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Links 26/6/2012: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is Coming



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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Virgin Atlantic IT director: airlines should work together on open source apps
    Virgin Atlantic’s IT director, David Bulman, has called upon the airline industry to work collaboratively on open source applications that create an emerging standard for re-use and allow passengers to avoid downloading multiple tools.


  • SourceForge submits Allura to Apache's Incubator
    SourceForge has announced that Allura, the software that powers the popular project hosting service, has been submitted to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator for consideration, the first step in the process of becoming a top-level Apache project. With this move, the organisation says that it hopes "to draw an even wider community of developers who can advance the feature set and tailor the framework to their needs."


  • SourceForge Sumits Allura To Apache Incubator


  • Giving the code away
    Why do corporations give away code under free and open source licences? What benefits do they derive and what are the pitfalls that can doom these code give-aways? And how do they make a real community grow around these projects? Richard Hillesley looks at the difficulties and rewards to giving away code.


  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 13 - a review of sorts
        By now, even your grandmother is using Firefox 13, so belated is my little review here. But it's only been about two weeks since it was birthed, and I have let everyone else get the first-story first-click glory. Now, I will give you a very reasonable tour of the latest release.

        Is it important enough to merit a separate article, you may ask? Well, the significance and scope of change is definitely less than what it used to be in the era of longer-term major number editions, but the particular version comes with some useful tricks. Firefox 13 is a gradual upgrade, worth its own little space in the blogosphere. Follow me.


      • Mozilla Firefox 13 Is Drawing Some Criticism
        If you've been using Firefox 13, you may have noticed how a particular new feature can expose your private browsing history. Specifically, the browser presents a thumbnail tab view of recently visited sites generated by taking snapshots as you surf from site to site. These thumbnails are aggregated on a page that effectively calls out all the sites you've visited. This feature even applies to SSL-protected sites, according to some users, and should be addressed by Mozilla. There are signs that the uptake of Firefox 13 is also going slower than planned.






  • SaaS

    • Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos Evolves His Cloud Approach
      Eucalyptus continues to update its private cloud software — delivering version 3.1 today. And CEO Marten Mickos continues to refine his management style at the open source company. So how has Mickos adjusted his approach at Eucalyptus vs. his previous role as CEO of MySQL, the open source database now owned by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL)? Here’s the update.


    • Eucalyptus moves back to full open source
      CEO of cloud software company Eucalyptus, Marten Mickos, has announced that the next release of Eucalyptus will exist only as one edition, ending the company's open source/enterprise versions which gave it open core styled product differentiation. Eucalyptus 3.1 will bring the company's full range of technologies into one version and the source code will be available through Github. All new development activity will occur on Github too, with defect and feature tracking made publicly available making it easier for any community member to follow the progress of an issue.


    • First commercial OpenStack VDI solution debuts


    • Great Open Source Cloud Debate Rages
      The role of open source firms has been to consolidate a set of rapidly occurring changes in a class of commercial software, frequently adding their own updates to the code and then commoditizing them in the marketplace. The Apache Web server did that. The JBoss Application Server under Marc Fleury's team of developers did it.




  • Databases



    • MemSQL - 80,000 queries per second
      Two former Facebook developers have created a new database that they say is the world’s fastest and a video to demonstrate its superiority compared to MySQL.




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • JavaFX 2.2 to allow native package creation
      Oracle says it intends to enable the next version of its JavaFX Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology to be natively packaged for various platforms. The process will be enabled by an application which can package exe and msi (for Windows), dmg (for Mac OS X) and rpm and zip (for Linux systems).




  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.8 Compiler - Is It Faster Yet?
      GCC 4.7 was released a few months back, but have changes in the trunk code-base -- for what will eventually become GCC 4.8 -- resulted in any major performance changes yet?

      GCC 4.8 will likely not be released until early 2013, but it's worth seeing if there's any performance changes early on in case the change is a regression or other issue. Plus GCC 4.8 will be competing with what will likely be LLVM/Clang 3.2 or LLVM/Clang 3.3.




  • Project Releases

    • Wireshark 1.8.0 can capture from multiple interfaces at once
      Support for capturing from multiple interfaces at the same time is one of the most notable improvements in the major update to the Wireshark network protocol analyser. Version 1.8.0 of the open source, cross-platform tool – used for network troubleshooting, analysis, development and education – also includes support for GeoIP IPv6 databases, and now allows users to add, edit and save packet and capture file annotations.




  • Public Services/Government

    • French government awards two million support contract for open source
      A two million euro, three to four year framework contract for providing open source support was awarded to open source specialist Alter Way, system integrator Capgemini and Java specialist Zenika by Disic, the central IT department for the French government. The three will provide support for no less than 350 open source tools used by 15 of the 22 ministries in France.




  • Open Hardware

    • Machine Speak: Robot Baby Learns Words
      "It is unclear why iCub should do any better than a nonphysical counterpart -- i.e., a software program designed to engage in conversation with a human trainer and learn from him to speak in a manner similar to language acquisition by infants," noted Ai Research President Yaki Dunietz. "It will be interesting to see how a bot who also possesses a physical body learns to speak better than a bodiless one."

      [...]

      DeeChee is designed on the open source iCub platform, which is available for anyone to create similar robots for a variety of types of research, including language acquisition.




  • Standards/Consortia





Leftovers



  • Hardware

    • Windows keyblet : no disruptive innovation, still not open source...
      Well, of course a keyblet is a fusion between a tablet and a keyboard. While the keyblet is presented by Microsoft as an innovation, we will see that it is not the case and that it will fail to offer a great experience both for PC/keyboard users and for touch-screen devices *touchlets?*.


    • Windows 8 Secure Boot: Two Linux Distros Respond
      First it was Fedora, which revealed its strategy late last month. Then, this week Canonical spoke up in turn with its own plans for Ubuntu Linux.

      The two distros are taking pretty different approaches. Here's an overview of what they've each said.


    • Solving the “Secure Boot” Problem: Don’t Let Windows 8 Secure Boot
      The division M$ has wrought in the ranks of OEMs and GNU/Linux distros has a very simple solution. OEMs can refuse to install M$’s key and the world will be at peace and “8″ will not boot on any PCs.




  • Security



    • Joomla 2.5.5 security updates arrives with added features - Update


    • Trojan.Milicenso: Another Reason to Avoid That Other OS


    • Trojan.Milicenso: A Paper Salesman’s Dream Come True
      Trojan.Milicenso may arrive on a compromised computer by various means, such as malicious email attachments or visiting websites hosting malicious scripts. The latter often unintentionally occurs when a user clicks a link in an unsolicited email. We have also encountered quite a large number of samples that appear to be packaged as a fake codec.


    • Sourcefire Pushes Open Source ClamAV Forward
      It's been five years since IPS vendor Sourcefire acquired ClamAV's intellectual property and personnel resources. Since then, the open source antivirus project has prospered under Sourcefire's guidance and is now complemented by commercial antivirus tools for consumer and enterprise marketsbased that are based on ClamAV.


    • How useful is antivirus software?
      It goes without saying that antivirus software can't catch everything. But, does it catch 10% or 90% of the malware targeted at Windows users?

      In a recent user group presentation, malware expert David Perry, of Comodo, said there are between 200,000 and 300,000 new viruses discovered every day (here "virus" is a generic term encompassing dozens of types of malware). They are built from kits and most circulate in the wild for a very short time, perhaps only a day. In other words, by the time they are detected, they're often out of circulation.




  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • New GM industry push in the UK
      BBC Radio 4 reported in its headlines this morning that the Agriculture Biotechnology Council had published a new report "Going for Growth", which calls for GM to be put at the heart of agricultural development in the UK. The BBC failed to point out that the misleadingly named ABC is actually a GM industry lobby group that represents BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont (Pioneer), Monsanto and Syngenta.






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