I fancy myself to be what some would call a "Free Software Advocate" and as such when I am making recommendations of free software to people I hear many of the same common misconceptions day in and day out. Lets separate some of the fact from the fiction shall we?#1 Free software is Illegal

One thing I love about Linux is it's ability to be modular and customizable to degrees Windows users can only dream of it. The insides of the operating system are available to sift through if doing so peaks your fancy and the source code is free to take and edit.

Back on April 9th, Tavis Ormandy dropped a bit of a bomb shell on the full-disclosure mailing list [1]. To summarize, Tavis found that a DBD attack was possible utilizing the latest Java Runtime. He reported it to Oracle/Sun, which assessed its severity and stated they didn't plan to patch it out of cycle. Based on his tweets, Tavis found out that other researchers were aware of this issue, and decided to disclose the issue to the public without delay.

Free Software Magazine: "The Morevna Project aims to create an animated film in a modern anime-style retelling a very old Russian folktale known as "Marya Morevna". It's a free culture production project pushing the envelope in several ways..."

The newsophere was abuzz this morning with the discovery that Energizer's "DUO" USB Battery Charger included a malicious backdoor in the accompanying software. This backdoor was only discovered after the product was discontinued, leading some to believe that it went through its entire lifecycle undetected.

I mentioned earlier this month that I was enjoying the Starcraft 2 beta on Ubuntu 10.04 thanks to Wine software. In my previous posting I had simply stated that SC2 was "playable" under Wine. I have a fairly powerful gaming laptop that sports an nVidia 260m GTX and a 1680x1050 resolution panel.