Holger Weiß, formerly of nagios-plugins.org, announced that 'Yesterday, the DNS records [of nagios-plugins.org] were modified to point to web space controlled by Nagios Enterprises instead. This change was done without prior notice. To make things worse, large parts of our web site were copied and are now served (with slight modifications) by Nagios. Again, this was done without contacting us, and without our permission.

According to WinSuperSite's Paul Thurrott, the operating system, currently code-named "Threshold," predictably will be called Windows 9.

If it launches on time, Microsoft should make a very un-Microsoft move that will shock some, excite others and potentially cause panic among its investors: turn Windows free. The time has come for Microsoft to stop licensing the software to OEMs and finally offer it at no charge to its PC partners and consumers.

An anonymous reader writes to point out a giant gift to the world from the Internet Archive: a massive collection of MAME ROMs, playable in your browser using Javascript Mess.

An army of volunteer elves are updating information about each of the hundreds of game cartridges now available, and will be improving them across the next few days.

The software, dubbed App Ops, was bundled into Android 4.3 as a hidden application. For each installed program, it presents a series of switches so that users can activate some permissions, such as granting access to the cellular or Wi-Fi network, but block others, such as sharing your physical whereabouts.

"Google told us that the feature had only ever been released by accident - that it was experimental, and that it could break some of the apps policed by it," said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director at the EFF.

In one of the premier open source software deployments in Europe, the city migrated from Windows NT to LiMux, its own Linux distribution. LiMux incorporates a fully open source desktop infrastructure. The city also decided to use the Open Document Format (ODF) as a standard, instead of proprietary options.

As of November last year, the city saved more than €11.7 million because of the switch. More recent figures were not immediately available, but cost savings were not the only goal of the operation. It was also done to be less dependent on manufacturers, product cycles and proprietary OSes, the council said.

The state of Oregon blames Oracle for the failures of its online health exchange, according to a new piece on NPR’s All Tech Considered blog. The health-insurance site still doesn’t fully work as intended, with many customers forced to download and fill out paper applications rather than sign up online; Oracle has reportedly informed the state that it will sort out the bulk of technical issues by December 16, a day after those paper applications are due.

Oregon state officials insist that, despite payments of $43 million, Oracle missed multiple deadlines in the months leading up to the health exchange’s bungled launch.

Oracle has a love hate relationship with Open Source technologies. While by acquiring Sun Microsystem Oracle became one of the significant Open Source players. However the way company handled core Open Source projects (OpenOffice and MySQL) they failed to earn any respect from the Free Software community. Then Oracle attacked Android with its Java and failed miserably – losing any respect that was left.

Today, the Ghost team is opening the platform up to everyone. You can download the Ghost application and get it going on your own server immediately, and users interested in assisting with the development can hit up the project's GitHub repo and start poking around.

The graphical console with all of its fancy charts and graphs has been set aside temporarily while the core team focuses on making Ghost stable and functional enough for launch, but it should be making an appearance in an upcoming release.

Eventually, the service is expected to work with other instant-messaging accounts and be interoperable with SIP standards, but for now it requires a BitTorrent account.

Averill was unable to provide details on how the service logs your chats, so it's not clear at this time whether message logs are stored locally, or even available as an option.

When asked about what BitTorrent's response would be to potential requests from government agencies like the National Security Agency for a BitTorrent Chat back door, he said, "We're not familiar with specifics of NSA programs, so it's not something we can really comment on."

Oracle has adopted the open source OpenStack cloud technology for its upcoming public cloud service, but though the company has made many tweaks and advancements to the technology, it does not appear to have yet contributed code back to the community.

Though Oracle has written its own additions to OpenStack, the company does not appear to have contributed any of that code back to the wider community. In fact, Oracle as a corporate entity has made zero commits to the mammoth codebase over all of its release, according to data put together by OpenStack commit watchers Stackalytics.