Well, it´s a bit of a slow news January, and I haven´t had time to do any reviews lately, but at least the new 4.8 release of my favorite desktop environment Xfce is out. And it looks good too. For a visual tour go here. Suffice to say that the long awaited browsing of remote shares using Thunar (FTP, Windows Shares, WebDav and SSH servers...) is now supported and there is now a removable devices eject button in the side pane. Most of these new features are only available on GNU/Linux though and not on the BSD´s, as you can see on the blog or from this posting and ensuing discussion as to the reasons why on the site of one of the developers. A solution that works on both platforms would be desirable. In the meantime, one can always use a different file manager to mount, unmount and browse volumes.

This story is an old hat by now, going back to the Bush years, but there are always people who are not aware of a particular issue yet. The HBO documentary 'Hacking Democracy' details the hacking of proprietary Diebold electronic voting machines and uncovered clear evidence that the software and memory cards had been tempered with or, if you put a very positive face on, were just extremely unreliable. Apparently computers count 80% of votes in the US. This is how governments are elected. Glad in Europe we´re still voting old style, but for how long?