12.22.13
Posted in News Roundup at 1:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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The video playback was fairly clear and smooth if I capture movement on just one work space. No distortions were evident mousing within a single application or moving among several resized windows on one screen. However, that was not the case when the recorded screen session involved moving among different screens or work spaces — then, the playback showed jerky movements and serious color distortions.
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Last week, Valve released the first beta for SteamOS. Although traditionally supplied on a disc image, Valve made the process slightly easier for some people by allowing you to unzip it straight onto a USB stick. However, installing it properly is a little more complex, and the Valve instructions can only take you so far. Here’s our plain English guide to installing SteamOS, and how to use hardware not recommended by Valve.
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Those dastardly devils at iFixit have managed to get their mitts on one of Valve’s 300 Steam Machine prototypes and, of course, torn it down. Inside is a quad-core Haswell Core i5-4570, a Zotac GTX 780 graphics card, 16GB of Crucial Ballistix Sport (PC3 12800) RAM, and a 1TB 5400 RPM Seagate hard drive. If you wanted to build your own SteamOS-powered doppelganger, it would set you back around $1300 to match Valve’s Steam Machine part-for-part.
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12.20.13
Posted in News Roundup at 3:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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With half a billion users on desktop and another 50 million on Android, Firefox still holds its own in the browser wars, especially as privacy concerns become front-of-mind for normal consumers.
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Today, December 10, Softpedia is happy to report that the final packages of the Mozilla Firefox 26.0 web browser are now available for download for all supported platforms, including Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X, ahead of the official announcement.
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While Google Chrome and other modern web-browsers — even modern versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer — support separate processes between the user-interface and other rendering tasks, notably missing from the threading party has been Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla developers, however, have been working towards a multi-process Firefox.
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There have been some interesting developments surrounding Mozilla’s Firefox OS platform and smartphones built on it. Alcatel had already delivered its popular OneTouch Fire phone based on the mobile operating system in countries ranging from Germany to Hungary and Poland. Now, the OneTouch Fire is going on sale at low prices in Italy via Telecom Italia. Meanwhile, Geeksphone has been discussing a high-end Firefox OS phone called Revolution that will purportedly run both Mozilla’s platform and Android (though users will need to choose one platform).
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Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox browser and operating system, is organizing a contest for creating games. They have teamed up with Goo Technologies for Mozilla and Goo’s Game Creator Challenge to engage ‘budding’ game creators.
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A Rust language front-end is under development for the GNU Compiler Collection. Rust is Mozilla’s programming language under development that’s similar to C/++ and aims to be a safe, concurrent practical language.
Up to now all of the work around the Rust compiler has been implemented atop LLVM, but now GCC developer Philip Herron has decided to work on a Rust compiler front-end for the Free Software Foundation’s compiler.
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Mozilla’s dependence on search engine revenue raises questions about its effectiveness as a champion of the free, open Web
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Mozilla, the open-source Web browser group behind Firefox, doesn’t appear to have much to do with Google until you look at the bottom line. There, you’ll find that 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google.
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Mozilla is about more than just web browsers
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Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker argues that the mobile- and data-centric Web faces new threats to its flexibility and openness.
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At long last, Mozilla has rolled out a massive UI update to Firefox that makes it look almost exactly like Chrome. Dubbed Australis, this is the biggest ever change to Firefox’s user interface, with much improved streamlining and customization, and the unification of Mozilla’s design language across the desktop, smartphone, and Firefox’s myriad other form factors. Australis will debut in Firefox 28, which just hit the Nightly (alpha testing) channel; if everything goes to plan, the new-look Firefox should be ready for mass consumption at the start of 2014.
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Back in August, in a post titled “The Success of Firefox OS Will Depend on the Success of Apps For It,” I made the case that Mozilla needs to drum up a lot of developer interest in its Firefox OS mobile platform in order to seed a healthy app ecosystem. And, sure enough, Mozilla has been steadily holding developer days in various locations and has even offered incentives for app development.
Now, in a new post online, Rick Fant, Mozilla Vice President of Firefox Marketplace, says: “We are excited by the developer interest in the short time since we’ve opened the Firefox Marketplace and are impressed by the creativity and innovation inspired by Mozilla-pioneered WebAPIs.” Mozilla is pointing to thousands of available apps in the Marketplace.
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In a rare occurrence, Mozilla developers release an out-of-band update that patches five security flaws in Firefox 25.0.1.
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I’ve always been a big fan of Mozilla’s email client, Thunderbird, even when it was unfashionable to admit it. Because, for the last few years, the view amongst those “in the know” was that email was dead, that nobody used it, and that even if they did, Web-based systems like Gmail meant that Thunderbird and its ilk were dinosaurs.
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Canonical announced a couple of days ago, December 11, that the recently released Mozilla Thunderbird 24.2.0 email client landed in the Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
Officially released by Mozilla on December 10, 2013, the Mozilla Thunderbird 24.2.0 email client is a bugfix release that solves an issue where long email messages that had multiple signatures might no longer be readable, and fixes a problem where users were not able to edit account settings in various non-standard configurations of local folder setups, as well as several security issues.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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I’ve been following the progress of OpenShot, an open source video editor, for the past few years. I think it achieves just the right balance between ease-of-use and a rich feature set. When I heard about the OpenShot Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, I was one of the first to contribute. By the deadline, their intended fund raising goal was more than doubled at $45,000+. This success also meant that OpenShot 2.0 will become available on Windows and Macintosh. Considering that video consumers constitute more than 50% of all Internet traffic and that every passing year this figure continues to rise, a free, high-quality video editing program for Linux, Macintosh and Windows is sure to cause quite a stir. The possibilities are endless for new authors of documentaries, narrative films, and personal video projects.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has long let users deploy Linux images from its own collection. Now it is allowing the import of pre-defined virtual machine images for popular Linux distros, as well as the ability to export those images once in use.
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However, the increase in popularity for Linux, as well as customers’ need for efficient data backup and restore services, made IDrive’s decision to expand the express service to other operating systems an obvious endeavor.
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Posted in News Roundup, Red Hat at 9:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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As with each release, installation images for the major desktop environments, hardware platforms, and the Cloud, are accounted for.
Aside from installation images for the GNOME 3 desktop, which is the main edition, installation images for KDE, MATE, LXDE and Xfce desktops are also available. Fans of the Cinnamon and E17 desktops have to install them from the bfo, DVD, netinstall CD image or from an existing installation of Fedora.
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12.19.13
Posted in News Roundup at 1:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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12.18.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Today, a special police unit can decide that a certain website needs to disappear from the Internet, and threaten its domain name registrar into revoking the address “until further notice”, without any legal basis whatsoever.
The name of the unit is PIPCU (Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit) and it has just reported on the success of Operation Creative – a three month long campaign that resulted in 40 websites accused of copyright infringement shutting down, or at least moving to a new Web address.
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Speaking at the Internet Service Providers Association, Security Minister James Brokenshire said that an announcement on blocking extremist websites is ‘forthcoming.’
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Numerous reactions are now being voiced against the inclusion in the 2014-2019 Defense Bill of article 13 whose provisions enable a pervasive surveillance of online data and communications. Gilles Babinet, appointed in 2012 as French Digital Champion to Nellie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, was quoted [fr] in the French newspaper Les Echos, “This law is the most serious attack on democracy since the special tribunals during the Algerian War” (our translation).
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Social networking giant Facebook has been granted a patent to use profile information to analyze whether shared files are “pirated” or not. The data is carefully analyzed using several social indicators including the interests of the poster and recipient, their geographical location, and their social relationship. According to Facebook the patent can help the company to “minimize legal liabilities,” but whether users will be happy remains to be seen.
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Facebook is developing a speech impediment. The recent fracas over beheading videos was marked by severe bouts of waffling from the social media giant. On one hand, it seems to want to ease unfettered expression. On the other hand, it’s set itself up as the content police.
These two aspects often collide with disastrous results. Beheadings are a go, but breast cancer groups can’t post photos of mastectomies. Recent partnerships with government agencies see Facebook willing to censor by proxy, even as it attempts to roll back its control in other areas. Giving 800+ million users access to a “report” button is well-intended, but the reality is more troubling. Something that’s simply unpopular can be clicked into oblivion in nearly no time whatsoever.
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It seems that Google now wants you to make use of words in a more careful and responsible way, and thus, has drawn off many words, including a bunch of profane words, from its built-in dictionary for Android. With the rollout of Android 4.4 KitKat, Google has now stopped giving you predictive suggestions for a raft of words.
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Last Tuesday (26 Nov) representatives from the country’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — the Haya’a — raided several bookshops selling the novel H W J N by Ibraheem Abbas and Yasser Bahjatt’s, demanding it’d be taken off the shelves. H W J N is a “fantasy, sci-fi and romance” novel about a genie who falls in love with a human, and is a best-seller in Saudi Arabia.
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China’s campaign against online rumors, which critics say is crushing free speech, has been highly successful in “cleaning” the Internet, a top official of the country’s internet regulator said on Thursday.
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The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this month rammed through Parliament a state secrecy law that signals a fundamental alteration of the Japanese understanding of democracy. The law is vaguely worded and very broad, and it will allow government to make secret anything that it finds politically inconvenient. Government officials who leak secrets can be jailed for up to 10 years, and journalists who obtain information in an “inappropriate” manner or even seek information that they do not know is classified can be jailed for up to five years. The law covers national security issues, and it includes espionage and terrorism.
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Fukushima continues to spew out radiation. The quantities seem to be rising, as do the impacts.
The site has been infiltrated by organized crime. There are horrifying signs of ecological disaster in the Pacific and human health impacts in the U.S.
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The drawn-out process in which a bill becomes a law lends itself to harmful things, like mission creep and bloating. Canada’s new cyberbullying legislation, problematic in its “purest” form, is now becoming even worse as legislators have begun hanging language aimed at other issues (child porn, terrorism, cable theft [?]) on the bill’s framework.
As was noted earlier, language aimed at punishing revenge porn had already been attached to the bill. But the urge to target as much as possible with a broadly written bill is too much for Canada’s politicians to resist. Michael Geist notes that Bob Dechert (Secretary to the Minister of Justice) took a moment during the debate to speculate about the “dangers” of “stolen” cable.
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This month, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Department of Homeland Security must make its plan to shut off the Internet and cellphone communications available to the American public. You, of course, may now be thinking: What plan?! Though President Barack Obama swiftly disapproved of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak turning off the Internet in his country (to quell widespread civil disobedience) in 2011, the US government has the authority to do the same sort of thing, under a plan that was devised during the George W. Bush administration. Many details of the government’s controversial “kill switch” authority have been classified, such as the conditions under which it can be implemented and how the switch can be used. But thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), DHS has to reveal those details by December 12 — or mount an appeal. (The smart betting is on an appeal, since DHS has fought to release this information so far.)
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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We’re proud to announce that Qt 5.2 is now available. With the release of Qt 5.1 in July, we showcased the Qt for Android and iOS ports and laid down the beginning of some heavy improvements we have now done on Qt’s graphics capabilities. In the last 6 months, we’ve worked very hard to finalize this release and especially these ports.
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Fresh Alpha 5 update brings improvements of Qt Quick Controls, aligns to newer Tizen 2.2.1 and standard Qt 5.2 RC 1 released week ago.
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Project Neon, the daily builds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Plasma 2 for Kubuntu, has started releasing ISO images for testing. These are very early previews of the next generation of KDE Software. It is strongly recommended not be installed on a production machine but can be tested as live images or installed into a VirtualBox or other VM.
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If you are using a Linux desktop computer that’s running the KDE desktop, it’s likely that you are running a KDE 4.11 series, either version 4.11.2 or 4.11.3. Those are the last two stable editions.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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After receiving push support for the SFTP (secure FTP) protocol last month, the GVFS (GNOME Virtual File System) software was updated a few days ago with pull support for the aforementioned protocol.
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On December 12, the Yorba Foundation has unofficially announced that a new version of its Geary email client for the GNOME desktop environment reached version 0.5.0 and it’s available for download, or update where appropriate.
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The latest open-source project being forked by the Ubuntu developers at Canonical is the GNOME Control Center. In Ubuntu 14.04, there will now be the Unity Control Center.
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The GNOME developers have announced earlier today, December 11, the immediate availability for download and testing of the GNOME Photos 3.11.3 photo viewer application for the upcoming GNOME 3.12 desktop environment.
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GParted 0.17.0 was released today and its key feature is support for online resizing of file-systems along with other bug fixes and updates.
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