"It's really interesting that companies are spending an inordinate amount of money trying to protect information, but they're trying to protect it from people outside the organization," Duncan said. "I think that's appropriate, because there are a lot of bad guys out there -- but a recent study showed 80 percent of data leakage problems actually came from within.

Finding my long-lost Wolvix post got me itching to run it again. I haven't had it on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) in some time. It did a good job there, but I wasn't able to turn off the annoying tap-to-click feature on the laptop's Alps touchpad, and I've been pretty happy with how Debian Lenny is doing that and more, so my use of Wolvix has dropped quite a bit.

Hooray! My Sierra Wireless AirCard 880 is working with Ubuntu 8.04.1 (Hardy Heron)! This is something I have been wanting to get working for quite a while. What it means is that I won't have to boot Vista in order to use my laptop on the train and bus during my daily commute.

It's not usually a big deal, getting sound working in Linux or BSD. In my case, however, my laptop's internal sound module is dead, and I've substituted a USB sound module from DealExtreme.com that costs about $2. It works, but it can be hard to get a given distribution to pipe the sound there rather than to the dead internal sound system.

I took some time to look at several Linux distribution logos, and then decided to collect 50 of them that caught my eyes. I not only picked those that are well-known and good-looking, but also those that looked weird and ugly. Without any more delay, here they are in no particular order...

Despite the wealth of free applications out there, many small business owners continue to spend an inordinate amount of their all-too-scarce resources on software. The good news is that there are free and open-source alternatives for virtually every package a small business might need.

I continue to be surprised by the amount of weight given to downloads as a metric for OSS success. A topic Matt Asay also touched on recently over at The Open Road. Like Matt, I’m talking OSS at the product or company level (i.e., not OSS projects) and by success I mean sales.

Car owners know all about LoJack, the service that can use a hidden box to help find your car when it’s lost or stolen, and techies know that it’s also available for laptop computers. But what do you do if you’d really rather not use proprietary software? Or maybe you’d just rather not let a centralized server, which could get hacked, to have info about you and your laptop?... Enter Adeona

In the past few days, since I’ve been spending time at my sister’s house, I’ve used as single system the laptop I bought a few months ago, with runs Fedora 11.