For many years this so-called ‘research’ group has been carrying out anti-Linux studies (read: manufactured publications for clients) that had been commission by Microsoft. Even recently, The Yankee Group’s founder called open source “a religion” and mocked it for some kicks.

Yankee Group has said that virtual appliances will enable the delivery of better-quality software and an improved user experience. The virtual appliance is an emerging new development for the software industry.

LAST YEAR, WE wrote about a controversial report penned by technology research and consulting outfit the Yankee Group, claiming that Windows was more reliable than Linux. The Yankee Group has been busy again this year, but its latest report seems to offer a very different story to last year’s, with Windows now performing significantly worse than its Linux and Unix rivals.

We warned about this a couple of weeks back, the context being Yankee Group FUD, but it’s worth repeating and presenting this alongside some more material and background, as well as new supportive stories.

Mainstream Linux distributions for servers have caught up substantially with Unix in terms of reliability over the past year, while Windows Server 2003 downtime has risen by nearly 25 percent, according to a Yankee Group survey.

According to the open source industry group FOSSBazaar, there are plenty of organizations that view using the software as risky. But the group maintains that concerns about open source stem from often poorly understood legal issues that could be overcome with some education.

Do you think your wireless communications are secure? Think again. There is a vulnerability built into the WPA2 protocol itself! It's based on abusing the GTK (Group Temporal Key) and can be used to create man-in-the-middle and denial-of-service attacks. Too few people know this.

This article shows how to install and configure ModSecurity (version 2) for use with Apache2 on a Debian Etch system. ModSecurity is an Apache module that provides intrusion detection and prevention for web applications. It aims at shielding web applications from known and unknown attacks, such as SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, path traversal attacks, etc.

Here is just a quick word of caution: Now comes the latest FUD from the Burton Group, Microsoft’s left-arm FUD buddy, which was only recently used against Google, VMWare and ODF. As usual, it all comes in the form of a report Microsoft can cite and distribute copies of. It’s now used against Free software, too.