companies’ broadband bases, and while I’d love to see another broadband option emerge, I’m not convinced that a national WiMax network will manage to succeed. The trouble is that all the telephone, cable, satellite, and wireless companies are in the same business–that of data delivery.…

Apple’s announcement yesterday that it plans to add support for Microsoft’s Exchange groupware server on iPhone and iPod Touch devices has gotten me thinking about Exchange support (or lack thereof) on other platforms, such as Linux and, strangely enough, Apple’s own OS X. It’s possible now to link up pretty much any mail client on any platform with Exchange via IMAP, but in order to access all the non-mail data that makes Exchange worthwhile, you need to find another route.

Come this June, in enterprises across the country, I expect that Treos will begin to wither in the eyes of one-time loyalists, and that erstwhile thumb-keyboard addicts will start to judge their BlackBerrys to be significantly sourer. That’s because June is the month in which Apple has promised to ship an enterprise and third-party application embracing the 2.0 version of the firmware that drives its popular but so-far solidly consumer-focused iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Apple’s iPhone will be far…