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When Mark Shuttleworth decided to nix Unity, the choice was obvious to Canonical—make GNOME the official desktop of Ubuntu Linux. This begins with Ubuntu 18.04 (so April, 2018) and we’ll be down to the official distribution and four recognized flavors.

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Google's Fuchsia mobile operating system, open source software in European governments, and more. Open source news roundup for April 30-May 13, 2017 read more

A question mark over whether the GNU GPL – the widely used free-software license – is enforceable as a contract may have been resolved by a US federal judge.…

The audio driver installed on some HP laptops includes a feature that could best be described as a keylogger, which records all the user's keystrokes and saves the information to a local file, accessible to anyone or any third-party software or malware that knows where to look.

Snowden encouraged attendees of the OpenStack Summit to “direct the future of the internet in a more free and fair way.” One way to do that, he says, is to use open source tools to build computing platforms that customers build and host themselves, which gives users more control over how data is handled.

Thanks to IoT botnets, DDoS attacks have finally turned from something of a novelty into an everyday occurrence. According to the A10 Networks survey, this year the 'DDoS of Things' (DoT) has reached critical mass - in each attack, hundreds of thousands of devices connected to the Internet are being leveraged.

Dire warnings ignored, plea for unity. Oracle has suffered an embarrassing setback in its plans for a modular architecture in Java 9.

A security researcher that goes online by the nickname of MalwareTech is the hero of the day, albeit an accidental one, after having saved countless of computers worldwide from a virulent form of ransomware called Wana Decrypt0r (also referenced as WCry, WannaCry, WannaCrypt, and WanaCrypt0r).

On Kickstarter, an open source, 4-bay “Helios4” NAS SBC runs Armbian on a Marvell Armada 388 SoC, and sells for $125, or $139 for the full case kit with fans. A Singapore-based startup called Kobol has gone to Kickstarter to pitch an open source network attached storage (NAS) SBC that supports up to 40TB of onboard storage, as well as media streaming and file sharing.

In this week's Top 5, we highlight tools for building great command-line UIs, an open source 2D game engine, mechanical keyboards, and more. Top 5 articles of the week 5. Mechanical keyboards for programmers and gamers Input Club's mechanical keyboards aren't just about producing exceptional products. They're also proof that open source can solve any problem. read more

Ever looked up at the night sky and tried to identify specific celestial bodies out of the millions you can see? Stellarium is an awesome open source planetarium application available in Fedora to help you identify and track objects in the... Continue Reading →

I originally got into systems administration because I loved learning about computers, and I figured that was a career that always would offer me something new to learn. Now many years later that prediction has turned out to be true, and it seems like there are new things to learn all the time.

When trying to make things work with the datetime module, most Python users have faced a point when we resort to guess-and-check until the errors go away. datetime is one of those APIs that seems easy to use, but requires the developer to have a deep understanding of what a few things actually mean. Otherwise, given the complexity of date- and time-related issues, introducing unexpected bugs is easy. read more

Machine learning and natural language processing are transforming our relationship with our devices by giving them a human voice. People with visual impairments have especially benefited from these technologies, but those who speak languages like my native Odia have largely been left behind by most voicebanks. read more

Wrestling with Google's machine learning framework Hands-on Occasionally a technology comes along that changes the way that people work. Docker has had a profound effect on how applications are deployed in the cloud, Hadoop changed how analysis of big data was done and the R language has disrupted the statistics market.…

Text editors aren't just something developers use to crank out code. Writers use them, too. A good text editor enables writers to focus on their words, but also packs other features that help them craft and publish their work more efficiently. While popular among the techies, GitHub's Atom text editor has evolved into a solid editor for writers, too. That's thanks to Atom's 6,100+ packages, which greatly extend the editor's capabilities. read more

Brad Fitzpatrick, a software engineer at Google working on the Go programming language, is a life-long nerd. Fitzpatrick's keynote at OSCON this year was based on bits of wisdom from half a life in open source.

A remote hijacking flaw that lurked in Intel chips for seven years was more severe than many people imagined, because it allowed hackers to remotely gain administrative control over huge fleets of computers without entering a password.

Have you launched an open source project or are you considering doing so? Making a success of your project can involve everything from evaluating licenses to community outreach. The good news is that there are many free resources that can help you advance and protect your project.

When last we met we reviewed some iptables fundamentals. Now you'll have two example firewalls to study, one for a single PC and one for a LAN. They are commented all to heck to explain what they're doing. This is for IPv4 only, so I'll write up some example firewalls for IPv6 in a future installment.