The year 2012 has been extremely successful for the GNU/Linux and Open Source technologies. These technologies dominated almost every aspect of the IT world. Here are some of the top movers & shakers which changed the IT landscape in 2012 and hold great promises for the future.
For many PC users, the prospect of switching away from Mac or Windows and onto Linux can be a nerve-wracking one.
I have always been a bit curious of the open source communities support of Google. I have even seen distros include “web apps” that launch a browser to open Google Docs or Gmail. I can understand the reasoning, to a point. Good desktop applications are difficult to come by on Linux, (seriously, you can’t argue this point, don’t try.) while Gmail is an absolutely best of breed email client. However, given that you use a Linux desktop for the control over the platform it gives you, it is a curious choice to relinquish that control, especially over such personal information as email, to a closed source solution that just happens to be hosted on a server instead of your local machine.
Jon Masters examines performance tweaks for the Linux kernel and summarises the latest goings-on in the kernel community
Up this holiday weekend on Phoronix are benchmarks of the open-source Nouveau Gallium3D when comparing the driver's state on the Git branches of Mesa 9.0 and Mesa 9.1-devel. While checking in on the latest Mesa Nouveau code, three NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were benchmarked from a development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04.
Patches surfaced on the Mesa mailing list on Saturday morning for supporting the OpenGL ARB_texture_multisample extension within core Mesa and the Intel i965 DRI driver.
A set of 26 patches against Mesa were needed for this initial ARB_texture_multisample implementation. The only driver implementing the support with these patches is the Intel DRI driver and even there it's only on right now for Intel Sandy Bridge "Gen6" hardware. For the newer Ivy Bridge "Gen7", there's still some IVB-specific things that aren't done or properly tested. Even for Sandy Bridge with these patches, there's some HiZ interactions that are likely wrong along with some other likely issues.
For many gamers, Steam is the most banked-upon tool in their gaming inventory. You can purchase, gift and play games using the software and also you can communicate with other players. Led by Gabe Newell, Steam is widely appreciated for being one of the nicest gaming companies around. For years, Steam was available only on Windows. Then, of course, Valve Corporation decided to branch out to other platforms as well leading to the release of Steam for Mac OS X in 2010. 2 years later, Steam brought good news for many Linux fans and gamers alike. This year, Valve released Steam Beta for Linux, a fully native port of the amazing gaming software bringing world-class gaming to this often-overlooked platform. With the release came the announcement of porting of Left 4 Dead 2 on this platform.
Also still being actively developed is the Tesseract fork of Sauerbraten, which delivers vastly improved graphics and other engine-level improvements to the open-source code-base. The Tesseract Git repository is still seeing new commits with the most recent work being from yesterday.
I’ve bought Humble Bundle 7 (still available for 24 hours) and a big positive surprise of this bundle has been Legend of Grimrock. This is a classic RPG game, you’ll have the control of 4 characters that you can choose between 4 races and 3 classes with these “heroes” you’ll have to walk in a dark dungeon searching to regain your freedom.
Here on the first day of 2013, it's already very clear that this year will be a banner year for open source gaming, what with players like Valve and Ouya poised to deliver game platforms based on open source tools. Mobile phones and tablets have also become havens for games, though, (think of Angry Birds) and it's clear that Mozilla wants to woo game developers for its upcoming Firefox OS mobile operating system.
digiKam team has announced release candidate of digiKam software collection 3.0.0. This version brings fix for more than 30 issues. This is the first release candidate after 3 beta releases. This release also focuses on the students projects in digiKam Google summer of code 2012.
KDE's photo management software, DigiKam, is preparing for the final release of version 3.0. DigiKam 3.0 introduces many changes and released this weekend was the 3.0 release candidate as a preview version.
Broadway, the HTML5 back-end for GTK3 that allows GTK applications to be rendered within a modern web-browser and served via a server, now has support for initiating multiple processes. The Broadway multi-process support is similar to running an X11 Server session with multiple windows.
We constantly hear about new security threats and companies that have been breached. As such, it’s understandable for some of us to be paranoid about security in order to prevent any possible attacks. If you’re not at least a little bit paranoid, you might want to read up on which site was the last one to have passwords stolen from.
2012 was another full year of major Linux distribution releases from the top vendors in the space. Though it was also a year in which at least two projects were hit with release delays.
Red Hat Inc. CEO Jim Whitehurst has offered the open-source world a “Red Hat State of the Union” blog, in which he outlines the progress the company made in 2012 and anecdotes on open-source technology. Although Whitehurst is touting Red Hat’s success, he brings to light major trends reshaping how partners build technology portfolios and engage with businesses.
Privacy over the Internet is becoming more and more important day by day. While it is believed that its impossible to obtain complete anonymity, security conscious people have striven for years to make a system that will ensure maximum anonymity and security. One such operating system that claims to give users full control over their privacy is Whonix.
Based on the Debian operating system, this OS uses Tor and VirtualBox to make one anonymous to outside world. As noted in their website: Whonix is an anonymous general purpose operating system based on Virtual Box, Debian GNU/Linux and Tor. By Whonix design, IP and DNS leaks are impossible. Not even malware with root rights can find out the user's real IP/location.
Only a few weeks ago, many Ubuntu loyalists were expressing fury that Canonical decided to incoporate Amazon search results on the Ubuntu desktop. Richard Stallman and Jono Bacon even weighed in on the matter, as did the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now, starting up a new round of debate, Alen Bell has delivered a Gnome Shell extension that brings online shopping results to Gnome Shell's Dash. According to some, this extension shows how to deliver shopping results to the Linux desktop correctly.
“Canonical is kicking off the New Year with a bang, and launching a brand new Ubuntu product,” the online magazine quoted the release as saying. “We’ll be holding an exclusive event hosted by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, to give full details of what we believe is the next generation of cross platform operating system.”
[...]
Anyone expecting to run Android applications within Ubuntu, however, will be disappointed.
A countdown teaser has been posted to the Ubuntu homepage that’s currently set to expire on January 2nd. The banner bears a "So close, you can almost touch it" tagline, implying an announcement based on touch support for the OS. That shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise considering Canonical’s recent hints at the future of Ubuntu. In a Slashdot Q&A last month, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth made it fairly clear that a cross-device OS was on the cards, with full mobile and tablet support set for Ubuntu 14.04 sometime in 2014.
Recent news reports indicate Linux has now reached 42% of consumer devices, largely through the explosive popularity of the Android...
The Enlightenment desktop has got its first stable release after almost 12 years of development and currently tarballs are available for compilation and installation on your machine. You can also install it binaries in your system by using the package manager of your distro.
Samsung Rumored to Release Open-Source, Tizen-Based Phone in 2013 Samsung is a big player when it comes to making some of the most popular Android phones, but that doesn't mean they don't also like to dabble in their own, Google-free side-projects. According to Japan's Daily Yomiuri, Samsung aims to launch its first phone running the open-source Tizen operating system sometime in 2013.
Want to see more of the Huawei Ascend Mate? The device, a massive 6.1 inch black slab phone, has leaked out some more photos, just ahead of its expected unveiling at CES. In these photos, we’re also seeing another device we’re hoping to see unveiled, the 5 inch D2.
It’s been a year and a half since HP stopped selling phones and tablets running the webOS operating system. But since then HP has transitioned webOS into an open source operating system and we’ve seen early builds ported to existing devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone and Asus Transformer Pad tablet.
Welcome to The H's look back at 2012. We've broken down the events of the year by what The H thinks was full of win, who was getting on the failboat and what made us just say "Meh". From the corporate giants and how they handled open source and the community to the battle to be the best browser, and from the best new open source software to the worst mis-steps in the community.
Why is the founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation of Europe currently leading a for-profit software company in the groupware space?
Open Sauce appears to be a major victor of the Arab Spring which led to a change of leadership in Egypt.
It appears that the nation which worked out how to build the world's largest public building with just copper tools, has decided that proprietary software is a bad thing.
Egypt is apparently drawing up plans to cast out the Voles, Oracles, Apples and other followers of Apep, into the Lands of the West in favour of a decent open sauce plan for its public software projects.
There are three new books about free software thanks to Google's 2012 Summer of Code Documentation Camp. The week-long event started off with an unconference, but the main objective was for each participating project to produce a cohesive, book-length work of documentation. All three projects delivered, and thanks to the arrangement made by FLOSSManuals with a local printer, 30 copies of each book were in print late Friday evening. FLOSSManuals has the sprint process down to a science, which is good news for open projects of all stripes, but it is still feeling out how best to sustain the sprint's energy after the participants part company.
No one needs an introduction to Mozilla. Yes, the makers of the Firefox internet browser. For years, Mozilla has been encouraging open web standards, trying to promote the web as a platform for all. And with the advent of HTML5 things have gotten much simpler with almost everything being able to be implemented in web. With HTML5, developers would no longer have to worry about creating applications intended for cross platform usage – if based on web-standards, it runs on any platform with a standard compliant browser! Building apps is quite easy as well.
Cloud Computing is new age technology and I doubt their are anyone in technology domain not talking about it. I have added list of 5 cloud application, software one should watch for 2013.
I've been writing about Open Source eCommerce (OSC) shopping carts for a decade now, and many carts have risen and fallen in popularity during that time. For the past five years I've tracked the popularity of OSC carts every month by doing an exact Google search and recording the results. This doesn't track the actual number of carts installed, and popularity can be positive or negative, but over time it becomes more and more valuable as the search results mirror the life cycle of a cart. Carts that are becoming more popular show rapid increases in the number of search results. It is possible to see exact the month a cart peaks in popularity. Year-to-year results are even more revealing.
The FreeBSD project has now officially released version 9.1 of the BSD Unix derived operating system. At the same time, the project's 2012 fund raising initiative blew past its $500,000 goal and is currently sitting at $684,905 raised; over $250,000 of that appears to have come from an anonymous donor.
Version 0.4.0 of the Simon open-source speech recognition system has been released. This release, which represents years of development, brings many improvements.
Simon 0.4.0 for speech recognition brings a whole new recognition layer, context-awareness for improved accuracy and performance, a dialog system, and much more. The main user-interface of Simon has also been reworked for improved usability.
Shanshan Zhou had a longtime childhood fantasy: she dreamt her otherwise static belongings would suddenly begin to play with her—she used to pretend they were alive. So when it came time to do a project for her Physical Computing class at Victoria University-Wellington, she took the opportunity to turn an inanimate object into “living art.” Zhou gave character to an object which, despite its lack of human features, could now connect with people.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has said that a stable specification of the HTML5 web markup language has been laid down for web application developers to now focus on.
Although this new stable version is not yet a W3C standard, it has been called "feature complete" a this stage.
William J. Baer was confirmed by the Senate on Sunday as the government’s top antitrust lawyer, placing him in charge of the Justice Department division that reviews corporate mergers and prosecutes price-fixing cases.
Amid the heated negotiations to reach an agreement to head off large tax increases and vast spending cuts in the new year, the Senate voted 64 to 26 in favor of Mr. Baer, a prominent antitrust lawyer at the law firm Arnold & Porter.
Drug dealers have redefined the term “shooting up”. Smugglers are shooting their supplies across the American border – by cannon.
Files obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and provided to CNET show that the National Security Agency (NSA) under its secret Perfect Citizen program is looking at the computerized systems that control large-scale utilities, checking for vulnerabilities including power grid and gas pipeline controllers. The U.S. government relies on commercial utilities for electricity, telecommunications, and other infrastructure requirements The program seeks to carry out "vulnerability exploration and research" against computerized controllers involved in these utilities.
In our homes and our offices, this weakness is only a medium-sized deal: developers can release a patched version of Safari or Microsoft Word whenever they find a hole; anti-virus and intrusion-detection systems can handle many other threats. But updating the control software on a drone means practically re-certifying the entire aircraft. And those security programs often introduce all sorts of new vulnerabilities. “The traditional approaches to security won’t work,” Fisher tells Danger Room.
Fisher is spearheading a far-flung, $60 million, four-year effort to try to develop a new, secure way of coding — and then run that software on a series of drones and ground robots. It’s called High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS.
Drones and other important systems were once considered relatively safe from hack attacks. (They weren’t directly connected to the internet, after all.) But that was before viruses started infecting drone cockpits; before the robotic planes began leaking their classified video streams; before malware ordered nuclear centrifuges to self-destruct; before hackers figured out how to remotely access pacemakers and insulin pumps; and before academics figured out how to hijack a car without ever touching the vehicle.
A non-profit government watchdog has sued the Central Intelligence Agency to uncover information about its controversial collaboration with the New York City Police Department's counter-terrorism surveillance program. The suit, filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center on Dec. 20, seeks to force the release of a report by the agency's inspector general into whether it violated legal prohibitions against spying on American soil. In 2011, the Associated Press revealed that the agency was deeply involved in training the NYPD's Intelligence Unit, which spied on Muslims in New York even when there was no evidence they had committed any crimes.
A Pakistani man whose father was killed by a US drone strike is to appeal a judgement in a case seeking to determine the legality of intelligence sharing in relation to GCHQ assistance in CIA drone strikes.
Noor Khan - whose father was killed in a CIA strike on a peaceful meeting in March 2011 –issued legal proceedings in March of this year against the Foreign Secretary in order to clarify the British Government’s reported policy of supporting the CIA’s covert campaign of attacks on his home region of Waziristan, using remotely-controlled robotic aircraft.
Supported by legal action charity Reprieve and solicitors Leigh Day & Co, Mr Khan’s legal challenge asserts that this practice are illegal. British law makes it clear that in these circumstances UK intelligence staff and those who direct their actions could be committing various criminal offences, including conspiracy to murder.
The rapid advance of drone technology has sparked interest by police and sheriff offices in acquiring drones. This new eagerness of many nonfederal law enforcement agencies to acquire drones has been also closely nurtured by the federal government.
Although 2012 saw an accelerating drawdown of the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) forces in Afghanistan, a grim aspect of that decade-long war—reliance on air strikes by unmanned drones—continued unabated. Indeed, those attacks were stepped up, with America’s use of drone warfare in Pakistan reaching an unprecedented height over the past year. With President Barack Obama re-elected and no longer facing the pressure of a campaign, it would be in America’s interest—and certainly in the interests of my country, Pakistan—to use the first year of his new term to de-escalate the violence.
Egyptian prosecutors launched an investigation on Tuesday against a popular television satirist for allegedly insulting the president in the latest case raised by Islamist lawyers against outspoken media personalities.
The final Green Left Report for 2012 features Christine Assange, mother of Julian Assange, on why the Australian government fears WikiLeaks, the problems of the corporate press, and the WikiLeaks releases that impacted the most on her.
The man's name and date of birth correspond with that given for one person in a secret 2010 cable sent by the US embassy in Canberra, detailing people to be added to the US government's Terrorist Screening Database. However, his family deny he was a member of any extremist group.
Because of Julian Assange’s effort, the world knows that heroic Ethiopians such as Andualem Aragie, Eskindir Nega, Reeyot Alemu, Woubshet Taye, and countless others are languishing in jail after being falsely accused of terrorism by a regime that is bankrolled by the U.S. Government and the European Union, and assisted by China.
Many Americans understood that the Dodd-Frank “reforms” were mostly worthless. They will not prevent another crisis or another massive TARP type bailout as the law did absolutely nothing about Too Big To Fail banks (which have actually gotten bigger).
Massachusetts' top securities regulator, William Galvin, charged on Monday that a top Morgan Stanley banker had improperly coached Facebook on how to disclose sensitive financial information selectively, perpetuating what he calls "an unlevel playing field" between Wall Street and Main Street.
1. It’s not a cliff.
As Americans experienced epic droughts, freakish hurricanes, and other extreme weather over the past few years, many are eager to see our nation secure a sustainable energy supply for the future that won’t break our climate. But others – most notably the polluting fossil fuel industries – are eager to double down on the same old technologies that are responsible for the climate crisis in the first place.
In short, John Boehner has committed himself to a set of principles for operating the House that makes the body fundamentally dysfunctional. A functional legislative body either needs a mechanism for the majority leader to get members of his caucus to toe the party line, or he needs the ability to “reach across the aisle” to get the votes he needs from the minority. John Boehner lacks the former, and by ruling out the latter he’s effectively painted himself into a corner where he might not be able to get any piece of “fiscal cliff” legislation passed by the full House of Representatives.
Anyone following the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) over the last 36 hours knows this has become a moment of high drama around the International Telecommunications regulations (ITRs) and the role of the ITU for Internet related issues. Unfortunately, that is probably the only thing anyone can say for certain. Even the member states on the ground have expressed confusion on critical matters, such as whether the widely reported "vote" on a resolution that included express language relating to the Internet [was really a vote or not].
“The good guys did not win—the terms are defined in such a way as to allow a significant amount of mischief in the Internet space,” Vint Cerf, the co-author of the TCP/IP protocol, and a founding father of the Internet itself, told Ars.
Across his Administration, President Obama has taken bold steps advancing a digital environment that rewards innovation and empowers individuals the world over. These ideas, and the policies that support them, are cornerstones of America’s economy. But the benefits from this approach extend well beyond the United States; they are equally important to the social and economic wellbeing of Internet users across the globe. This is why the United States is strongly represented at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) treaty conference in Dubai this month, where over 100 delegates from the public sector, private sector, and civil society are joining with our international partners to ensure the future of global, interoperable telecommunications networks.
A former telecommunications policy maker at the international organization, which is holding talks in Dubai to expand regulation of the Internet, warns that the group's conference is "absolutely absurd."
Internet pioneer Vint Cerf lashes out over the work being done by WCIT members in Dubai this week
Most countries at a conference on telecommunications oversight agreed Wednesday that a United Nations agency should play an "active" but not dominant role in Internet governance as they struggled to reach a worldwide compromise. As a marathon session at the UN's World Conference on International Telecommunications concluded at about 1:30 a.m. local time in Dubai (2130 GMT), the chairman asked for a "feel of the room" and then noted that the nonbinding resolution had majority support, while denying it was a vote.
Telecoms summit grinds to halt after China and Algeria object to human rights language, an interruption that follows a vote to give a U.N. agency a more "active" role in shaping the Internet.
The United States is refusing to sign a telecom treaty at a UN gathering in Dubai because it opens the door to governmental regulation of the Internet, the US delegation chief said Thursday. "The United States today announced it cannot sign (the treaty regulations) in their current form," Terry Kramer, head of the US delegation to the World Conference on International Telecommunications, said in a teleconference from Dubai.
A Missouri lawmaker is seeking to limit the use of drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles. The legislation would require law enforcement officers get a warrant before using a drone in Missouri.
Six years after a spying scandal rocked Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the boardroom caper came to a quiet close in a federal courtroom Thursday when a former private investigator was sentenced to three months in prison for his role in the pretexting scheme.
A class action lawsuit against Instagram has been filed in San Francisco federal court, following user outrage regarding the mobile photo sharing app's changed Terms of Service.
President Barack Obama has signed into law a five-year extension of the U.S. government's authority to monitor the overseas activity of suspected foreign spies and terrorists.
The warrantless intercept program would have expired at the end of 2012 without the president's approval. The renewal bill won final passage in the Senate on Friday.
The idea of watchful drones buzzing overhead like Orwellian gnats may seem far-fetched to some. But Congress, in its enthusiasm for a new industry, should guarantee the strongest protection of privacy under what promises to be a galaxy of new eyes in the sky.
China has tightened its rules on internet usage to enforce a previous requirement that users fully identify themselves to service providers.
Corporate Education Reform hurts children. This truth needs to be said a million times over. No longer can we allow reformers to hide behind the rhetoric of reform and ignore the realities. Words like "poverty is not destiny" "high expectations" "quality school options" and "choice" all mask the very real impact of these reforms. There are consequences to the disruption of school closings, to purposeful disinvestment in neighborhood schools, to layoffs of experienced educators, to the haphazard expansion of largely low-quality charters.
As most who read this blog know, I work in a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. Unlike many teachers out there who see only their small window of the reform world, I get to see the cross-section. Students cycle through my program so quickly (too quickly, thanks to massive cuts in mental health services) that I hear dozens of stories a week from all over the city and surrounding suburbs. And what's happening out there is beyond heart-breaking, it is wrong. Kids have come in to the hospital with massive anxiety, depression, and aggression related, in part, to school policies. I have students who report fear of “getting jumped” on the way to schools across town after their neighborhood school was shut down. I've had kids with school refusal due to the very real fear of a dangerous bus route through rival neighborhoods. Young people are afraid of the increases in violence and gang activity as kids from all parts of the city are thrust together in schools whose only response to the rage is zero tolerance lockdown. There is no healing, just ignoring and punishing the problem, pushing the fights off of school grounds. Almost every child I work with from the neighborhoods targeted for the brunt of school reform has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. They have difficulty sitting still, are quick to react to any perceived threat with violence or aggression, cannot concentrate on school work, and have come to hate the experience of school. And yet all they get from school leadership is school closures, fired teachers, and false choices.
A few weeks ago, we asked for your help to identify patent applications that threaten to stifle innovation in the 3D printing community. Now more than ever, it's critical to make sure the free and open source community and others who work in the space have freedom to operate and to continue to innovate. With your help, we have identified a lineup of top-priority patent applications that seem both overly-broad and dangerous to the free and open source community. Now it's time to find proof that these patent applicants do not deserve the monopolies they are asking for: that what they are trying to patent was known or was obvious before the patent was filed.
Kim Doctom could fill his own Year in Review list for 2012. The Megaupload mega-personality planned a cloud music service called Megabox. He unveiled a new domain, Me.ga, only to lose it in a preemptive strike by the African nation of Gabon. There were even rap songs and accusations against Joe Biden.
But hanging over all that was Dotcom's ongoing soap opera in New Zealand. On January 20, 2012, 76 police officers raided Dotcom's mansion on behalf of the US and took him into custody for extradition to face charges of racketeering, money-laundering, and copyright infringement. Twelve months later, the legal woes aren't over, and Megaupload remains down... but Dotcom is being invited to ceremonially turn on Christmas lights in the country.
Given recent reports that a Montreal-based company has captured data on one million Canadians who it says have engaged in unauthorized file sharing, it seemed like it was only a matter of time before widespread file sharing lawsuits came to Canada. It now appears that those lawsuits are one step closer as TekSavvy, a leading independent ISP, has announced that it has received a motion seeking the names and contact information of thousands of customers (legal documents here). To TekSavvy's credit, the company insists that it will not provide subscriber information without a court order and it has sent notices to affected customers.
The MPAA is still not happy with Google’s efforts to reduce online piracy and says that the search giant continues to facilitate a “staggering amount of copyright infringement.” For their part Google is warning policymakers of the damaging effects the recent surge of DMCA takedown requests is having on the flow of information online. Both Google and the MPAA agree that the current DMCA takedown procedures are not ideal, but the solutions both parties have in mind are quite different.
A court in China has ordered Apple to pay compensation to eight Chinese writers and two companies for violating their copyrights.