The Germany based Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has opened its traditional annual conference in Berlin, Germany, again this year. After a year of breakdowns in data security, the hacker organization is calling for a number of new protective measures.

Novell announced that BrainShare 2009 has been canceled. BrainShare has been held for more than 20 years, and the 2009 event was scheduled for March 8 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Dates for lectures at the first Akademy extension, “Camp KDE”, (Jan 17 to 23, 2009) in Jamaica have been set. Dates for the first KDE-Gnome conference in Gran Canaria have also been agreed, (July 3 to 11, 2009) along with a location.

Snow-covered white mountains, green meadows, yellow cheese, purple cows, the distant sound of yodeling marmots, and plenty of Linux people from all over the world – a perfect combination for a geek event.

VMworld, the world's largest virtualization event, offered a variety of technical events, birds-of-a-feather sessions, press conferences, and perhaps the biggest IT party ever. VMworld's fifth year is one to remember.

The opening keynote Thursday of the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego was by author and security expert Bruce Schneier. In his opinion "perceived security" should be an aspect of all security implementation.

Linux kernel developer Ted T'so shared his know-how in a number of tutorials at the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego. One theme was getting first help for system crashes, and in the process, he took the opportunity to present SystemTap.

At the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego, Lee Damon and Mike Ciavarella presented a foundation workship as a tutorial for admins with tips and tricks for working efficiently. The presentors didn't agree on all points, but one commonality was that they advised against running High Performance Computing (HPC) together with virtualization.