Most people lock their doors and windows, use a paper shredder to protect themselves from identity theft, and install antivirus software on their computers. Yet they routinely surf the Internet without giving a second thought to whether their browser is secure and their personal information safe. Unfortunately, it’s easy for someone with nefarious intentions to use a Web site to glean data from — or introduce spyware to — your computer. Even worse, sometimes all you have to do is randomly click on a site to have your data probed in a most unwelcome way.

The GNOME Foundation has issued a statement in response to recent accusations that it has been supporting the acceptance of Microsoft’s Office Open XML format (OOXML) as an ECMA standard at the expense of the Open Document Format (ODF), the open standard used by OpenOffice.org, KOffice and other free software office applications. However, whether the statement’s attempt at logical rebuttal will do anything to reduce the emotions or altruism behind the criticisms is anybody’s guess.

Skype recently released Skype 2.0 beta for Linux, which includes the ability to make video calls, a feature the Windows and Mac versions have had for some time. I tried the beta on two systems running Ubuntu 7.10 — my desktop PC with a USB webcam and a MacBook Pro with its onboard iSight webcam — with mixed results.

Today is the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, and we’re enjoying the day off with our families. In fact, we’re enjoying it so much that we’re taking tomorrow too. That means a reduced posting schedule on our sites. We’ll be back to our regular schedule on Monday.

If you have a fondness for old arcade games and want to play them again, try the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME), a free emulator that lets you recreate the look and feel of old arcade game systems in software. While it’s written for Windows, you can run this open source application under Linux.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed another two cases on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley against High Gain Antennas, LLC of Parker, Calif., and Xterasys Corp. of City of Industry, Calif. The cases follow a similar case against Monsoon Multimedia, which was recently settled out of court.

When deer hunting season begins in Mississippi, or its time for the alligator lottery to start down in Florida, sportsmen flock to the Internet to order their licenses through companies like Automated License Systems (ALS). To keep its servers running reliably, ALS’s Infrastructure Manager Rich Edwards uses Red Hat Linux and servers from Levanta, no questions asked.

Gogh is an extremely lightweight drawing program designed for pressure-sensitive devices. Despite its simplicity, it packs in a lot of features and a lot of fun.

Nobody ever thinks to mention .rpmnew and .rpmsave extensions to new users of Fedora or Red Hat derivatives. Instead, most users suddenly discover that these files are accumulating on their hard drives, or notice a fleeting message on the screen about them during a version upgrade. Many, I suspect, simply leave them alone, uncertain what to do about them. Yet dealing with them is simply a matter of using a few basic commands, and can be a necessity for ensuring trouble-free upgrades in the future.

Martin Roesch is one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever to build a company based on open source software. Roesch is the author of Snort, which he claims is the "most-widely deployed" intrusion detection software in the world, and the founder of Sourcefire, a network security services provider that uses Snort as the centerpiece of its operations. Last week, the Tech Council of Maryland named Roesch its Commercial IT Executive of the Year.