“A report published by the European Commission’s Open Source Observatory provides some details from a recent presentation given by Gendarmerie Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard, who says that the Gendarmerie has been able to reduced its annual IT budget by 70 percent without having to reduce its capabilities.”

Read the full story over at Ars Technica.

From http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1167.htm

I know quite a few people either using or considering Amazon S3 as a CDN – this test would suggest that it’s perhaps not the best strategy.  In fairness to Amazon S3, I think the performance would have been shown to be greater had he used the option of additionally having the file on S3 Europe, and had visitors dynamically sent to the correct location via DNS.  Of course, it could be argued that one of the points of using a CDN is that you don’t have to do that sort of thing yourself.  As far as I’m aware S3 has no option for global load balancing.

As both a marketing and technical exercise it looks pretty impressive, although Google’s geography seems to leave something to be desired – see page 13 to see what I mean.

There are a lot of good ideas here, particulary with respect to security, and I’m extremely keen to see what the finished product will look like.   Probably just as interesting will be to see how well Google can use the Open Source community once it’s released, and integrate contributions from elsewhere into Chrome.

Update 03/Sept/08 – Google Chrome is now released, including the source code which is under a BSD License.
Update 2, 03/Sept/08 – The first proof of concept DoS vulnerability has already been released which crashes the whole browser, something the architecture is supposed to avoid.

Dag Wieërs has too, and being the kind guy he is, he’s posted a quick guide to undeleting an open file.