As many readers will likely know, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — for whom we're sure we could find many a fitting and unflattering nickname, if it wouldn't land us a all-expenses-paid visit to Gitmo — recently released guidelines for the U.S. Customs Service giving agents carte blanche to search and seize travelers' laptops without probable cause, including U.S. citizens, who once upon a time were protected from such things by the Fourth Amendment. After much — well-deserved — outrage, someone is finally doing something about it, in the persons of Senators Russ Feingold & Maria Cantwell, who introduced legislation last week to put the brakes on DHS's searchmobile.

It was just days ago that we learned that a UCLA sysadmin has discovered the largest known prime number — we'll spare a visual, as it's 13 million digits long — and possibly won $100,000 being offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). Now today comes the release of version 2.6 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) — the follow-up to the 2.4 series, first released last October.

There are plenty of Linux & Open Source conferences each year for the enthused enthusiast to choose from — LinuxWorld, OSCON, Linux.conf.au to name just a few — but curiously, nothing open to the average user from the bastion of Linux advocacy, the Linux Foundation. That is until now, as the LF has recently announced it will be sponsoring an open-attendance conference of it's own starting next year.

Blogging is nothing new these days — it seems as if everyone and their grandma has a blog and is sharing whatever it is that winds them up with the world.

If you thought the Linux Foundation was just about spreading Linux Love and giving Linus a place to hack, fasten your seatbelt, because the gloves have come off and they're sharing just what they think.

It's that time again — yes, indeed the development cycle is up, and the good people behind the GNOME Desktop have just released a fresh version into the wild.

If you've ever thought about becoming a member of the Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit organization responsible, among other things, for keeping Lead Penguin Linux Torvalds a'coding — then you might know it's been a bit of an expensive proposition in the past. The door has been opened a bit wider for individuals, however, as the Foundation is now offering an individual affiliate membership for the low, low price of just one easy payment of $49 per year.

Cisco — rulers of all things network — have set their sights on something new, and they've gone out and gotten it. The it in this particular case is Jabber, Inc., the company responsible for building an enterprise offering around XMPP — the "Jabber" protocol — and the go out and getting happened yesterday, as Cisco announced that it intends to buy the 54-employee company before the end of next summer.

The mobile phone industry is nothing if not cutthroat, with each manufacturer — not to mention provider — doing everything they can to show up and stomp out its competition. What isn't usually seen, though, is an old-fashioned public call-out.

Breaking News has just learned that Wikileaks — the website utilized to post materials obtained from Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo mail account — is, for undisclosed reasons, no longer available online.

It must be Hacker Day here at Breaking News — as though the Large Hadron Collider being hacked wasn't enough, it has now been revealed that the group known as Anonymous has successfully hacked into the Yahoo email account of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and released at least some of its contents into the wild.

If there weren't already enough problems at the European Organization for Nuclear Research — angry calls & letters, protests, panic, even death threats — surrounding the Large Hadron Collider — in addition, that is, to the chief problem of making the device work — there certainly are now, as a new and particularly frightening problem has arisen: hackers.

The brouhaha is nothing new to Open Source software projects. In fact, if there is ever a day when someone, somewhere is not screaming about bad decisions or better ways, then that's a day when progress isn't being made. The news that users were storming the gates at Canonical and Mozilla HQ, though, caught us a little by surprise.

UAL Corp. had a nasty surprise on Monday when its stock price fell nearly 75% after a computerized chain-reaction caused outdated information to hit the trading floor hard — and UAL's financials even harder.

The O'Reilly Open Source Conference — OSCON — has made its home in Portland, Oregon since 2003, but won't be any longer, as the event's organizers have decided to pull up stakes and — like many other technology groups — move to California's San Francisco Bay area.

The Fedora Project has had a rough time over the last month. Beginning with the announcement of an unidentified "infrastructure systems issue," the project's problems continued through the revelation that one or more of the project's package-management servers had been hacked, leaving the security of the distribution's entire package system in doubt.

The X Window System is a fundamental part of nearly all Unix-like systems, providing the framework that allows for the myriad of graphical interfaces available to the end user. Being such an essential component, new releases are eagerly anticipated, and the one expected today is no exception, particularly as the eager anticipation has repeatedly been prolonged.

Among the interesting — if a bit odd — aspects of Ubuntu development is its convention of assigning each release a codename — often more universally known and used than the offical release number. These codenames follow a well known pattern, progressing alphebetically with the name of an animal and some, er, "unique" adjective, like Breezy Badger or Gutsy Gibbon. Lately, though, the names have been just a bit more odd than normal, and the trend continues with the nom-de-plume for Version 9.04.

If we had a nickel for everytime a half-truth eminated from the corporate world, we'd probably be able to buy quite a bit of it. That doesn't make it any less disappointing, however, when the half-truths are about Linux, from a Linux vendor. Such is the case this week, as Lenvo denied, then confirmed the end to their consumer Linux offerings.