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Links 3/8/2014: Ubuntu 14.10 Alpha 2, XBMC Becomes 'Kodi'





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Mitro makes password manager open source as team heads to Twitter
    The team at Mitro Labs, the developer of a password manager, is joining Twitter, and its software is being released under a free and open source license, Mitro said Thursday.


  • Mitro Releases a New Free & Open Source Password Manager
    Today, Twitter acquired a password manager startup called Mitro. As part of the deal, Mitro will be releasing the source to its client and server code under the GPL.


  • GSA CIO calls for open source to be considered first
    Open source and open data solutions now should receive top consideration at the General Services Administration.

    Sonny Hashmi, the GSA chief information officer, said Thursday during an online chat with Federal News Radio that he recently signed out a memo requiring agency software developers to look at open source before they consider traditional commercial solutions.


  • SDN blogs: Open source SDN; SDN adoption pace remains high
    This week, SDN bloggers took a look at how open source SDN continues to take shape among vendors, how SDN adoption rates are higher than initially predicted, and all you need to know about OpenFlow.


  • New day dawns for open source
    One of the major driving forces behind the plethora of technological innovations in the cloud computing arena is the concept of open source software. With nearly one million open source projects related to the cloud believed to be in progress, new technologies such software as a service are on the rise.

    Companies are contributing more in terms of time, money and support for user-led open source initiatives, with big business benefits such as operational cost reductions, application flexibility and boosts to competitive advantage being on offer.

    Vendor-led development initiatives are gaining ground too, buoyed by massive collaboration projects on a global scale. The increasing ‘democratisation' of the open source world is a major contributor to its burgeoning success.


  • Open source IT is the way forward
    A PRESENTATION by the European nuclear research organisation CERN at the recent open source convention (OSCON) has provided a glimpse at where IT organisations are going to have to go in order to remain competitive. They will need to leave old legacy proprietary approaches behind and adopt open source.

    CERN collects huge volumes of data every day from thousands of detectors at its nuclear collider ring located under the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva. It organises and archives all of this data and distributes much of it to research scientists located throughout the world over high-speed internet links. It presently maintains 100 Petabytes of legacy data under management, and collects another 35 Petabytes every year that it remains in operation. One Petabyte comprises one million Gigabytes.


  • Bitnami Changes the Face of Application Deployment
    Brescia said that Bitnami's goal is to make it as easy to deploy an application on a server as it is to install an application on an endpoint computer. Bitnami has more than 90 different open-source applications and development environments in its software library that can be deployed with one-click installer packages on desktop, virtual machine and cloud deployments.


  • Belkin's WRT54G Router Successor Is Crap On The Software Front So Far
    Belkin revived the Linksys WRT54G in a new 802.11ac model earlier this year and one of its selling points has been the OpenWRT support as what made the WRT54G legendary. However, OpenWRT developers and fans are yet to be satisfied by this new router.


  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla



      • Want Firefox without Australis? Try Pale Moon
        If the release of Firefox's Australis interface got you down, there are Firefox-based alternatives out there with a more traditional Mozilla UI. One such alternative is Pale Moon and here's how you get it.






  • SaaS/Big Data



    • Contributing back as an OpenStack operator
      Paying talented developers to write high quality code isn't cheap; why on Earth would you then turn around and give that code to your competitors? Turns out, there's probably a competitive advantage in doing so.


    • ownCloud 7 Arrives with New Features and Improvements
      ownCloud Inc, the popular open source enterprise file sync and share project, has launched the latest ownCloud 7.


    • Cash and Development Resources are Heading Fast for Hadoop
      June and July brought lots of big news surrounding enterprise analytic data management powered by the open source Hadoop platform. Cloudera, focused on supporting enterprise Hadoop, announced in June that it raised a staggering $900 million round of financing with participation by top tier institutional and strategic investors. It also firmed up a partnership with Dell and Intel to launch a dedicated Dell In-Memory Appliance for Cloudera Enterprise that facilitates Hadoop-driven analytics.




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



  • CMS



    • TechCrunch Open Sources Its WordPress Async Task Library
      Back in early 2012, when the TechCrunch developer team (Nicolas Vincent, Alex Khadiwala, Eric Mann, and John Bloch) started working on the TechCrunch redesign, one of the main goals was to improve site performance. During the development process, we implemented several tools to help achieve that goal.




  • BSD



  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC



    • FSF at CommonBound conference on economic equality
      The FSF is happy to building bridges to new communities, and exploring the role of free software in social justice and economic change.


    • GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 18 new GNU releases!
      A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see https://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html. To submit new packages to the GNU operating system, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.


    • Recap of Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: August 1
      Join the FSF and friends every Friday to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones.




  • Public Services/Government



    • Open-Source Space
      As I write this, NASA has just passed another milestone in releasing its work to the Open Source community. A press release came out announcing the release on April 10, 2014, of a new catalog of NASA software that is available as open source. This new catalog includes both older software that was previously available, along with new software being released for the first time. The kinds of items available include project management systems, design tools, data handling and image processing. In this article, I take a quick look at some of the cool code available.

      The main Web site is at http://technology.nasa.gov. This main page is a central portal for accessing all of the technology available to be transferred to the public. This includes patents, as well as software.


    • CQC sticks with open source for data capture needs
      The commission's consideration of open source options for content management was based on Cabinet Office requirements for public sector organisations to look at potential alternatives to proprietary systems dating back to 2010.




  • Openness/Sharing



  • Programming



    • What's that? A PHP SPECIFICATION? Surely you're joking, Facebook
      A group of Facebook developers has decided to break with 20 years of tradition and release a formal specification for the PHP programming language.


    • Group Test: Linux Text Editors
      If you’ve been using Linux long, you know that whether you want to edit an app’s configuration file, hack together a shell script, or write/review bits of code, the likes of LibreOffice just won’t cut it. Although the words mean almost the same thing, you don’t need a word processor for these tasks; you need a text editor.

      In this group test we’ll be looking at five humble text editors that are more than capable of heavy-lifting texting duties. They can highlight syntax and auto-indent code just as effortlessly as they can spellcheck documents. You can use them to record macros and manage code snippets just as easily as you can copy/paste plain text.


    • August 2014 Issue of Linux Journal: Programming
      Programming always has been that "thing" people did that I never understood. You've heard me lament about my lack of programming skills through the years, and honestly, I never thought I'd need to learn. Then along came the DevOps mentality, and I started introducing programmatic ways of managing my system administration world. And you know what? Programming is pretty awesome.


    • Text Editors, Note Takers, and Program Languages
      Today in Linux news, Jack Germain has a look at the perfect note taker. The Linux Voice has a comparison of text editors for programmers and the Linux Journal introduces their current issue on program languages. In other news, XBMC becomes Kodi and Linux.com has 10 reasons to take the Linux Foundation's Introduction to Linux edX course.






Leftovers



Recent Techrights' Posts

Yes, Microsoft is the Problem
"I am no MS shill."
Another Failed Use Case for Chatbots (LLM): Legal Advice and Analysis
They're just some self-discrediting toy that costs way too much to operate
Nonfree Software in My Bank, by Richard Stallman
Updated 8 hours ago
 
Someone Should Remind Microsoft Lunduke That Microsoft Hires Many Sexual Criminals and Pedophiles as Well
Microsoft Lunduke on an "expedition" to find one or more perverts, then generalise to everyone in the "community"
Cash Machines (ATMs) Make Mistakes and They're Proprietary Software
Correcting mistakes is a colossal challenge
We Cover Topics Other Sites Are Too Afraid to Cover (Even When They Know the Facts)
It's not that they doubt the truth, they just realise there may be consequences for talking about it
They Try to Tell Us the Free Software Foundation Inc is Dying, But Its Revenue Doubled Since the Dot-Com Bubble Burst
Being in "Activism" is never easy; but it does positive things for society
It's About the Cost of Workers, Not the Fictional Skills Shortage (That Does Not Exist, the Media Spreads False and Sometimes Self-Fulfilling Narratives)
This issue isn't limited to computing, some dub it "globalism"
Links 29/07/2025: More Pushbacks Against Slop and More Praises of Tom Lehrer
Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/07/2025: Purple Yarrow and Understanding Op Amps
Links for the day
This Monday WebProNews Absolutely Flooded the Web With Fake (LLM Slop) 'Articles' About "Linux", Google News Promoted Them as Legitimate
All of the following are fake articles attributed to pseudonyms or authors that don't exist; the images are also slop. Why does Google promote these?
Linuxiac is Not a Slopfarm, But at Least Some of Its Articles Are Machine-Generated Fakes
what we said about it was correct
Expect More Microsoft Layoffs
"Are more job cuts coming?"
Microsoft Behaving Like It's Running Out of Money to Pay Salaries
Does that seem like the behaviour expected from a company which claims it is "worth" trillions?
LWN Downtime Due to Linode, Not LLM Bots
"I’ve received an email letting me know that there is a potential for data loss."
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 28, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, July 28, 2025
Links 28/07/2025: Science, Health, and Conflicts
Links for the day
Gemini Links 28/07/2025: Healthy Self-Image With Autism and a "New Life"
Links for the day
Links 28/07/2025: COVID-19 Sped up Brain Aging, "Circumvention is More Popular Than Compliance"
Links for the day
Richard Stallman is Usually Right Because He Thinks "Outside the Box"
he is able to observe society (mores and norms) as somewhat of an outsider
LWN Has Been Down for a Long Time, Another Casualty of LLM Bots?
Time will tell. How much time though?
Slopfarms Versus 'Linux' (and Against People Who Write Real Articles About GNU/Linux)
LLM slop in slopfarms by Brian Fagioli and Redazione RHC
Gemini Links 28/07/2025: Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray and Running pkgsrc in a FreeBSD Jail
Links for the day
Microsoft Turns News Sites Into Spamfarms
Is the site The Register MS the next IDG?
The Register MS/The Register US
On Saturday I contacted them for a comment (before issuing criticism)
Hacking revelations at Vatican Jubilee of Digital Missionaries
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 27, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, July 27, 2025
The Week to Come
Planning ahead
LLM Slop Has Only Been a Boon for Misinformation Online
The very same companies that were supposed to maintain quality (again, not limited to Google with PageRank) are now actively participating in generating and spreading slop
When They Tell You It's Free, Does That Mean No Charges (If So, Who's Paying and Why)?
there's "no free lunch"
We're Going to Focus Less on the Molotov Cocktail-Throwing Microsofters and More on Patents
We can get back to focusing on what we wanted to focus on all along
Just Trying to Keep Web Sites Honest (Journalistic Integrity)
the latest articles in LinuxIac are real
Links 27/07/2025: Political Affairs, Data Breaches, Attacks on Freedom of the Press
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/07/2025: Hot in Japan and Terminal Escape Codes
Links for the day
Links 27/07/2025: More Microsoft Layoffs Coming, Science and Hardware News
Links for the day
Links 27/07/2025: FSF Hackathon and "Hulk Hogan Was a Very Bad Man"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/07/2025: DAW Mixer Chains and Simple Software
Links for the day
The Register MS is Inventing or Giving Air Time to New Conspiracy Theories so as to Distort the Narrative As High-Profile Agencies Fall Prey to Microsoft Holes
But the problem is holes, i.e. Microsoft making bad products; the problem is Microsoft
Most Editors at The Register Are American, Including the Editor in Chief, a Decade-Long Microsoft Stenographer (Writing Prose to Sell Microsoft)
It's not easy to tell where the site is based (we tried) because it's hiding behind ClownFlare and CrimeFlare hasn't been well lately
Pushers of systemd Rewrite History (Richard Stallman Said UNIX "Was Portable and Seemed Fairly Clean")
Unlike systemd
"New Techrights" Soon Turns 2 (A Few Days Before the FSF Turns 40)
We have a lot more to say about LLM bots
When Silence Says So Much
Garrett, a 'secure' boot pusher, will need to defend himself in the UK High Court
The Register in Trouble
There is not much that can be done at this point
Trajectory of The Register: From News Site/s Into "B2B"... and Into Microsoft Salespeople
Something isn't right at The Register
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 26, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, July 26, 2025
Misinformation in Social Control Media
Social control media passes around all sorts of tropes
Slopwatch: Fake Linux 'Articles' and Slopfarms With "Linux" in Their Names/Domains
throwing bots at "Linux" to make some fake articles