Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 11/4/2010: Oracle Loses Gosling, Google Funds Ogg



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • A word (or two) about Linux desktop security
    All things considered, I still believe that Linux desktop security is superior to that of Windows in a home environment. Here's why:

    - The default firewall setup offers a very safe configuration off the bat.

    - The software repository model is safer.

    - Viruses are no concern.

    - Social engineering is definitely a threat, but following a few simple guidelines should keep it safe.

    Some have raised a very valid concern about the lack of reactive security in the Linux Desktop. Unlike Windows users, we have nothing to fix or even detect the situation once security is compromised. While I agree with such concerns, in my opinion all that means is that Linux users need to approach security differently to Windows users. Windows users have grown accostumed to a reactive model. They have a wide variety of tools to detect a security threat and kill it. The key to Linux desktop security is to take a proactive approach: Preventing over healing.

    To me, it boils down to this: Linux desktop users are safe as long as they follow a few best practices, which is more than what Windows users can say today, even with the help of an antivirus. In addition, in the event of security being compromised, the severity of damage is generally much more limited.


  • Dear XM Radio…




  • Kernel Space

    • Autonomously Generating An Ideal Kernel Configuration
      While most Linux users are fine with just using the kernel supplied by their distribution vendor, there are some enthusiasts and professional users who end up tweaking their kernel configuration extensively for their needs, particularly if they are within a corporate environment where the very best performance and reliability is demanded for a particular workload.






  • Applications





  • Distributions



    • Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 10.04 inspired wallpaper
        Today, we would like to present you a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 inspired wallpaper, brought to you by Opentechblog.com to accompany your morning coffee.


      • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS comes with Impressive Feature Set
        Its the time to gear up for the next version of Ubuntu. Codenamed Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu 10.04 is slated to hit on 29th April 2010. Let’s have a look at the changes & new features to be incorporated in this new Ubuntu LTS(Long Term Support) release.


      • Ubuntu 10.04 gets a new sleek installer
        The recent Beta 2-release of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) features a new sleek installer that brings a fresh breeze of professionalism into the installation procedure.


      • Ubuntu Is A Poor Standard Bearer For Linux
        So how do we, in the Linux press make people outside of the Linux community aware that Linux does not equate to Ubuntu? That is the real challenge we now face if we want Linux to be more widely accepted.


      • Testing and Feedback in Ubuntu
        I was reading an article about how Ubuntu is a bad standards barer for the “Linux” desktop. I’ll leave aside how paradoxical the brand “Linux” is used to mean desktop when it means nothing of the sort and I assume she means FreeDesktop (FDO).

        But I was struck by the problems that she has had and the comments to the entry. When comparing them to my own support roster for the past few months of sudden grub mortality (8 cases) where grub just looses all ability to boot anything with cryptic errors such as “Invalid symbol ‘u’ found” and ‘Error 15′.


      • Crashes with Ubuntu 10.04 beta 2
        I have been using Ubuntu 10.04 since beta 1 and it has been quite stable until this week.


      • Ubuntu developers make their first MAJOR mistake with 10.04


      • Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 2 Kernel
        Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 2 uses a kernel based on version 2.6.32.9 (2.6.32-16.25). But already now the current stable version is 2.6.33.2 so I would not be surprised if the release would be based on this one (or even a newer one). Check your kernel version with the command uname -r (from your terminal). If you have a new computer with dual core, i5 or i7 processor, then you should consider updating your kernel to a kernel where support for older cpu€´s are removed. You can try to use the server version of the kernel instead of the generic one.


      • Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release schedule
        Ubuntu 10.10 will released on October 28, 2010.

        June 03rd, 2010 – Alpha 1 release

        July 1st , 2010 – Alpha 2 release

        August 12th, 2010 – Alpha 3 release

        September 2nd, 2010 – Alpha 4 release

        September 23th , 2010 – Beta release

        October 21st , 2010 – Release Candidate

        October 28th, 2010 – Final release of Ubuntu 10.10

        Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release schedule








    • Mint









  • Devices/Embedded



    • Phones

      • Mobile Apps: Strike While Iron's Still Hot
        According to ABI Research, people will download around 6 billion mobile apps in 2010, up from an estimated 2.4 billion downloaded in 2009. The main drivers for the increase: the rise to the rapid adoption of smartphones (which had a 20% sales growth in 2009) and the proliferation of App stores for those platforms. And with two new platforms set to debut later this year (Samsung's Bada OS and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7), the growth will only continue.




      • Android

        • iPhone OS 4.0: The great Android 2.1 imitator
          Last year I wrote an article, which explored the nature of the rivalries between the big three: Google, Apple and Microsoft. In that article, I posited that Google’s entry into smartphones, the development of Chrome, and the firm’s titanic efforts in the cloud and with advertising not only obsoleted Microsoft’s presence in these spaces, but elevated Google to Microsoft’s old role as Apple’s arch nemesis.


        • And The Next Battle Is Apple vs. Google... As Microsoft/Yahoo Fade Off Into The Sunset?
          While plenty of virtual ink has been spilled over the Google/Apple device battles, could they be approaching a bigger online battle as well? It's certainly not outside the realm of possibility -- and given its control over the devices it sells, perhaps it could get a pretty good starting position with a search engine. Still, it does seem like a bit of a reach for Steve Jobs and company. At this point, it seems more like some analyst just looking for a more interest "Google vs." prediction than anything serious at this point.


        • Google’s Android Operating System Makes Profits
          Verizon supported the Android 2.0 gadget with a $1 million marketing promotion, which helped the company make hundreds and thousands of sales of Droids at the time of holidays.


        • Android builds its app arsenal: applications
          GOOGLE'S Android phone operating system is moving into more new handsets as the battle for smartphone supremacy heats up.


        • Is Steve Jobs Ignoring History, Or Trying To Rewrite It?
          Still, it seems like history could repeat itself, with the rest of the industry closing the innovation gap with Apple fast. With Google subsidizing the mobile OS, other phone manufacturers have an economic advantage as well. Jobs is trying everything he can to hold back the Android advance, including suing HTC, the largest manufacturer of Android phones. He is fighting Google with everything he’s got—undercutting Google’s pending acquisition of AdMob by entering the mobile advertising market and creating fear among Android partners with his patent lawsuit.


        • Vodafone launching its own ‘Android App Shop’ in Europe, this June
          Here's some good news if you're in one of the many European DEAD ZONES where Google has yet to launch official access to the Android Market - Vodafone is launching its own app-selling shop front to sell Android apps to its customers.












    • Sub-notebooks

      • Android on x86: report
        Since I expect Android on tablets to be a big thing in 2010, I am experimenting with the closest thing I can get: Android in my eee 701 Surf 4G...


      • Asus Eee Nettop Available With Red Flag Linux Pre Installed
        This article is provided by third party writers who are not affiliated with DailyBreakNews.com. We do not endorse or create these articles. If you have questions, comments or concerns about any of the articles on this site, please contact us.

        The Asus Eee Box has got the Chinese Linux distribution, The Red Flag Linux, which is going to help you to buy it. The coolest thing is the price of this Asus Eee Box. The features for this model are just the way they were supposed to be. The complete features of this Asus Eee Box are not yet know, but we have go few of the features which this model does carry.Spec Details :1) Red Flag Linux2) Atom N270 processor3) 160GB hard drive4) 1GB of RAM5) standard Intel integrated graphics












Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source is a rubber ball
    If an open source project turns proprietary then there will be a fork and the open source lives on. The open source culture is all about freedom. Freedom of information. Those who try and limit their information only end up limiting themselves, not those around them. This is why proprietary companies have come and gone yet open source has out lived them all. When those proprietary companies head off to the failed company afterlife. All of their secrets and locked in knowledge, goes with them. When individual open source projects are shut down then nothing is lost. The information is still available for effective usage in other projects.


  • A challenge to alter Open Source landscape
    If the community-driven Open Source application development is to be considered the new age equivalent of the hippie movement, the coding community goes through a Summer of '69 almost every year.

    Coding challenges like the Google Summer of Code (SoC), organised between May and August, have, in many ways, altered the landscape of Open Source endeavours.

    UNIX was written by one person in a month, but today the space has been democratised, and an enthusiastic under-grad sending in an important bug fix becomes the new star on an Open Source mailing list.


  • Firefox 3.7 nightly adds built in option for tabs-on-top
    Mozilla's been playing around with interface changes in Firefox 3.7 for a while -- there's the updated default theme and built-in glass support (which made a very brief appearance and has yet to return). In yesterday's nightly build, another UI option appeared: a simple right-click allows you to move your tabs to the top of the browser window.




  • Oracle

    • Time to move on...


    • “Father of Java” Resigns from Sun/Oracle
      This would, perhaps, be the second most shocking/sad news after the resignation of Jonathan (former Sun CEO). I’m sad and upset after hearing the confirmed news that James Gosling will be leaving Sun/Oracle.


    • Java founder James Gosling leaves Oracle
      James Gosling, the creator of the Java programming language, has resigned from Oracle, he announced in a blog entry on Friday

      Gosling resigned on April 2 and has not yet taken a job elsewhere, he reported.

      "As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good," he wrote.

      Gosling was the chief technology officer for Oracle's client software group and, before that, the chief technology officer of Sun's developer products group.






  • Openness

    • Open Source Spying: 2010
      In 2006, Clive Thompson wrote in a watershed New York Times Magazine article “Billions of dollars’ worth of ultrasecret data networks couldn’t help spies piece together the clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So perhaps, they argue, it’s time to try something radically different. Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?” (Open-Source Spying) At the Gov 2.0 Expo, Clive Thompson will discuss the progress made in the Intelligence Community since that 2006 with Matthew Burton, Chris Rasmussen, and Lewis Shepherd.






  • Standards/Consortia

    • Interesting times for Video on the Web
      If I told you that Google had helped fund an ARM code optimised version of the Theora video codec, most people’s reaction would be immediately to skip forward to the next blog entry. Audio and video codecs are the classic example of things that no one cares about, until they don’t work.

      Ask most computer users what their preferred video codec is and they’ll look at you as if you asked what sort of motor they’d prefer in their washing machine. “We just want it to work!” they say. In this regard, it’s exactly the same for content creators and publishers. Every visitor to a website that can’t view a video is one set of eyeballs less for a message to get through to. It doesn’t matter how clever the advertising is, how much time is spent honing the message or how many clever viral tricks are deployed to attract surfers to the site, the moment the page opens up with a big blank box where the content should be, all that has been in vain.

      [...]

      Fortunately, there is some good news in the form of HTML 5. This new version of HTML (the basic language used to write webpages) introduces a video element.


    • Apple Slaps Developers In The Face
      The fact that Apple would make such a hostile and despicable move like this clearly shows the difference between our two companies.








Leftovers

  • Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?
    In junior high school, one of my classmates had a TV addiction — back before it was normal. This boy — we'll call him Ethan — was an encyclopedia of vacuous content, from The A-Team to Who's the Boss?




  • Crime





  • Finance

    • Big Banks Mask Risk Levels
      Major banks have masked their risk levels in the past five quarters by temporarily lowering their debt just before reporting it to the public, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

      A group of 18 banks—which includes Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc.—understated the debt levels used to fund securities trades by lowering them an average of 42% at the end of each of the past five quarterly periods, the data show. The banks, which publicly release debt data each quarter, then boosted the debt levels in the middle of successive quarters.








  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights







  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM





  • Copyrights

    • Digital decay and the archival cloud
      Up to now, there has been one characteristic of digital recordings that has provided an important counterweight to the fragility of digital media - it's what Bollacker refers to as "data promiscuity." Because it's easy to make copies of digital files, we've tended to make a lot of them. The proliferation of perfect digital copies has provided an important safeguard against the loss of data. An MP3 of even a moderately popular song will, for instance, exist on many thousands of computer hard drives as well as on many thousands of iPods, CDs, and other media. The more copies that are made of a recording, and the more widely the copies are dispersed, the more durable that recording becomes.


    • Copyright 1710-2010 “For the encouragement of learning”
      The world’s first copyright law was passed by the English Parliament on 10 April 1710 as ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning’. Its 300th anniversary provides a unique opportunity to review copyright’s purposes and principles. If today we were starting from scratch, but with the same aim of encouraging learning‚ what kind of copyright would we want?








  • Digital Economy Bill

    • Digital economy bill: A quick guide
      The controversial Digital Economy Bill may have had a few parts stripped out, it may even be a damp squib. But the remaining, 76-page bill is still a wide-ranging piece of media and technology reform.

      Confused? Read our clause-by-clause guide to the bill as it stands now after being adopted by the House Of Commons and as it awaits Royal Assent …










Clip of the Day



SourceCode Season 3 - Episode 5: First Nation rights (2006)

[an error occurred while processing this directive]



Recent Techrights' Posts

What Happened to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Elections: The Purge, the Cover-up, and the Witch-hunts
OSI has gone "full Microsoft"
What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
resist, do not capitulate
Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
 
In 24 Countries Observed by statCounter Vista 11 is Still Less Than a Quarter of Windows Users Despite All Other Versions Being 'Expired'
They ought to move to GNU/Linux
Ensuring That Every Computer User Anywhere in the World Can Take Control of All His or Her Computers
We must fight the people who attack general-purpose computing, in particular those who push this agenda very aggressively inside Linux
Links 27/04/2025: Pope Goodbyes, "Politics of Fear", Slop Redux and More Google Shutdowns (Google Debt Had Grown This Year)
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Serenity Dialectics, Hockey Jersey Ethics, and More
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Death of Nest Thermostats, Death of Metaverse
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Projects Workflow and Discovering Technology
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 26, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, April 26, 2025
Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
To them, it's either Google or Yandex
In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
Site May be Even Faster Now
It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
It's not happening only in Lenovo
What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
We're only getting started
More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
Links for the day
In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025
Links 25/04/2025: Slop Fatigue and Patent Judges Flocking to Fake, Unconstitutional and Illegal Kangaroo Court (UPC, Captured 'Justice')
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/04/2025: Night Manager and Devuan in Hosting
Links for the day
Approaching 10,000 Articles/Pages Since Going Static
Trying to silence or derail the site was always a dumb strategy
Windows Falls to New Lows in Nicaragua, Now Below a Quarter (It Used to be Almost 100%)
Another all-time low for Windows
Microsoft is Shedding Off Loads of Staff and That Can be Dangerous Too
Working for Microsoft is a choice; nobody forces you to do it
Richard Stallman and the Unix Philosophy
When asked about systemd people must remember that RMS speaks as an active Board member of the FSF and also the founder of the FSF
The Cost (to Linux) of LLM Slop
Slop 'artists' like Fagioli are far from harmless
Links 25/04/2025: Ubisoft Spyware, Hegseth Fails at Tech on Every Level
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/04/2025: Food Forest Update and Facebook Destroying the Net
Links for the day
Get Rid of Back Doors, Don't Obsess Over Bounties and Other Corporate PR Stunts (or Needless Reboot Rituals)
Security as a term has mostly lost its meaning due to repeated misuse for many years
Serial Sloppers Are Killing the Web (They Probably Don't Care, Either)
Slop is a disease on the Web
Streaming Apps Are “Investor Fraud” That Kills the Planet
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Things Get Increasingly Nasty at Microsoft Ahead of the Fake Results and May's Mass Layoffs Wave
They try to get people to 'resign' so that they won't count as layoffs and the company's 'wellbeing' will seem better
IBM's Debt Ballooned by 8.5 Billion Dollars in Just 3 Months!
Hallmark of a company in a state of disarray, trying to spend its way out of trouble
Big Trouble in GNOME
even GNOME people admit the CoC went wrong
Slopping the Trough: Disney Plus Loses Billions and the Decline of Physical Media in America
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 24, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, April 24, 2025