Image via Wikipedia

20 years ago Thursday, a student named Linus Torvalds announced he was going to be creating a new operating system which he intended to displace Microsoft Windows.  Torvalds described Linux as “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional.”

Today, we’ve seen Linux being used in most every mid to large-sized company around the world (including Microsoft), and runs the majority of smartphones, TVs, ATMs, navigation systems, game platforms and much more.

Linux is licensed under the GPL, which gives everyone the right to use it and allows no one ownership of of the software.  And its a big piece of software.  Linux contains 14 million lines of software and is protected by more than 520,000 patents, according to a Linux Foundation report. Governments and businesses alike enjoy the system’s flexibility and decentralized nature.

Linux is bound to grow, but with people’s love of their desktop computers, it’ll be a long time before Linux threatens Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop.

Related articles

• Linus’ First Linux Post, 20 Years Ago Today (linux.slashdot.org)
• At 20, Linux is invisible, ubiquitous (cnn.com)

In today’s world most of the companies are dispersed in different geographical location and information is exchanged through emails, it is very critical to have a secured way to communicate and exchange files. Most of the enterprises are looking ways to protect their data beyond anti-virus and firewalls.

Daily more identity thefts, security breaches are happening in different parts of country. It’s doubling day by day and companies are trying to develop new products to kill this problem. You can read latest news on security breaches below. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/02/data_breaches_skyrocket/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/30/ohio_hospital_hack/

Consumers have had hard time protecting their personal data, which is kept on their hard disks. Sometimes, these above news make them panic and persuade to look for more secured way of storing data. It is very difficult to protect the data loss and data theft.

But to some extent it can be prevented by incorporating latest encryption codes. Here is a solution that offer simple and easy to use for small businesses and consumers. Secure Zip by PKWARE combines file compression with encryption and an X.509 digital certification process to provide simple, effective email security without an expense security infrastructure…something small businesses can’t even entertain.

It is free for consumers / individual users for limited period. It can save and send secure documents directly from your Microsoft Office Suite. It is tightly integrated with other office email clients so that your email attachments are safe and secured. You can try the product by just providing your email id.

Securezip will protect all your stored data and transmitted data. SecureZIP is the industry-leading security and compression utility that zips and unzips files, greatly reducing transmission times and storage requirements, while securely protecting data in transit and at rest.

SecureZIP allows you to exchange data securely with a wide variety of systems including mainframe, midrange, server and desktop systems. It protects mail server gateways too. SecureZIP supports both passphrase and digital certificates, offering flexible security that meets varying requirements within business environments.

SecureZIP also improves processing efficiencies and security. Application Integration1 streams data directly in and out of the application. Other products require the zip file to be extracted into a data file before it can be read by an application. Application Integration eliminates this step, improving operational efficiency by reducing the number of steps needed to process data and security by not staging decrypted data to disk. Digital certificates also authenticate the file’s sender to assure recipients that the communication received can be trusted and has not been altered or tampered with in any way.

SecureZIP automatically installs an X.509 digital certificate and provides global directory services so files can be securely exchanged with others without requiring passwords. When a user sends an email and attachment, SecureZIP retrieves the public key of the recipient from the SecureZIP Global Directory and encrypts the information using that key. The recipient can then open the encrypted file using their private key.

More than 25,000 companies, including 60% of the Fortune 100, are using SecureZip. SecureZip recently launched its new and updated version SecureZip12.1. You can also have the review of this product at PC Magazine.

Jim Peterson
Chief Scientist
PKWARE

Jim Peterson – A biography

Jim Peterson is the Chief Scientist at PKWARE. Jim has been developing commercial software products for over 20 years. Since joining PKWARE in 1994, he has held various leadership roles in product development. He continues to drive the evolution of .ZIP technology, focusing on ensuring the ZIP format remains a secure and interoperable standard. Prior to joining PKWARE, Mr. Peterson held engineering roles at several companies where he was responsible for designing and developing healthcare management, warehouse automation, and financial accounting applications.

About PKWARE and SecureZIP

PKWARE, Inc., the largest global software company providing ZIP solutions, is the creator and continuing innovator of the ZIP standard for file compression. PKWARE products are used to ensure the security and portability of data across all major platforms. Hundreds of global organizations in financial services, banking, retail, healthcare, government, and manufacturing use PKWARE services daily.

Image via CrunchBase

If you’re running the latest version of Firefox or Google’s Chrome browser, you can now run a light-weight Linux right there on your browser.  Who said that JavaScript was a weak language?

If you’d like to try it out, point Firefox 4 or Chrome 11 to the demo page. Keep in mind that this is just Linux, no X Window or other graphical interface, just the command line, a small C compiler and QEmacs, Bellard’s emacs clone. Still, it’s really Linux, really running in your web browser, really using JavaScript to emulate hardware.

For more info on how Bellard did it, as well as what the hardware emulator supports, see Bellard’s technical notes.

Related articles

• Run Linux In Your Browser (techie-buzz.com)
• Javascript-based PC emulator, running GNU/Linux (boingboing.net)

Currently more than 52% of Internet users are exposed to this problem due to ISPs who haven’t properly updated their DNS (Dynamic Name System) servers, but there’s a way you can tell if you’re at risk.

Visit www.doxpara.com and click on the “Check My DNS” button on the upper right side of the page.  It will run a series of tests for you, automatically, and tell you if your machine is at risk.  There’s another checker at DNS-OARC and one at the lower left corner of DNSstuff, but you don’t have to run all three.

Business personnel must check their DNS to ensure that there are not problems that could expose personal or proprietary data to criminal enterprises abroad.  Failure to do so could result in criminal prosecution for the company themselves  — it’s unlikely the true criminals will ever be caught.

Image via Wikipedia

[Listen here to get the inside information from the people who make parallels about how it will help your Mac run Windows while it's still running the famous Mac Operating System!]

Parallels, an award-winning virtual machine packages, enables Mac users to run Windows, Linux or any other operating system and their critical applications at the same time as Mac OS X on any Intel-powered Apple computer. Since being made available in June 2006, the product is now in its 3rd generation.

Parallels is the company made famous for being the first to enable Macs with Intel processors to run Windows programs. In technologist terms, this was like solving the common cold – something people had wanted forever.

Since being launched, Parallels Desktop for Mac has been recognized with more than 30 major industry awards and was the first non-Apple product to ever win the MacWorld Magazine Reader’s Choice Award. Some other notable awards include the MacWorld Magazine’s “Editor’s Choice” Award (the “Eddy”) and PC World Magazine’s “Innovation of the Year” Award.

Now, about two years later, Parallels has sold more than 1 million copies of the Parallels Desktop for Mac software. It is the top-selling Mac utility program and sales have been made in 102 countries.

Is it coincidence in that time span the Apple Mac market share worldwide has climbed from approximately 3 percent to nearly 7 percent? Hardly … the Parallels software has eliminated the wall that previously existed between PCs and Macs and the virtualization technology has been a catalyst behind enterprise Mac adoption.

On 16th May, 2008, Ben received on behalf of Parallels the Red Herring 100 Award, a selection of the 100 most innovative private technology companies based in North America out of more than 800 closely-evaluated companies that are leading the next wave of innovation.

Ben Rudolph
Director of Communications
Parallels
Ben Rudolph – A biography

Ben has worked in both information technology and biotechnology and describes himself as a total tech nerd who loves tinkering with gadgets, hardware and software. In his role as the evangelist for Parallels that means he can either talk at the deep technical level with the “gearheads” or provide a “tech 101″ overview to someone who doesn’t know a USB port from a tawny port. Ben is a frequent and popular speaker at industry conferences and at Apple stores.

Parallels is a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software that optimizes computing for consumers, businesses, and service providers across all major hardware, operating systems, and virtualization platforms. Founded in 1999, Parallels is a fast-growing company with 900 employees in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Palm has been falling behind cell phone manufacturers as they’ve been integrating new multi-media features into their hand-held devices. The Palm operating system hasn’t seen the types of upgrades it needed, and the company split into Palm and Treo — software and hardware companies. Treo phones, which I use, have been very popular and recently adopted both Palm and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Although the Windows versions has its problems (power being one of them), it has proven to be very popular, as it can handle newer multimedia applications.

Enter Palm’s secret project.

Palm just announced that it has been secretly developing a Linux operating system platform for the use of our ever-present hand-held devices, and will provide it with full multi-media capabilities. The units will be able to handle audio, video and a host of other functions.

What does it mean to consumers? Palm is saying that they will have three platforms that they official support – Palm OS, Windows CE and Linux – so your favorite version won’t go away. Moving to Linux, however, means that a substantial library of free software will become available and that many commercial applications will be able to move over to your cell phone due to ease of portability and features.

Your cell phone, though, will still be a cell phone, and it should work pretty much just like it does today. The future, however, is pretty promising.