Open source: Concluding his controversial series Why Ubuntu (still) sucks, Randall Kennedy starts by explaining that few, if any, of the angry dissenting readers that commented have even figured out exactly what’s going on here. In the process he learned that “engaging [the open source] community on an intellectual level was pointless” and Kennedy “got a glimpse of the ‘real’ face of the Linux community, the immature, mom’s basement-dwelling, pimple-faced geek side that the Red Hats, Novells and Canonicals of this world don’t want you to see.” The final piece drew plenty of comments, as did the predecessors. My favorite: “You, sir, are evil. And I mean that in a good way.” Security: Many of today’s worms and bots create tens of thousands of variants each month which, in the words of Roger Grimes, “has made many anti-virus software programs that use static signatures significantly less accurate.” Stopping malware that mutates on demand. “Who cares whether anti-virus companies get the malicious sample and make a signature? The malware has never existed before and won’t exist again. Server-side polymorphism has created another challenge in the anti-virus world.” Storage: Data is growing so much it could reach a point where IT cannot store it reliably. “But what if we could use disk drives differently to create reliable, secure single instances of our data?” Mario Apicella asks in Protect your data by breaking it apart. That’s where dispersed storage comes in. Two startups, Cleversafe and RevStor, are advancing the model, which involves shredding data and storing each fragment, encrypted, on a separate node. “As with a shredded paper document, no single data fragment can give away the whole. Because of this, dispersed storage is inherently more secure than traditional methods. Only the owner can bring the data confetti back together.” Related: CleverSafe takes a slice out of storage. Technology Industry