The latest issue of the Mandriva newsletter is a round-up of events in the world of Mandriva since the last issue came out last year - new releases, major changes to the website, rearrangement of the Club, and more.

Within the next 24-hours, Microsoft will submit to JTC1 a set of proposals for addressing the 3,522 comments that accompanied OOXML's failed ballot last September. We'll no doubt hear a lot of yip-yip-yahooing on their end. Expect a major media campaign. I don't want to take away the surprise, but I'm hearing that journalists are being flown into Redmond next week from around the world for briefings on OOXML. So, for their benefit, and yours, let's review where we are in the JTC1 process.

GnuPG is the GNU project's complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC4880 . GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign your data and communication, features a versatile key managment system as well as access modules for all kind of public key directories.

Want a fully functional PC capable of running Puppy Linux for $85? You got it...

Two things piqued my interest recently. One was the iPlayer protests at the BBC, the other was the Wiki tracker project. More specifically, it was the reporting of these events. In the case of the former, it went virtually unreported and made me proud of our independent and open news sources and reporting network. The latter highlighted (again) the many issues of user-generated content.

A news aggregator eliminates the need for surfing the Web as much. Instead of going to all the Web pages you have bookmarked to read your favorite blogs, news, or media presentations, you can simply add an RSS/RDF or Atom syndication format to Liferea and have all the news feeds at your command.