Chrome OS has been taking huge strides off late, what with Android apps finally making an appearance on selected Chromebooks. However, some would argue that wouldn’t an Android build designed for desktop be better than Chrome OS running Android apps. Also, while Android apps add functionality to Chrome OS, the base features remain the same.
One thing that open source teaches us is that software is a negotiation, with all of the good and the bad that implies. Sometimes we have to bend and twist software to get things to work. For instance, as a Linux user, I’ve often struggled downloading digital music from Amazon. Right now, as I write this, I’m able to download my purchases like a normal human being, but prior to this recent detente, downloading my Amazon purchases meant configuring my browser to identify as being Firefox on Windows, downloading proprietary .amz files, and using a command line utility to open those files (while it sounds awful, once I figured out the process, it didn’t take much longer than downloading a zipped file of MP3s). Open source taught me resilience and flexibility in terms of using different tools to accomplish my goals, rather than just accepting Amazon’s limitation. I wanted to use Amazon and I wanted to use Linux and I didn’t think the two ideas should be mutually exclusive.
I have been learning Linux since the last few weeks. By learning, I mean, delving seriously with books and into the command line, making notes and the like. It has been an interesting experience and I have really learnt a lot of new stuff.
As of this writing, the 4.8 development cycle is nearing its end. Linus has let it be known that a relatively unusual -rc8 release candidate will be required before the final release, but that still means that the cycle will only require 70 days, fitting into the usual pattern. A look at the development statistics for this release also fits the pattern about now.
With regard to the release cycle, it has become boringly regular in recent years. The 3.8 kernel, released on February 18, 2013, came out on a Sunday, as has every subsequent release with the exception of 3.11, which was released on Monday, September 2, 2013. In these last few years, the only cycle that has taken longer than 70 days was 3.13, which required 77 days. The extra week that time around was forced by Linus's travels, rather than anything inherent in that cycle itself. Since then, every cycle has taken 63 or 70 days, with the sole exception of 3.16, which showed up in 56 (and one could quibble that it was really a 63-day cycle as well — that was the time Linus experimented with opening the merge window before the previous final release had been made).
The first article of this series, described the efforts to provide a better documentation for the Linux Kernel. This article will explain how we handled the conversion of the Linux Media subsystem documentation.
The technology concept of blockchain gained notoriety due to the rise of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, but blockchain has much wider implications and uses, according to Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Hyperledger Project.
In December 2015, the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the Hyperledger Project in an effort to build an open-source blockchain platform. Blockchain is an approach that enables a ledger of transactions that can be verified through a distributed model. Among the backers of the Hyperledger project are Accenture, ANZ Bank, Cisco, CLS, Credits, Deutsche Börse, Digital Asset Holdings, DTCC, Eris Industries, Fujitsu, IC3, IBM, Intel, J.P. Morgan, London Stock Exchange Group, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MFUG), R3, State Street, SWIFT, VMware and Wells Fargo.
Behlendorf joined the project in May 2016 as executive director helping to lead the effort forward. Behlendorf is well-known in the open-source community as one of the founders of the Apache Software Foundation.
After announcing the imminent release of Linux kernel 4.8.1, as well as the availability of Linux kernel 4.4.24 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman has informed the community about the launch of the seventh maintenance update to the Linux 4.7 kernel series.
According to a recent Google+ post, Linus Torvalds has teased us with the release of Linux kernel 5.0, which should happen when the project reaches 6 million Git objects.
It appears that major kernel milestones, such as Linux 3.0 or Linux 4.0, were released when the Git object count was around two and four million marks respectively. As of October 8, 2016, the current Gib object count crossed the 5 million mark, which means that after one more million Git objects, the Linux 5.0 kernel should be released.
While running the fresh NVIDIA vs. AMD Vulkan Linux benchmarks (that also included some OpenGL numbers too), I had also taken the opportunity to run some fresh OpenCL compute benchmarks of the latest NVIDIA 370 proprietary Linux driver against AMDGPU-PRO on different graphics cards.
Just for kicks and some extra benchmarks to look at over the weekend, here are some fresh benchmarks of 11 different GPUs when using the latest NVIDIA (370.28) and AMDGPU-PRO (16.30.3) Linux drivers on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The open-source (Clover-based stack) wasn't used for any open-source AMD OpenCL testing due to its less than stellar state.
With catching up on the OpenGL extensions, Marek Olšák of AMD has been spending a fair amount of time on performance optimizations for the AMD's open-source OpenGL driver and some code that benefits Mesa as a whole too.
Building off the exciting patches published Friday for completing ARB_enhanced_layouts that finish off the RadeonSI OpenGL 4.4~4.5 support, the Nouveau NVC0 support is basically done too with the finishing up of that final extension being done in the Mesa state tracker.
Nouveau contributor Samuel Pitoiset went ahead and set the cap to enable ARB_enhanced_layouts for NVC0 along with exposing GLSL 4.5. The patches are currently on the mailing list but hopefully all of this latest GL4 work will hit Mesa Git in the week ahead to make it into the next Mesa release.
A government investing in free and open source software, rather than in proprietary solutions, is always a wonderful thing (unless it’s a poor implementation…). When I heard about India’s DigiLocker project, which is built on ownCloud, I was excited to learn more and grateful when someone from ownCloud was able to connect me with the project team.
Even though we just had the nice and successful ownCloud Contributor Conference there have quite some ownCloud releases happened recently. I like to draw your attention to this for a moment, because some people seem to fail to see how active the ownCloud community actually is at the moment.
Technology has been serving humanity with its best. It is a technology that has encouraged us to explore the unexplored and it is technology that gives us confidence. One such technology that has been changing the world is the movie making tools. Now it is a common thing to shoot a movie and edit it. You can do it in your PC. IT is that simple. This has encouraged many of us to explore the world of movie making. And for others just making a surprise birthday video or a wedding anniversary video is unexplainable. These are the videos that are uploaded all over the social media and these are the videos that make people famous at times. But who does the trick? That is when we need to mention the amazing movie editing tools that you can use online.
The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence v6.3.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.
Gone were the days when the Internet was only used by corporates and tech enthusiasts. With government departments and services going online and even schools recommending online learning systems, the Internet is fast becoming a common household technology.
As more and more people are learning to use the Internet, the number of those using emailing and messaging services is also going up. Consequently, the competition in the email and online messaging market is intensifying - just to give you an idea, a single company like Google is offering three services (Hangouts, Messenger, and now Allo) just for messaging purpose.
This, in turn, has resulted in people using multiple services in order to get the best of all worlds. While there's no harm in using several services, you'd likely agree that after a point it becomes really difficult to manage and keep up with all of them. It's then when you start searching for a way that can make life easier for you.
You'll be glad to know that there exists an application, dubbed Rambox, that's built specifically for this purpose - it lets you access all your commonly used web services from within a single window. In this article, we will discuss the basics of this application as well as the features it provides.
PVS-Studio is a tool for bug detection in C, C++, and C# projects. It is intended for use in finding and fixing security and quality issues in code, before they turn into vulnerabilities, crashes, or painful debugging. Until now it was working for the developers who use the Visual Studio environment.
The development team of PVS-Studio static code analyser has long and persistently been developing their product for Windows OS, and thus, proved itself as a reliable provider of high quality software.
Now the team set a bigger goal and started Linux support. In the article devoted to their Linux support the author tells about various tasks that the programmers have set on the stage of the product development.
Rsync is a file-copying tool which allows you to copy or synchronize files and directories on a local or remote system. It is fast and offers large number of options. In this tutorial we will show you how to use rsync on a Linux VPS.
If you have just moved to Linux then I'm sure you'll have lots of queries. But you don't need to worry. Linux has one of the largest communities on the Internet to help people get their queries cleared. Here in this article, I'm going to mention 10 Best communities to help you learn Linux. You can ask any question and thousands of people will be there to answer it.
The advanced flight simulator X-Plane 11 [Official Website] will release this "holiday season" and it will feature Linux support. You can see their announcement here.
The respected scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson is working on a computer game called 'Space Odyssey' [Official Site]. It will be an online game and feature Linux support. It sounds like it will support offline play too.
It's a game about creating your own galaxies civilizations, which sounds like it could be fun.
Graphically, Hybrid Wars is actually quite nice to look at. There's a nice variation in enemy units, your mech looks great and visually the explosions and effects look really great.
I do love a good 4x strategy game, Master of Orion 2 was my first and I fell in love. It's a genre not too well served on Linux, but Lord of Rigel [Official Site, Steam] looks like it might be good.
It has a page up on Steam, both the Steam store, the official website and the trailer all list Linux which is great to see.
We're excited to announce Sugar 0.110.0 - a new stable release.
I really wanted to break free from that, so I started looking into GNU/Linux, and into which tools could replace those I was already used to. Krita was obviously what everybody recommended for digital painting, so here I am. If it weren’t for Krita I would still be stuck with another OS, as I do need to be able to paint for work.
We are happy to announce a new upcoming release for Choqok after more than one year and half.
Big news about this release is that Choqok is now based on KDE Frameworks 5 and we officially support Friendica.
There’s an LTS (long-term support) release of KDE Plasma 5 available now. The dot story is quite extensive. The FreeBSD ports for this LTS release can be found in area51 (as usual) in the plasma5 branch (as is the norm as long as we’re not done settling other KDE foundations in official ports).
There are also packages available, although those are obviously not sourced from the official FreeBSD package servers but from the KDE-FreeBSD team’s servers. Ask in #kde-freebsd on freenode if you need instructions for adding that repository server.
For benefit and convenience of fellow software engineers, we're sharing frameworks originally developed within the Kexi Project (that is KDb, KProperty, KReport). There are marked with the same version 3.0.0 and are prepared for general, standalone usage. So this combined release marks a major milestone for two efforts: porting to Qt 5 started in 2014, development of the three frameworks started in 2008.
GTK+ version 3.22 was released on September 21, bringing with it a range of improvements to Wayland support, gesture support for pressure-sensitive tablets, several new widgets, and more. The release also marks a turning point for how stable and development branches of the code will be maintained. Moving forward, the project is adopting a new scheme that allows it to designate certain stable releases for long-term support. The plan also breaks with past releases where version numbering is concerned, though the project is keen to downplay that change in favor of focusing on the support that stable releases will offer to downstream projects.
The new release scheme was announced on September 1 in a Google+ post and an accompanying blog post written by Allan Day. The blog post explains more of the background issues that led up to the decision to adopt a new scheme.
In practice, it turned out to be a great event. It was halfway between the traditional highly technical gathering and the “event aimed at new contributors”, with 13 attendees including myself.
The gspell fundraising has reached its initial goal! So thanks a lot for your support!
Expect GtkEntry support in the next version of gspell, which is planned for March 2017.
We already told you about the release date and schedule of the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, whose development cycle will start later this month, and today we'd love to tell you a little bit about its upcoming features.
As you might expect, the GNOME development team always comes with new ideas to improve the widely-used desktop environment, meaning the core components and applications included in the GNOME Stack. In GNOME 3.24, a lot of these applications and tools will see a large number of improvements, both visually and internally.
GNOME Control Center appears to be the center of attraction in GNOME 3.24, and it will offer a revamped User Accounts and Printer settings panels to match the new design, along with an updated Online Accounts settings panel that should add various improvements to Kerberos integration.
Just a few minutes ago, renowned Solus developer Joshua Strobl was proud to announce the 37th installation of This Week in Solus (TWiS) newsletter with the latest news about what happened in the Solus world during this week.
Today, October 9, 2016, 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informed Softpedia about the official release and immediate availability for download of the BakAndImgCD 20.0 data backup and disk imaging Live CD.
The Salix development team announced the release of the second Beta build of the upcoming Live Edition of the Salix Xfce 14.2 GNU/Linux distribution based on the Slackware 14.2 operating system.
We are finally nearing the end of the 4.0.0 release cycle. If all goes as planned I will publish a final set of ISO images by the end of the month flagged as stable. These ISO images come with only one known issue and that is the file selector in the theme tool currently does not display selectable files. A work around for the time being is to click the “advanced” button to assign theme components.
Red Hat will demonstrate how the company’s open source technologies are helping accelerate business transformation by enabling all these trends during its participation at GITEX.
The vendor invites trade visitors and media the chance to speak with Lee Miles, General Manager, Middle East and Africa, at Red Hat and other senior company executives, to learn more about the technologies it will be showcasing at the show.
After informing us a couple of days ago about the release of DebEX KDE Live DVD 161001 and DebEX GNOME Live DVD 161007, developer Arne Exton now announces the general availability of DebEX Barebone Live DVD.
DebEX Barebone Live DVD is the third and last edition of the Debian-based DebEX operating system, and it looks like the build, version 161009, is here today, October 9, 2016, pre-installed with all the latest GNU/Linux technologies and open source software projects, including the recently released Linux 4.8 kernel.
My October adventure is one of mixed emotions, again. One step forward, one step back, two to the side, a quick hopscotch through a minefield, and then you land your foot in dung but also find Cinderella's ever-so-smelly shoe amidst all that dross. That's the best way to describe the latest update and what it offers to the user.
Frankly, people would be far more inclined to ignore the stability bugs and the early release problems if they had proper apps to play with. They did it with Android. But when you have nothing meaningful to do, you start picking scabs and your nose, and one thing leads to another. In the desktop mode, there's more to do, yes. But the Store is just crippled at this point. Horrible. It causes serious damage to the Ubuntu Touch reputation. There has to be more there. More! Otherwise, it's just a sad graveyard of enthusiasm and dashed hopes. The touch side needs to shine, hook users in, make them feel that Ubuntu is all about fun and joy but also serious work. Anyhow, nothing to be too excited about. There's more progress on the phone than the tablet, but that's understandable, the phone has been around for much longer. Still, I do hope Canonical will soon unleash dozens if not hundreds of modern and relevant apps to compensate for its other failings, and give the tablet the needed breathing space until the functional bugs can be ironed out. If not, all that users will have to play with will be issues, boredom and resentment. C'mon. Just do it!
If you'd still like a chance to win a tablet for your own games and entertainment, then take a look at my contest, link in the second paragraph of this article. There's still enough time, and plenty of opportunity. Worst case, just load it with Android. But let's hope we must never do that. Off you go reading, gents and ladies.
A new version of udisks-indicator, a drive partition tool for the Ubuntu desktop, is now available to download. it features an improved GUI and new options.
Ubuntu/Canonical developers have been discussing plans and requirements for Mir Version 1 including stable ABIs and licenses.
This Google Doc has been circulating about latest thoughts by Mir developers about version 1. For next week's Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak release, Mir is currently at version 0.24.
Today the 6th generation XPS 13 developer edition makes its debut in both the US and Europe (Canada to follow). This Kaby Lake-based system comes with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS preloaded and features the Infinity Edge display.
The snap format is a compressed filesystem with a single metadata file describing the security profile and desired integration of the snap. That format is shared by everyone in the snap community, regardless of their choice of store, authentication systems, licensing or host Linux distribution.
This is the second in a series of interviews with Snap adopters, you can read the first interview here. If you have an interesting snap story to tell, please contact me.
I’ve always been a big fan of Krita, so when I started working on snap packaging it was high on my list to do. In doing so I worked closely with Boudewijn Rempt and others, and I caught back up with them recently to talk about the experience.
Canonical's Didier Roche proudly announced the availability of the third Beta build of the upcoming and highly anticipated Ubuntu Snappy Core 16 operating system for PCs, embedded and IoT (Internet of Things) devices.
Linux Mint 18 KDE Edition is the latest version of Linux Mint 18 features KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment, based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system and ship with Linux 4.4 LTS kernel.
Pemi’s $10 “BeanDuino” DigiSpark clone gives you an 8-bit ATtiny85 MCU with 8K flash and a micro-USB in a 20 x 11mm package.
Pemi Technology is a Slovakian company run by Arduino hacker Bobricius, who wears a Star Trek Next Generation uniform, so you know you’re in solid geek territory here. Customers seemed to like Pemi’s 27 x 12mm PicoDuino Arduino clone, which like the new BeanDuino is a tiny, Arduino compatible based on Microchip/Atmel’s 8-bit ATtiny85 MCU. The BeanDuino is even smaller, at 20 x 11mm, which leads Bobricius to tap his communicator and announce: “I believe the BeanDuino is the smallest complete development platform in the world.”
Want to develop wearable or very compact applications, networked applications, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and prototype your brainstorms quickly and inexpensively? Then this roundup of versatile open source hardware boards is for you. All you need is a few pieces of hardware, basic soldering skills, and some JavaScript know-how.
With the commoditization of chips for connecting to networks, more and more devices can now be controlled via the Internet to do everything from remote temperature sensing to turning off lights in your home while you’re halfway around the world. In years past, however, if you were a JavaScript developer and wanted prototype network-connected devices, you either needed to learn how to develop firmware using a vendor’s custom tool chain, master C or C++ to write Arduino sketches, or partner with a hardware engineer.
Thankfully, with the proliferation of IoT platforms, a vibrant community has emerged and tools have been developed with which anyone can create prototypes using only a few pieces of hardware, some basic soldering skills, and JavaScript code.
Let's take a look at four excellent popular platforms: MbientLab MetaWear, ESP8266, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi.
Alexa support for Raspberry Pi has been available for a few months now, but there was no provision for making it hands-free and voice controlled. Users had to wake up Alexa by pressing an on-screen button. With the new code, Amazon has provided developers support for make the software always listen for the 'hot word,' in this case "Alexa", similar to what you get with Amazon's popular Echo, Dot, and Tap devices.
I hate bad reporting. And mostly I try to ignore it, where most tech authors can have violently differing opinions about their subject matter. But when some idiots don't know basic math - that is when we need.. the STATS POLICE. This is what Tech Crunch has now done, on an article which has the correct headline (the mobile wars are over) if they intend that to be the OS wars but on that story they are years behind the curve. Typical Americans, clueless about mobile once again, mesmerized by iNonsense.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 made it to the no-fly list during its recall. And for good reason; we don’t want anything catching fire on planes, right? That is exactly what happened in Southwest Airlines flight, but the main problem is that the Galaxy Note 7 that ignited on the plane was a replacement… which was supposed to be safe.
It turns out this is not really an isolated event. Multiple other incidents of replaced handset burning up have been surfacing. KSTP news reports a melting phone in Farmington, Minnesota. The device was replaced and supposed to be the safe solution, but it melted on a teenager’s hand, leaving a small burn in her thumb.
Another incident was reported in Nicholasville, Kentucky, where a man’s Galaxy Note 7 replacement unit caught fire last Tuesday. The phone was sitting in his room, unplugged and not in use. The user then noticed his room was filled with smoke and walked in to find the Galaxy Note 7 in flames. Later that day he was diagnosed with acute bronchitis.
Samsung Electronics Co. has temporarily suspended production of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone, an official at a supplier for Samsung said Monday, amid a series of media reports that some Note 7 replacements have caught fire.
The halt is in cooperation with consumer safety regulators from South Korea, the United States and China, the official said on the condition of anonymity.
The Android smartphone market is in disarray. Samsung smartphones are exploding like bombs, while Google's too-high Pixel pricing and likely cancellation of the Nexus line are both recent bombshells. In other words, it is a confusing time for consumers looking for a high-quality and safe Android device.
I was just a teenager when I got involved in the open source community. I remember talking with an old bearded guy once about how this new organization, GNU, is going to change everything. Over the years, I mucked around with a number of different OSS tools and operating systems, got excited when symmetric multiprocessing came to BSD, screwed around with Linux boot and root disks, and had become both engaged and enthralled with the new community that had developed around Unix over the years. That same spirit was simultaneously shared outside of the Unix world, too. Apple user groups met frequently to share new programs we were working on with our ][c’s, and later our ][gs’s and Macs, exchange new shareware (which we actually paid for, because the authors deserved it), and to buy stacks of floppies of the latest fonts or system disks. We often demoed our new inventions, shared and exchanged the source code to our BBS systems, games, or anything else we were working on, and made the agendas of our user groups community efforts to teach and understand the awful protocols, APIs, and compilers we had at the time. This was my first experience with open source. Maybe it was not yours, although I hope yours was just as positive.
In last week's look at the new revision of the OpenType font format, we focused primarily on the new variations font feature, which makes it possible to encode multiple design "masters" into a single font binary. This enables the renderer to generate a new font instance at runtime based on interpolating the masters in a particular permutation of their features (weight, width, slant, etc). Such new functionality will, at least in some cases, mean that application software will have to be reworked in order to present the available font variations to the end user in a meaningful fashion.
But there is another change inherent in the new feature that may not be as obvious at first glance. Variations fonts redefine the relationships between individual font files and font "families." There is a mechanism defined in the new standard to bridge the gap between the old world and the new, called the Style Attributes (STAT) table. For it to work in a meaningful fashion, though, it must be implemented by traditional, non-variations fonts as well—which may not be an easy sell.
There is no formal definition of a font family, but in general usage the term refers to a set of fonts that share core design principles and, in most cases, use a single name and come from the same designer or design team. The Ubuntu Font Family, for example, includes upright and italic fonts in four weights at the standard width, one weight of upright-only condensed width, and two weights (in upright and italic) of a monospaced variant.
A big challenge in sharing digital information around the world is “tofu”—the blank boxes that appear when a computer or website isn’t able to display text: â¯Â. Tofu can create confusion, a breakdown in communication, and a poor user experience.
Five years ago we set out to address this problem via the Noto—aka “No more tofu”—font project. Today, Google’s open-source Noto font family provides a beautiful and consistent digital type for every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters.
Project Soli, which debuted at Google I/O in 2015, is a tiny chip that uses radar to detect discreet hand and finger motions. It was designed as a unique way to interact with mobile devices, but students at the University of St. Andrews found a way to use the simple chip to give electronics an actual sense of touch.
The chip, developed by Google’s Advanced Technologies And Projects group, or ATAP, uses the same kind of radar as airports use to track arriving and departing planes. As radio waves bounce back to the Project Soli chip from your hand, the unique signals detected can be used to decipher even the tiniest of motions.
I work primarily with Windows but let me say that I, like many of you, have no choice in the matter. We don’t live in a world where the company tells us, “Well, here’s Microsoft Office and everything we do is on a web app. Have fun!” My goodness, that would be a relative paradise for many people. You could potentially go hog wild and use the applications you want.
Still, a lot of us work with very clunky tools sometimes set on a gray-haired version of Java and birthed from Windows installers. It’s a sad reality that a lot of highly-specialized practice software applications, many of which attach to MICROSOFT databases, will only run on Windows because the developer is selling these apps for profit and not for fun. They also happen to know that 95% of the market is drenched in……Windows.
According to a recent report, European open source jobs may be more sought after and more rewarded than anywhere else in the world. These findings were a key feature in the results of The 2016 Open Source Jobs Report which was released by Dice, a career site for technology and engineering professionals in association with The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration.
NFV management and network orchestration (MANO) is sure to be a hot topic at next week’s SDN & OpenFlow World Congress at The Hague, Netherlands. For many, MANO has been considered to be a roadblock to not only deploying network functions virtualization (NFV), but also to making NFV agile and efficient.
ETSI continues to move on its open source MANO work in support of telecom NFV plans, releasing the latest OSM stack focused on VNF, SDN controller support
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute’s Open Source MANO initiative continued to feed software into the management and orchestration community with the launch of its OSM Release One stack.
Two researchers, Gregorio Robles and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain, had embarked on a study of forks. Their paper titled “A Comprehensive Study of Software Forks: Dates, Reasons and Outcomes,” studied the sustainability of software projects in an open environment of sharing software. Key questions answered were—how many forks were in actual existence, was forking frequency increasing and understanding the root-causes for forking. Also, the researchers looked into the outcomes of forking—a point that may be of specific interest to CIOs. But first, let us understand what a fork truly means.
Rethink Robotics today unveiled its high performance Sawyer robot for the global research and education markets. Built on the open source Robot Operating System (ROS) and equipped with a software development kit (SDK), Sawyer will help leading educators and researchers innovate in fields including machine learning, human-robot interaction, mechatronics and grasping, machine vision and manufacturing skills.
Collaboration platform provider gives its top tips on 'inner source', the idea of adopting open source software development principles within the enterprise
Open-source software is now not only acceptable; in many companies, it is required. In the past, enterprises looked at open source projects as if they were science experiments, lacking the support and “single throat to choke” in case of an escalation. But the tide has turned. It is now common to have one or more companies offering support on open source projects, enabling enterprises to not only get the same level of service formerly reserved for proprietary commercial software, but to also benefit from the vibrant communities surrounding open source projects.
What are the benefits of community for the enterprise? Independence and transparency.
This week we’ll step back and revisit a few fundamentals of competition and cooperation and how this results in the open source ecosystem.
The open source community is a diverse and fractious collection of individuals and organizations. In its infancy, in many ways it could be compared to the hippie movements of the '60s: a lot of passion, a lot of fun, a lot of weirdness, and not a lot of organization. Over the last decade or so, it has evolved into a respected software development force that relies on the support of its members.
As it's grown and diversified over the last decade, it has gotten more mainstream in the sense that there are now many different players that are making quite a bit of money based on open source principles. It has more prestige and a lot more respectability. As they say, money changes everything.
That's what I was thinking as I read Max Schireson's article, "The money in open source software," on TechCrunch: how much things in the open source community have changed, and how much they have stayed the same. The article is a breakdown of how to plan for a profitable company based on open source software. It provides a lot of common-sense points: Have and stick to a business plan, pick a licensing model that makes sense, and maintain customer satisfaction. None of these are particularly earth-shattering ideas.
There we are. It feels like a dream. It happened too fast, and I did not get to absorb the full aroma of the conference. But never mind. There will always be another opportunity, and LinuxCon will be there next year, waiting, beckoning. Despite a somewhat less than perfect circumstances, I am quite happy. I enjoyed my session, if I'm allowed to say that, and I think I served my audience well, and their feedback was good and open. There is nothing that would have made it better except a little more time to network, talk to people, pilfer some more free shirts and electronics, and actually see the city.
Anyhow, I hope you find these little field reports entertaining. And maybe we will meet somewhere next year, and you will come over and say, oh so you are that crazy guy, why are you not wearing a fedora huh? Indeed. 2017, so let the countdown begin. The Final Countdown. By a band called Europe. What can be more appropriate? OMG. See you next autumn.
Firefox is one of the most used web browsers on the Web. According to Clicky, it holds around 20% of the global market share. Firefox is also installed by default in almost all Linux distributions. So it’s very likely to see Linux users using it all the time, although many other alternatives are available like Chromium and Epiphany.
Since the web browser’s window is all what many of us see the whole day, you may want to customize its appearance. We are not talking about “personas” or those simple backgrounds that you put to colorize a small part of the browser’s window. We are talking about changing the theme totally. Firefox does this using “Complete Themes“.
As just announced on mozilla.dev.platform, we landed a set of changes in today's Nightly that tightens our sandboxing on Linux. The content process, which is the part of Firefox that renders webpages and executes any JavaScript on them, had been previously restricted in the amount of system calls that it could access. As of today, it no longer has write access to the filesystem, barring an exception for shared memory and /tmp. We plan to also remove the latter, eventually.
Mozilla is currently working on bringing form autofill functionality to its Firefox web browser.
Firefox remembers form data by default that you enter on sites, but the browser does not ship with options to create profiles that you may use on any form you encounter while using the browser.
I just installed RethinkDB 2.3.5 on a new laptop and took a few minutes to slow down and play with the product. I’m very proud of what we built alongside our community – RethinkDB’s technology more often feels like magic, and I hope it will continue to play an important role in advancing the state of the art in database technology.
We’re working with members of our community to develop a continuity plan for RethinkDB and Horizon. Both projects will continue to be available, distributed under open source licenses. We hope to continue our open development process with a larger community of contributors.
We’d like your help to ensure RethinkDB’s future as an open-source project! We don’t have all of the details figured out, but we wanted to be as open as possible during this process. If you’re interested in contributing, please join us in the #open-rethinkdb channel of our public Slack group. You can expect to see development slow down in the meantime, but everything will continue to be available on rethinkdb.com and horizon.io. We will post updates on our blog and Twitter as we continue working things out.
It’s been a while I have not written about Emacs and more particularly my personal use case for Emacs. I started using Emacs because I was looking for a text editor capable of handling formats such as HTML and CSS; then I found out Emacs had quite convenient IRC clients and I could even use a bit of Org mode for project management. That was in 2013 and early 2014. As I was impressed by the seemingly infinite power of Emacs, I started using Org-mode more and more on a daily basis (something I still do today); and I started learning (e)lisp both in order to understand Emacs a bit more in-depth and because I wanted to start to learn a programming language.
Remember: I’m no software developer. When I’m not maintaining or creating websites for friends, I’m not doing much else in the way of “coding”. My Emacs usage remains however a daily experience that I would like to share here.
It's not surprising that a new skills survey rounds up the usual list of suspects for the most popular programming language, naming JavaScript, Python, Java, et al.
What is surprising is the list of skills that pay off the most in terms of developer salaries: Bash, Perl and Scala. Bash topped the list at about $100,000.
Bash?
I read a lot of these surveys, and the Bash scripting language rarely makes a strong appearance. But it leads the list of respondents' stated median salaries by programming language in a new report from Packt Ltd. titled "Skill Up 2016" (free download upon providing registration info) which garnered more than 11,500 responses.
"We've now seen what languages are the most popular," the report says, "but what languages are the most lucrative in 2016? Our data shows that languages favored by more experienced developers command the highest salaries; it pays to be a Perl Monk or a Bash Scripter. Scala developers also manage to command high salaries, while the more ubiquitous JavaScript and Python hover around the middle, as they are likely favored by both highly-paid and more junior alike. If you're still working with Visual Basic or PHP, you might want to consider an upgrade."
The Russian government is reportedly drafting a Bill that would require government agencies to prefer the use of open source software, as part of efforts to reduce its reliance on US vendors Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.
Russia’s Lower House of parliament is working on legislation that would further prohibit the use of foreign software, Bloomberg reported.
Today at the Open Hardware Summit in Portland, Alicia Gibb and Michael Weinberg of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) launched the Open Source Hardware Certification program. It’s live, and you can certify your own hardware as Open Hardware right now.
Jason Ekstrand gave a presentation at the 2016 X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) on a driver that he and others wrote for the new Vulkan 3D graphics API on Intel graphics hardware. Vulkan is significantly different from OpenGL, which led the developers to making some design decisions that departed from those made for OpenGL drivers.
For more than a decade, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. They knew that the laws of physics had set a 5-nanometer threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about one-quarter the size of high-end 20-nanometer-gate transistors now on the market.
Confucius once said, “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” For those of us in cybersecurity professions, we can easily relate to this philosophy. Cybersecurity has become exceedingly complicated in recent years, and the complexity might now be our biggest vulnerability.
IT is evolving rapidly, but IT security is often left playing catch up in order to adapt to the changes in how businesses approach and deploy computing, applications, networks, databases, and devices. Many organizations rely on best practices such as defense in depth, secure development lifecycle, penetration testing, separation of duties, etc. However, these tactics do not allow cybersecurity to move at business speed, and they contribute to the lag in IT security.
Art Swift, president of the prpl Foundation, pointed to high profile IoT hacking attacks saying that “regardless of whether these hacks were malicious or simply done in the name of research, the fact is that it is possible today to hack into just about any connected device.”
Swift says that hackers can reverse engineer, exploit a weak implementation, modify or re-flash the firmware, and then move laterally across the system.
The US former Secretary of State made the admission in a Wall Street speech in 2013.
In the latest dump of classified emails, Mrs Clinton noted the problems with imposing a no-fly zone over Syria.
She said: "To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defenses, many of which are located in populated areas.
Hey America! Just checking in with another update on how a recent presidential election is going to doom us all! I'm not talking about the election that's happening in this country right now. I will at some point, but it's an election that happened thousands of miles away which deserves the bulk of our attention today. I'm speaking, of course, about the this year's presidential election in the Philippines, where a legitimately crazy person named Rodrigo Duterte took control of the highest office of in a country of more than 100 million people. He's said and done a lot of insane things since then, but if you're only keeping track of the highlights, you probably have no idea just how insane things might get.
During the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton cast herself as a skeptic of hydraulic fracturing -- the controversial process to extract natural gas. But newly released documents purporting to show excerpts of her paid speeches show that Clinton proudly touted her support for fracking, which environmental groups say can pollute groundwater and undermine the fight against climate change. The excerpts also show Clinton saying that some environmental organizations trying to restrict her work to promote fracking were front groups for Russian oligarchs.
The transparency group Wikileaks published the document as part of what it says is a tranche of emails from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. Podesta has refused to say whether the excerpts are authentic but has not denied their authenticity, either.
Internal strategy documents and emails among Clinton staffers shed light on friendly and highly useful relationships between the campaign and various members of the U.S. media, as well as the campaign’s strategies for manipulating those relationships.
The emails were provided to The Intercept by the source identifying himself as Guccifer 2.0, who was reportedly responsible for prior significant hacks, including one that targeted the Democratic National Committee and resulted in the resignations of its top four officials. On Friday, Obama administration officials claimed that Russia’s “senior-most officials” were responsible for that hack and others, although they provided no evidence for that assertion.
As these internal documents demonstrate, a central component of the Clinton campaign strategy is ensuring that journalists they believe favorable to Clinton are tasked to report the stories which the campaign wants circulated.
At times, Clinton’s campaign staff not only internally drafted the stories they wanted published but even specified what should be quoted “on background” and what should be described as “on the record.”
Hillary Clinton told top banking executives that she has “both a public and a private position” on Wall Street reform and is reliant on wealthy donors to fund her campaign, leaked excerpts of the former first lady’s speeches seem to show, fueling claims of hypocrisy on the part of Mrs. Clinton at a crucial moment in the presidential campaign.
Marietje Schaake (previously) is a Dutch Member of the European Parliament who has a fantastic track-record for getting it right on issues related to technology, free speech, human rights, and privacy; she is the author of a report on export controls for spying technology used to identify dissidents to torture.
She uploaded the videos from the debate about these tools to Youtube, only to receive a notice from Youtube informing her that a video had been removed had been reviewed and found to be in violation of Youtube's standards, resulting a takedown for the video and a "strike" against Schaake's Youtube account -- enough of these strikes and she'll permanently lose access to the service.
The video that Youtube removed "included footage of European Trade Commissioner Cecila Malmstrom, who gave her opinion about the new law."
YouTube is now one of the most used platforms for videos online. It has over a billion users, and reaches more 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S. It has become a portal for sharing information and ideas, which is vital for any democratic society.
Faced with the possibility that website blocking may not achieve its goals, Russia is now considering fresh opportunities for decreasing online file-sharing. Sources familiar with negotiations say that authorities are mulling a system of fines which would target individual downloaders.
The Films and Publications Amendment Bill that was deliberated by the Portfolio Committee on Communications in Parliament last week has caused an uproar as people debate whether it is strictly an internet regulation or the government’s attempt at stifling and censoring freedom of speech.
Also known as the Internet Bill, the proposed law aims to regulate the online distribution of digital films and digital games, among others, but it has come under attack from media organisations such as Multichoice, organisations such as the Right2Know campaign, and opposition parties such as the DA.
A version of this post originally appeared in the Cyber Saturday edition of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily tech newsletter.
Last week produced a spate of cyber-security news, including revelations about Yahoo (again) and lousy counter intelligence at the NSA (again). But if there is a common thread, it’s that first reports often are false or incomplete and the story is not what it seems.
Take the brouhaha over Yahoo using software to feed emails to the NSA. The news led to hyper-ventilating among privacy types and predictable high-horse behaviorf rom rival tech giants like Google and Microsoft. But as my colleague Robert Hackett explained, a lot of this fulminating took place before anyone really knew the facts — which are still emerging in dribs and drabs.
Meanwhile, journalists (me included) breathlessly reported another security lapse at Edward Snowden’s old stomping groups, Booz Allen, which led the FBI to arrest a contractor for stealing secrets. But now it turns out the guy was probably just a kook and a hoarder. It’s still not a good situation but it sure doesn’t look like the stuff of a John LeCarre novel.
Part of the trouble, from a media perspective, is that a lot of the incidents we learn about are delivered by anonymous sources and wrapped in national security laws. This makes it hard to verify information — easy to jump to conclusions.
So call it the fog of cyber war. In an era where everyone is amped up about cyber attacks, a lot of first impressions are tinged with paranoia and misinformation or are just flat out wrong. I don’t know what to do about this except to say that, as with other dramatic events like mass shootings, it’s best to take first reports with a giant grain of salt.
A European civil society group defending rights and freedoms in the digital environment awarded Facebook the Belgian Big Brother Awards 2016 yesterday.
The awards are based on a concept created by European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) member Privacy International, and are negative prizes for “the worst privacy abuser.” The goal of those awards is to draw attention to violations of privacy, they said in a press release.
The Belgian award was “unanimously granted to Facebook by the professional jury,” and the public confirmed Facebook’s title as the “ultimate privacy villain of the year.”
On Friday, Motherboard reported that beleaguered US company Yahoo allowed someone—possibly a US intelligence agency such as the NSA or FBI—to install a backdoor on its servers, likely for scanning purposes, that afforded unfettered access to Yahoo’s systems, including users’ personal emails.
“This backdoor was installed in a way that endangered all of Yahoo users,” a source familiar with the incident told Motherboard.
This should concern Canadians, because Rogers, one of the largest telecom companies in the country, totally outsources its email systems to Yahoo. Emails sent from Rogers accounts are sent to Yahoo’s US servers for storage and processing, and Yahoo scans Rogers emails for spam, malware, and child pornography.
This isn’t the first time that Rogers’ ties to Yahoo have compromised Canadians: The Toronto Star previously reported that Rogers customer data was included in the massive hack in September.
Iranian judges have ordered a young female writer and activist to serve a six-year jail term for writing an unpublished fictional story about stoning to death in her country.
Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee received a phone call on Tuesday from judicial officials ordering her to Evin prison in Tehran, where her husband, Arash Sadeghi, a prominent student activist, is serving a 19-year sentence.
Ebrahimi Iraee told Voice of America’s Persian network this week that she had been sentenced to five years in prison for insulting Islamic sanctities and one extra year for spreading propaganda against the ruling system.
“They haven’t issued a written summons [as required by the law],” she said in a Skype interview. “They called me using the telephone of one of my friends, Navid Kamran; they had gone to his shop to arrest him and they called me from there to summon me.”
Police today launched a hate crime probe after literature saying those who insult Islam “must be killed” was allegedly handed out at a London mosque.
A Standard investigation has uncovered claims that the booklet, which says “any Muslim should kill” those who insult the Prophet Mohammed, was distributed at a gathering in Walthamstow.
It points to a classical manual of Islamic law to justify killings without waiting for court judgments and says apostates “deserve to be assassinated”.
The booklet discusses the case of Mumtaz Qadri, a fanatic who murdered a governor in Pakistan in 2011 because of his support for liberal reforms to the country’s strict Islamic laws.
A Christian woman who has been facing execution in Pakistan for six years after being accused of blasphemy has been granted her final appeal.
Pakistan’s supreme court will hear the case of Asia Bibi, a mother-of-five from the rural village of Ittan Wali in Punjab, eastern Pakistan, who was convicted of blasphemy in 2010 after allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhamed during a row with other women over water.
All of Ms Bibi’s appeals in the lower courts failed before the supreme court temporarily suspended her execution in July 2015 ahead of a fresh hearing now scheduled to be heard on 13 October.
If her final appeal fails, Ms Bibi will be the first woman to be executed under the country’s controversial blasphemy laws.
When Kate Kelly, founder of the Mormon feminist group Ordain Women, was accused of apostasy, she couldn’t readily access the Church Handbook of Instructions, Volume 1, for the definition. So Kelly and Nadine Hansen, a lawyer representing her in her hearings, had to turn elsewhere.
"The only way that women can access that volume is by accessing it online at WikiLeaks,” Kelly told The Daily Beast.
The news that WIPO member states have endorsed a decision taken by the organisation’s Coordination Committee to drop any further investigation of the allegations of serious misconduct levelled against the organisation’s Director-General Francis Gurry is no surprise; a few days ago this blog predicted it would happen. However, for anyone who believes that the IP system is best served by transparency and accountability, the fact this outcome was so predictable does not make it any less depressing.
Ever since the then WIPO deputy Director-General James Pooley first accused Gurry of being involved in taking WIPO staff members’ DNA and in interfering to alter the outcome of a procurement process in his April 2014 Report of Misconduct, IAM has taken no position on the claims. We don’t know if they were true; but we do know that they should have been investigated quickly, thoroughly, independently and with full protection for witnesses.
Each year, the World Intellectual Property Organization Economic and Statistics Division sends out questionnaires, which intellectual property offices worldwide are expected to complete and return.
But because the survey is voluntary, many African countries, including some Africa Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO) member states, do not respond to the questionnaires.