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03.09.12

Links 9/3/2012: KDE 4.8.1, New Wine

Posted in News Roundup at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Zanata: Web-Based Translation Manager For Open Source Developer

    If you are a open source software developer or a content writer you can use Zanata to translate your software strings, User interface text/String, software documentation and localized into any languages.

    Zanata is an open-source translation manager that enables a community of translators to work on localising software and documentation using nothing more than a web browser.

  • Netcraft: Open web platforms the winners

    A new survey from Netcraft has Apache, Nginx, and Google’s web servers all up, with Microsoft IIS market share dropping down, raising questions about the health of Microsoft’s related offerings.

    The Netcraft results are always interesting, because there’s always a little something for everyone. Depending on how the data is presented, a given hosted domain could be up, down, or off in the ninth dimension. So, care must be taken when qualifying the survey results.

  • TLWIR 34: Africa Embraces Free Software
  • FTA Community demands TradePub to correct inappropriate use of FTA course books

  • Events

    • CeBIT 2012: At the Open Source Project Lounge

      The Open Source Project Lounge at this year’s CeBIT – taking place in Hannover, Germany until 10 March – is as diverse as ever, with a variety of free and open source (FOSS) projects and organisations being represented by both developers and community members alike. Despite primarily being a commercial show where space is expensive, each year, projects have the opportunity to apply for free booth space, and this year, the Open Source Project Lounge is in the corner of Hall 2. The H had the opportunity to attend this, the world’s largest ICT event, and catch up with a number of the projects’ representatives.

    • Linux Training Opportunities at Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

      The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit is a great time to, well, collaborate. But it’s also a really good opportunity to learn.

      We’re offering three courses at this year’s Collaboration Summit, each in a different area, to help build skills while rubbing elbows with other top kernel developers.

      Advanced Linux Performance Tuning is a deep dive into proven tools and methods used to identify and resolve performance problems, resulting in system that is better optimized for specific workloads. This is particularly for those who write or use applications that have unusual characteristics, that behave differently than kernel performance heuristics anticipate. It is a hands-on course that assume some familiarity with basic performance tools. This course is offered on Monday, April 2nd.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Developers Should Love Mozilla Boot-to-Gecko Phone

        When Mozilla announced the Boot-to-Gecko, all-HTML cell phone last week at Mobile World Congress — along with a plan to partner with Telefonica Digital to build really cheap smart phones running the Mozilla system — I wondered if it was really possible to bring such a cheap phone to market, regardless of the underlying system running the phone.

      • Mozilla Doesn’t Want Pepper for Linux Flash

        A couple week ago, Adobe announced that is was abandoning Flash on Linux to Google. The idea being that Chrome integrates Flash and Google can be the place where Linux users go for Flash.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

  • BSD

  • Project Releases

    • PhoneGap 1.5 Released!
    • Vagrant celebrates its 1.0 stable release

      Exactly two years after its first release, the Vagrant project has announced the first stable version of its open source development environment generation tool. Vagrant 1.0 allows developers to easily set up virtual machines for development and testing purposes using Oracle’s VirtualBox and a single configuration file.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • An Open Source Robotic Surgeon Could Save Your Life

      Could the surgeon who saves your life be a robot? The answer to that could be yes, if the developers of the Raven II robotic surgeon have their way. Raven II comes with a surgical robot featuring two robotic arms, a camera for viewing the operational field, and a surgeon-interface system for remote operation of the robot. “The system is powerful and precise enough to support research on advanced robotic surgery techniques, including online telesurgery,” say U.C. Santa Cruz researchers who helped develop it (shown here). The code for Raven II is open source, and this robot is only one of several open source robots poised to advance healthcare.

  • Programming

    • Alpha release of Python 3.3.0 brings first syntax changes in two years

      The 3.3.0 version of the Python programming language has entered the testing phase with its first alpha release. This version marks the lifting of a two-year moratorium on changes to the language’s syntax. Proposed by Guido van Rossum as Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) 3003, the moratorium was designed to enable non-CPython implementations of the language to catch up to the core implementation after the Python 3.0 release.

    • A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python, an interview with author Hans Petter Langtangen

      I am a professor of mathematical modeling at the University of Oslo, but for the last 10 years I have been on 80% leave to work at Simula Research Laboratory, which carries out long-term basic research in ICT. At Simula, my main responsibility is to be the manager of a Norwegian Center of Excellence, named Center for Biomedical Computing. Our aim is to develop mathematical methods and software tools to study biomedical phenomena and thereby help clinicians in improving diagnostics and treatment. I am an active scientist and participate in several of the center’s projects. More information is found on cbc.simula.no.

    • Develop Android apps from within Android using AIDE (video)

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Security

    • GitHub security incident highlights Ruby on Rails problem

      On Sunday morning, 4 March, Egor Homakov exploited a flaw in how the Ruby on Rails web framework handles mass assignments that allowed him to write a posting, delete a posting or push changes into source code on any GitHub project. Homakov had previously created an issue regarding mass assignment security on the rails issue tracker on GitHub; this was closed by the developers saying that it was the application developers’ responsibility to secure their applications. Homakov then decided to demonstrate the issue using the nearest Ruby on Rails application, GitHub.

    • At Pwn2Own Hacker Competition, Google Chrome Gets Punk’d

      Slowly but surely, the Pwn2Own hacker contest has become an important fixture in the world of testing the security of software applications, operating systems and hardware devices. Just prior to last year’s Pwn2Own competition, Apple dropped a series of important updates to its Safari browser and iOS platform, but that didn’t stop Charlie Miller from exploiting a Safari vulnerability to hack into an iPhone’s address book. The results from the 2012 Pwn2Own hacker contest are now in, and one of the major software applications to lose to the hackers this year was Google Chrome.

    • OpenSUSE, Linus’ Daughter, and a Question of Security

      “Nobody likes the idea of having to practically beat their operating system into submission,… but this is the reality with Linux,” asserted Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “One good idea layered over another good idea added to another good idea sometimes ends up with really bad results. We don’t all want to be ‘protected from ourselves’ by more and more features that assume the user is a dummy. There’s another OS for that.”

  • Censorship

    • All Your Internets Belong to US, Continued: The Bodog.com Case

      Imagine a scenario in which a country enacts a law that bans the sale of asbestos and includes the power to seize the assets of any company selling the product anywhere in the world. The country tests the law by obtaining a court order to seize key assets of a Canadian company, whose operations with hundreds of employees takes a major hit. The Canadian government is outraged, promising to support the company in its efforts to restore its operations.

      That is the opening of my technology law column this week (Toronto Star version, homepage version) which continues by noting this scenario became reality last week, though the product was not asbestos and the Canadian government has yet to respond. The case involves Bodog.com, a Canadian-owned online sports gaming site and the country doing the seizing was the United States. Supporting online gaming operations will undoubtedly make governments somewhat squeamish, but the broader implications of last week’s seizure touch on millions of websites and Internet companies who now find themselves subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

    • Banned Facebook promises Chinese devs GLOBAL glory

  • Civil Rights

    • Vermonters Say: Corporations Are Not People!

      In a presidential primary season marked by the rise of “Super PACs” and an explosion of corporate spending in elections, Vermont voters have raised their voices against special interest money in politics. On Super Tuesday, 63 out of a possible 65 towns in Vermont called on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C. and to address the issue of corporate personhood and money in politics.

      The 2010 Citizens United decision, which Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders labeled “one of the worst decisions the Supreme Court has ever handed down,” struck down bipartisan clean election laws and declared that Congress could not limit so-called “independent” spending. After Citizens United, the 2010 fall elections were the most expensive in U.S. history, with more spending by outside groups than from the candidates themselves. The 2012 election cycle is on track to be the most expensive yet.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • ACTA may already be dead

          During last week’s public workshop on ACTA, held in presence of Commissioner Karel De Gucht and moderated by MEP Vital Moreira, chairman of the INTA committee1, the manifest tension made it obvious: the Parliament and the Commission are now afraid of citizens,and of the streets. What we saw during the workshop was a parody of debate, where speakers were either members of the Commission, academics, or among the few of the remaining ACTA proponents (including the chairman of a pro-ACTA lobby2!). Nobody from authors, artists or citizen groups were allowed on the panels, despite La Quadrature’s demand to participate.

        • Danish trade minister and ACTA booster apologise for bogus piracy numbers

          Here’s a clip of a Danish TV show discussing ACTA, which Denmark has fiercely advocated in favor of. It starts with the head of a rightsholder society and the Danish trade minister quoting dodgy statistics about the extent and cost of piracy, and then demonstrates that these statistics are patently false, and finally, brings out those responsible for quoting them and gets them to admit their errors.

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