Society runs on trust. Over the millennia, we've developed a variety of mechanisms to induce trustworthy behavior in society. These range from a sense of guilt when we cheat, to societal disapproval when we lie, to laws that arrest fraudsters, to door locks and burglar alarms that keep thieves out of our homes. They're complicated and interrelated, but they tend...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict stunned the Roman Catholic Church on Monday when he announced he would stand down, the first pope to do so in 700 years, saying he no longer had the mental and physical strength to carry on.

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - A U.S. official sought to reassure Israel this week on President Barack Obama's determination to curb Iran's disputed nuclear program, as the clock ticks on a threatened Israeli pre-emptive strike.

Gun-loving rocker to attend State of the Union address

Ted Nugent - the rocker famed for deploying Marshall stacks and hunting rifles to equally deadly effect - will attend Barack Obama's State of the Union address later today.…

sdb is a really simple program to benchmark disks. It only writes/reads data sequentially to/from a file and calculates the performance of this action. A memory buffer is used for input/output to get values close to the real performance of the disk or RAID system. You can use flags like O_DIRECT and O_SYNC to avoid buffering by the operating system. It is similar to dd, but there are some differences, since dd was not created for benchmarking a disk. It is possible to initialize the buffer with random values before writing them to the disk or a file on the disk. It is a simple but effective program to get the maximum speed of a disk. Due to the simplicity, you will get the results much faster than with a more complex benchmark.

Release Notes: IOPS calculation is now possible. Thread synchronization was rewritten: it is more critical in order to calculate IOPS with several threads, the limit on the number of parallel threads is removed, and the output in verbose mode gives more information. CPU usage is calculated.

Tags: Benchmark, disk

Licenses: GPLv2

At least... until hybrids inhale helium

With the rise of the iPad and the growing desire among consumers and enterprise for sexy and speedy gadgets, it seemed that flash gits were holding all the cards. The hard drive industry was holding its breath, wondering how to replicate the expensive experience. But what about hybrid disk drives, the ones that have a lump of flash cache inside their casing? Are they just the thing to spread tablets and Ultrabooks into the mass market? It's now increasingly likely that hybrid drives combining flash speed and disk drive capacity and affordability will take a massive mass-market bite out of the computing pie, leaving a reduced wedge for pricy all-flash tablets and notebooks and just a small sliver for lumbering and slow disk-only notebooks and desktops.…

FileBot is the ultimate tool for mass renaming your tv shows and anime, downloading subtitles from various sources or just simple file verification.

Release Notes: This release improves upon the new Music mode, includes many adjustments that make automatic matching of episodes/subtitles even better. The GUI will now allow you to rename valid entries despite one or more conflicting entries in the batch.

Release Tags: Stable

Tags: anidb, IMDb, md5sum, opensubtitles, sfv, sha1sum, sublight, subscene, subtitles, subtitlesource, thetvdb, Torrent, tvrage, tvrenamer

Licenses: GPLv2

How to gain solid-state performance with out losing hard drive capacity

Feature The idea of using a low-capacity SSD to store the most frequently accessed files or parts of files in order to access them more quickly than a mechanical hard drive can serve them up - a technique called SSD caching - has been around for some time, but it wasn’t until the arrival of Intel’s Smart Response Technology with the company’s Z68 chipset, released in 2011, that the technology began to be implemented in personal machines rather than servers.…

eSecurityPlanet: SSL/TLS Security is the foundational technology that secures Web transactions and communications, but it is not infallible.

Infinity PFM is a personal finance manager with support for budgets, OFX/QIF/QFX import, color reports, and charts. Both a Web client and desktop client are available.

Release Notes: This minor release fixed a bug in Bitcoin import.

Release Tags: Minor

Tags: Accounting, Personal Finance, Budgeting

Licenses: GPL v3

ZABBIX is an enterprise-class distributed monitoring solution designed to monitor and track performance and availability of network servers, devices, and other IT resources. It supports distributed and Web-based monitoring, auto-discovery, real-time monitoring, SLA assurance, trending, and more.

Release Notes: This release introduces several improvements and a number of bugfixes.

Release Tags: Stable

Tags: Logging, Networking, Monitoring, Systems Administration

Licenses: GPL

Cementing relationships and saving 'leccy

Turkey will spend $5bn over the next two years creating a smart grid to cope with increased energy consumption, and buying plenty of American kit with which to do it.…

Monsti is a simple and resource-efficient CMS for private and small business sites with mostly static pages and a simple structure.

Release Notes: This release contains bugfixes and some new features.

Release Tags: Unstable

Tags: Content Management System, Web, Flat File CMS

Licenses: Affero GNU Public License version 3

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama plans to release a long-awaited executive order aimed at improving the nation's defenses against cyber attacks as early as Wednesday, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Thieves posed as workmen in raid that cut off hundreds

Two men have been jailed for 16 months for nicking large volumes of copper cable from BT's network. The pair posed as workmen to swipe the metal, cutting off telephone and internet connections to hundreds of homes and businesses.…

s6-linux-utils is a set of minimalistic Linux-specific system utilities.

Release Notes: This release adds an option to allow s6-mount to choose the fstab file. It also adds support for non-slashpackage installations.

Release Tags: Major feature enhancements

Tags: SysAdmin, Utilities, Command Line Tools, linux lightweight

Licenses: ISC

s6-portable-utils is a set of tiny general Unix utilities, often performing well-known tasks such as cut and grep, but optimized for simplicity and small size. They were designed for embedded systems and other constrained environments, but work everywhere. Other sets of small utilities are usually system-specific; for instance, the (otherwise excellent) BusyBox project only works on Linux.

Release Notes: This release adds support for non-slashpackage installations.

Release Tags: Major feature enhancements

Tags: SysAdmin, Utilities, Command Line Tools

Licenses: ISC

s6 is a complete process supervision suite in the style of daemontools, runit, and perp. It provides a candidate for process 1. It also comes with a library and command line utilities that implement inter-process notification and synchronization.

Release Notes: This release fixes a (very rare) bug in s6-log, and adds support for non-slashpackage installations. The ucspilogd command has also been integrated into the s6 package.

Tags: Boot, Init, supervision, Syslog

Licenses: ISC

execline is a very light, non-interactive scripting language, which is similar to a shell. Simple shell scripts can be easily rewritten in the execline language, improving performance and memory usage. execline was designed for use in embedded systems, but works on most Unix flavors.

Release Notes: This release fixes a small bug in backtick and adds support for non-slashpackage installations.

Release Tags: Minor feature enhancements, Minor bugfixes

Tags: Software Development, Interpreters, Embedded Systems, Shells

Licenses: ISC

skalibs is a set of general-purpose, low-level C libraries, all in the public domain. It can replace or hide the standard C library to some extent. It is designed to allow building of small static binaries. It is used in building all skarnet.org software, including execline and s6.

Release Notes: This release features, among other changes, a rewrite of libbiguint, IPv6 support in libstddjb, and support for non-slashpackage installations.

Release Tags: Major feature enhancements, Minor bugfixes, Code cleanup

Tags: Software Development, Libraries

Licenses: ISC