Still another explanation is that Windows procedures for moving information from one application to another were not designed with security in mind. Scripts, too, such as Word or Excel macros, can be saved in data files and can alter the way Windows works, with disastrous results.
Dear all, this is with a lot of struggles that we have finally managed to open the SFD 2010 registration! As you can see there is still a lot of ongoing work on the site, and this includes a New Wiki where you can create your team page, a new home page for all the information about Software Freedom International and other generic and important stuff and much more to come.
Last week I was invited to take some publicity shots for the Software Freedom Day Melbourne crew at the State Library of Victoria Experimedia centre. Asides from occasional complaints from my camera (the infamous Nikon ERR CHA happened 3 times) I managed to get about 200 shots which I’ve whittled down to 26 of the best and put them up as a set on Flickr.
Industry observers will be looking for answers to that question this week at the Linux Foundation's LinuxCon conference in Boston, where a wide range of participants, contributors and stakeholders in the Linux ecosystem will be gathering to discuss a broad range of topics.
A LinuxCon session led by Red Hat's Matthew Garrett discussed the lessons learned from Google's ongoing attempts to include power-management code in the mainline Linux kernel... and revealed there's still some emotions running high in the debate.
If there was any doubt that feelings are still running high regarding Android code's inclusion into the mainline Linux kernel, those doubts were quickly dispelled when Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett asked an audience member to leave the room as an argument began brewing between that audience member and another during the Q&A session of Garrett's talk at the 2010 LinuxCon in Boston today.
Ever wonder how lolspeak, the language of lolcats could be used to secure Linux?
At LinuxCon, Joshua Brindle from Linux security vendor Tresys (pic left) detailed something he called lolpolicy for making SELinux security policies easier to manage.
Colin Ian King, an Ubuntu Kernel Developer, has released Firmware Test Suite (fwts), a tool for the automatic testing of a PC's firmware. King explains in a blog posting that many subtle or vexing kernel issues can be caused when a PC's firmware is buggy and so a tool to automatically check for BIOS and ACPI errors is useful. Fwts incorporates over thirty tests and is able to offer advice on how to fix, or workaround issues, that it finds. In future, King plans to expand the number of tests whenever he finds an automatically diagnosable issue.
We've featured an open source SingStar-like karaoke game before, but if you're looking for something a bit simpler, OSD-Lyrics automatically downloads and displays lyrics for a ton of popular Linux media players.
If you've been looking for other alternate uses for your Linux-based HTPC, you can check karaoke machine off the list by installing OSD-Lyrics. Unlike previously mentioned UltraStar, it's not a full-fledged game; instead, it just displays lyrics for a number of different media players like Amarok, Banshee, Exaile, Rhythmbox, and Songbird (to name just a few).
Canonical's long-term goal is to see Ubuntu available to every organisation and individual on servers, desktops, laptops and netbooks. The company recently launched a virtual appliance of IBM's DB2 Express-C 'no-charge' community edition of DB2 software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform in both private and public cloud configurations.
IBM on Thursday will make a new release of Lotus Sametime available for purchase. Sametime version 8.5.1 introduces support for the latest releases of desktop and smart phone operating systems, as well as support for Linux on the desktop, and Linux running on the System z mainframe.
IBM AIX, Linux, IBM i and VMware are now supported and a Canadian data center is available to allay legal concerns about trans-border data flow.
The game should run well in Windows, but you may have trouble when attempting to install the game on Linux. Certain versions of the game reportedly do not work at all under Wine (A Windows program launcher for Linux), and there is no official support for the platform. A great game if your netbook is running Windows, but it may take a bit of work with Wine so Linux players may have trouble with this one. If you’re determined to get it going you can take a look at the WineHQ page here for more info.
Everybody who downloaded our game illegally (for free) has now a chance to redeem himself and get the latest version of the game (Win+Mac+Linux) and it’s fantastic Soundtrack only for $5 (instead of $20).
"With a proven track record of more than 190 installations, Raytheon High-Speed Guard is able to sustain full transfer rates on dual-processor commercial off-the-shelf servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with a strict Security Enhanced Linux policy," the company said.
After the first day of enthusiastic activities like talks and hands on workshops, the momentum had been set for the second day of the MiniDebConf. The proof for it was the missing students in the Seminar Hall, who were all busy in the lab since morning trying out packaging and other technical skills.
Although, the intervention was made by us, moving the talks scheduled for the day to the lab.
John Ferlito, president of Linux Australia, has said that the latest freeze on Debian 6.0 — known as "Squeeze" — means that users are likely to see a stable release within six months.
The Debian Project announced the freeze at its annual developer conference "Debconf10", meaning that no new features will be added to the release.
Here is the visual preview of Maverick Meerkat Alpha 3 or Ubuntu 10.10. It is running inside an Oracle VirtualBox. At the alpha stage you can't expect major changes from users point of view, but I noticed a new option 'Input Method Switcher' (image 6).
If you're in the same boat, you might be able to give that system a new lease on life. Jolicloud is a free, Linux-powered operating system designed specifically for netbooks. It's fast (way faster than Windows), easy to use, and better optimized for cloud computing.
There's great news in store for Synology Disk Station owners, in the form of a major update to the firmware. Although the current version - 2.3 - is well designed, Synology has clearly been busy completely redesigning the interface to its NAS products yet again.
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Rather than a website-like menu on the left, though, there's now a 'taskbar' at the top, which makes DSM 3.0 look a lot like Ubuntu Linux. In fact, there's more than a passing resemblence to Ubuntu in these screenshots. Given that the Disk Stations are Linux-based devices, this is no huge surprise.
Embedded Linux runs on virtually every smart phone today and will help support the 20 times more mobile data and 40 times more spending on mobile transactions that are forecast to occur in 2015.
As Nokia continues to work towards launching its MeeGo operating system, industry experts are speculating why the company continues to ignore Google's Android OS.
Many suggest that developing a smartphone to run on the Androind OS is Nokia's best chance for competing with market rivals.
The Nokia N900 is a touch screen and slider phone that has a QWERTY keypad. It is also Nokia's fist phone that runs Maemo5, a Debian Linux-based operating system that can run on computers and phones and it may end up being the only Nokia phone with Maemo5. This leads to the question is the N900 worth the purchase?
Nokia's head of sales and marketing, Niklas Savander, took part in a Q&A session on Twitter last Thursday to face consumer comments and questions directly.
The handset maker is banking its future on its new MeeGo OS. But success would come much easier if it just gave Google some love.
We saw our first images of the Desire HD over the weekend, and just as day follows night, video leaks typically follow pictorial ones. You'll already be familiar with the mooted specs -- including 720p HD video recording, WVGA screen resolution, and an 8 megapixel imager -- so what else does this handset tour reveal?
security applications, is now focusing on the world of mobile, this is due to many publications, which relate to information for each users main platform. For example, iPhone does not JailbreakMe, which opened the devices operating system could potentially destroy the security system is easy.
Divergent to Apple, Android gives the users the control to evaluate an app before it is installed. Security research firm, Lookout recently discovered that apps found on the Android are frequently not capable to gain access to a person’s contact data.
Within one day sells about 160.000 phones with Android on board, while at the same time is only 95.000 new iPhone owners. RIM sells the BlackBerry 120.000 per day.
A home grown operating system, GNU/Linux based Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS) with Indian language support, has been developed by NRCFOSS. BOSS desktop version 3.1 and BOSS server version 1.0 have been released for deployment. Currently the BOSS Desktop version supports 18 Indian languages – Assamese, Bengali,Bodo, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. BOSS comes with features like multimediasupport, cameras and scanners, USB devices, on-line dictionary, internet tools and support for integrating mobile internet devices etc. BOSS can be downloaded for installation from http://www.bosslinux.in. Both BOSS desktop and server versions have obtained Linux Standard Base (LSB) certification from “The Linux Foundation” which ensures that any LSB (Linux Standard Base) certified application will work correctly on BOSS. BOSS has implemented the security features such as Security Audit, Cryptographic Support, Objectreuse functionality, User Data Protection, Identification and Authentication, Security Management etc.
One of my recurring themes in this blog is related to the advantages that OSS brings to the creation of new products; that is, the reduction in R&D costs through code reuse (some of my older posts: on reasons for company contribution, Why use OSS in product development, Estimating savings from OSS code reuse, or: where does the money comes from?, Another data point on OSS efficiency). I already mentioned the study by Erkko Anttila, “Open Source Software and Impact on Competitiveness: Case Study” from Helsinki University of Technology, where the author analysed the degree of reuse done by Nokia in the Maemo platform and by Apple in OSX. I have done a little experiment on my own, by asking IGEL (to which I would like to express my thanks for the courtesy and help) for the source code of their thin client line, and through inspecting the source code of the published Palm source code (available here). Of course it is not possible to inspect the code for the proprietary parts of both platforms; but through some unscientific drill-down in the binaries for IGEL, and some back of the envelope calculation for Palm I believe that the proprietary parts are less than 10% in both cases (for IGEL, less than 5% – there is a higher uncertainty for Palm).
Oracle has announced the availability of version 3.2.8 of its open source VM VirtualBox desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. The latest maintenance update includes several bug fixes and a number of changes over the previous 3.2.6 release from late June, including various stability improvements.
In the open-source world we’ve been “hell-bent on deepening relationships with customers” through support (in whatever guise), but if the HBR article is correct, this is the very thing that will be most likely to be dropped the minute a customer can. And, in fact, this is precisely what happens, as Jon Williams (formerly of Kaplan Test) famously pointed out at OSBC years ago.
So what’s the right revenue model?
Red Hat has a good model in which it packages up support as an ongoing stream of software updates, patches, etc. (Red Hat Network) Salesforce has an even better model, frankly, wherein it delivers the updates as part of the application: support is just part of the overall experience. But it’s not really an open-source model, so I’ll disregard it here.
Red Hat’s model, admirable though it may be, is not ideal for all kinds of open-source companies. For example, it is a poor fit for a Java application like Alfresco, my past employer. We considered it but there weren’t enough moving parts in the application itself to make an RHN service compelling enough in itself to justify buying an Alfresco subscription. (Red Hat’s model works precisely because Linux is so complex.)
Nor does Red Hat’s model work in the case of Canonical, my current employer, which has made a commitment to make all software – including bug fixes, updates, etc. – completely unfettered for customers and non-customers alike. (This isn’t to say that RHEL is proprietary, but only that easy access to the code, including ongoing maintenance, is available under a subscription.)
The GNU Compiler Collection version 4.5.1 has been released.
It had included BusyBox software in its high definition TVs. BusyBox is a set of programs for embedded systems, part of which was written by Erik Anderson. He released his software under the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2, a licence used by open source programmers that allows others to use material for free under certain conditions.
The article discusses the travails of Mathew Burton, a former analyst and software programmer at the Department of Defense who spent years trying to get the software he wrote into the hands of those who desperately needed it. But alas, no one could figure out the licensing rights for the software it was supposed to work with... so it never went anywhere. Today Mathew has (unsurprisingly) left Defense and has open sourced the code so that anyone can use it. The lesson? The tangled mess of navigating all the license agreements isn't protecting anyone and certainly not the public. It's just preventing interesting new and derivative works from being used to render American safer.
In short, the crises here doesn't have to do with size of government, but in a misplaced desire by many governments to protect "intellectual property."
Now I understand the need of government to protect physical property. A forest, for example, can only be logged once every few generations, so allocating that resource efficiently matters. But intellectual property? Things like documents, data, and software code? It's use is not diminished when someone uses it. Indeed, often its value increases when numerous people start to use it.
Throughout all of this accept that as research becomes less directed or applied that the measurement becomes harder, the error margins larger, and picking of winners (already difficult) near impossible. Consider mechanism to provide baseline funding at some low level, perhaps at the level of 25-50% of a PhD studentship or technician, direct to researchers with no restrictions on use, across disciplines with the aim of maintaining diversity, encouraging exploration, and maintaining capacity. This is both politically and technically difficult but could have large dividends if the right balance is found. If it drops below an amount which can be useful when combined between a few researchers it is probably not worth it.
If the Smithsonian Commons project is any indication, the answer is yes. I talked to Michael Edson, director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian about the project.
Meet All Our Ideas, the “suggestion box for the digital age“: a crowdsourcing platform designed to crowdsource concepts and opinions rather than facts alone. The platform was designed by a team at Princeton under the leadership of sociology professor Matt Salganik — initially, to create a web-native platform for sociological research. (The platform is funded in part by Google’s Research Awards program.) But its potential uses extend far beyond sociology — and, for that matter, far beyond academia. “The idea is to provide a direct idea-sharing platform where people can be heard in their own voices,” Salganik told me; for news outlets trying to figure out the best ways to harness the wisdom and creativity and affection of their users, a platform that mingles commenting and crowdsourcing could be a welcome combination.
Even China and South Korea, both of which have made rapid progress in science and technology in the past decade or two, have not taken full advantage of the open access movement.
The Federal Trade Commission said today that it had permanently killed the operations of a group that it said posed as domain name registrars and convinced thousands of US consumers, small businesses and non-profit organizations to pay bogus bills by leading them to believe they would lose their Web site addresses if they didn't.
Technology can certainly make for some interesting clashes with regulatory regimes. Social networking, for example, starts to bring up all sorts of questions about the fine line between certain regulated areas of advertising, and basic free speech communication issues. Eric Goldman points us to the news that the FDA is warning pharma giant Novartis (pdf) over its use of a "Facebook Share" widget on its site promoting the drug Tasigna (a leukemia drug).
How many CEOs will the Hewlett-Packard board have to force out before it realizes that the person who should have succeeded Lew Platt back in 1999 is Ann Livermore, the HP veteran running the company’s enterprise business? If the board blows it again and fails to name Livermore to replace ousted chairman and CEO Mark Hurd, the way it blew it when Carly Fiorina was booted out in 2005, the wasted opportunity will be inexcusably senseless.
A Transportation Security Administration agent has been arrested for allegedly stealing nearly $500 dollars from a wheelchair bound passenger as she passed through a security checkpoint at Newark Airport.
It was snug, round and had a stunning view of a lake, and its residents liked it so much that they stayed put for several hundred years.
Welcome to the oldest house in the UK, newly unearthed by archaeologists amid a series of finds which are changing our knowledge of the earliest Britons.
The Obama administration has asked Britain, Germany, Australia, and other allies to consider criminal charges against Julian Assange for his Afghan war leaks. Philip Shenon reports.
One of the alleged ringleaders behind the 2008 hack of RBS WorldPay has been extradited to the U.S., where he was arraigned Friday in the Northern District of Georgia on charges that he helped coordinate the global $9.5 million bank card heist.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology quietly published a list late Sunday of 2,087 steel mills, cement works and other energy-intensive factories required to close by Sept. 30.
Energy analysts described it as a significant step toward the country’s energy-efficiency goals, but not enough by itself to achieve them.
Global warming is one of those really strange, politically-charged topics. Politics is weird that way. Sometimes really obvious things, like rising global temperatures, become wedge issues between the political parties.
On one level, it makes sense. If the world is getting warmer and we’re all doomed, fixing the problem could get expensive. After all, environmentally-sound behavior isn’t necessarily cheap.
Thanks to a better-than-expected response rate, lots of advertising and a little luck, the Commerce Department announced today that it is returning to the Treasury $1.6 billion in savings from the 2010 Census.
I joined Goldman Sachs in 2005, after five flailing years in a physics Ph.D. program at Berkeley.
The average salary at Goldman Sachs in 2005 was $521,000, and that’s counting each and every trader, salesperson, investment banker, secretary, mail boy, shoe shine, and window cleaner on the payroll. In 2006, it was more like $633,000.
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Wall Street, like Scientology, has an all-inclusive and claustrophobic value system all its own. Particularly at Goldman Sachs, which prided itself as a breed apart from other firms, this provincialism went even further. Former employees who had left Goldman were rarely mentioned. The unanimous phrase for it was ‘no longer with the firm,’ said in the same tone used to describe the passing of a family member.
This tendency reached the height of comedy inside the strategies division, where some of the quants published academic papers on the more theoretical aspects of their work. If an author quit Goldman though, his name would be removed from the official version of the publication. It got to the point that some papers had no authors, and had apparently written themselves. So it goes. No longer with the firm.
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The Goldman meat grinder doesn’t really need me. It doesn’t really need you either, gentle reader. That feel-good saying that made the rounds on Twitter a couple months ago is actually totally right: go out and write your own story, or you’ll just be a character in someone else’s.
House Democrats on Tuesday pushed through a $26 billion jobs bill to protect 300,000 teachers and other nonfederal government workers from election-year layoffs.
The bill would be paid for mainly by closing a tax loophole used by multinational corporations and reducing food stamp benefits for the poor. It passed mainly along party lines by a vote of 247-161.
The president’s comment came the same day that G.M.’s chief executive, Edward E. Whitacre Jr., avowed, “We don’t want to be known as Government Motors,” and told an industry conference, “If you liked our first-quarter financial results, stay tuned for our second-quarter financial results.”
As Federal Reserve policymakers meet Tuesday, they will face the challenge of a faltering economic recovery without a clear consensus on what, if anything the central bank should do about it.
Fed leaders still think that the recovery is on track, though the pace of growth has slowed and the risks of a dip back into recession have risen since their last policymaking meeting in late June.
Keeping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in business will cost taxpayers billions. But getting the federal government out of the mortgage business would cost home buyers dearly, in the form of higher interest rates.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday that tough economic times require that he shutter a major command that employs some 5,000 people around Norfolk, Va., and begin to eliminate other jobs throughout the military.
Birkenfeld got paid, too: A starting salary of 180,000 Swiss francs (just over $170,000) plus an American-style bonus, which in his best year, he said, put him at one million Swiss francs in total compensation (about $946,000). When home from the road, Birkenfeld drove a BMW M5 and split time between a plush apartment in Geneva and a chalet in the shadow of the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps. Id, Part II.
A confidential, seven-page Google Inc. "vision statement" shows the information-age giant in a deep round of soul-searching over a basic question: How far should it go in profiting from its crown jewels—the vast trove of data it possesses about people's activities?
I am baffled by the Google-Verizon agreement on nonnet-nonneutrality. I’m mostly baffled by why Google would put its name to this. What does it gain?
As I see it, the agreement makes two huge carve-outs to neutrality and regulation of the internet: mobile and anything new.
South Korean police raided Google Inc's Seoul office on Tuesday, the latest in a series of legal challenges the company is facing because of data collected by its controversial fleet of "Street View" cars.
The Verizon-Google Net neutrality deal is now public. In brief: neutrality for Plain Old Internet, transparency but not neutrality for wireless, and nothing for “Additional Online Services” unless they “threaten the availability” of POI. They’re pushing their plan as a legislative framework.
The question is, why would Google do this?
Is it a matter of corporate naivete? Verizon is, at base, a telephone company; it thrives in the interstices of state regulation the way small marine organisms thrive inside the nooks and crannies of a coral reef. That is its preferred habitat. Its organizational culture evolved there and it is brilliantly adapted to it. Google is a company built by engineers.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving short shrift to processing DNA from missing persons cases, taking as long as two years to handle profiles, according to a Department of Justice Office of Inspector General report.
Overall, about 40 percent of the FBI’s backlog of processing 3,200 DNA profiles stems from missing persons cases, according to Monday’s report.
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“Backlogs can also prevent the timely capture of criminals, prolong the incarceration of innocent people who could be exonerated by DNA evidence, and adversely affect families of missing persons waiting for positive identification of remains,” the report added.
We've covered a few different recent stories of various sports leagues or professional sports teams trying to limit how journalists and photographers can report on their games, and have even covered cheeky attempts to get around such restrictions by having reporters cover events from home while watching on TV. Now, a whole bunch of you have been sending in variations on a story in the UK, where the Southampton football team apparently has decided to ban photojournalists from taking images of matches, instead telling newspapers they need to buy photos from the team's "official" photographer.
Take.fm is a new movie torrent indexer that is a step above the plain old torrent indexes most BitTorrent users have become used to. The site, which only lists verified and high quality releases, combines a pleasant and great looking user interface with all the functionality needed to find the best films.
When an edition of the Sunday Times newspaper included a free CD of a Jimi Hendrix concert without the permission of Hendrix's estate it deprived the estate and two film-makers of potential profits for a year, the High Court has found.
The paper believed it had permission from the concert's rights holder to distribute the CD but the musician's estate said that it had not. The paper will not have to pay additional damages, though, because it had genuinely attempted to licence the music, the Court said.
The research compared the book markets in the UK (with a strong copyright law) and Germany (with either weak or non-existent copyright), and found much more writing going on in Germany and (more importantly) much more innovation in the bookselling market. In the UK, where copyright limited printings, books were expensive and only owned by the wealthy and elite. In Germany, where copyright was weak or didn't exist, certainly there was a fair amount of copying of other books, but it resulted in widespread innovation in the book market, including segmenting the market into hardcovers (for the wealthy and the elite) and cheaper paperbacks for those less well off.
Richard Stallman Speech Sina 2005-09