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I recently was able to attend an interesting Cato/Techfreedom/CEI debate on the unintended consequences of the rogue website crackdown. The specific focus (not surprisingly) was the debate over SOPA/PIPA, but thankfully some of the debate went further back, to discuss how the government and private actors were already using existing law to do questionable things to sites they declared "rogue." This became even more timely with the Megaupload takedown... which happened about the same time that this panel ended. It was especially nice to see some discussion over the problematic seizures around Dajaz1 and Rojadirecta, as well as the fact that Veoh went bankrupt defending a bogus copyright lawsuit under existing law. These are not "hypotheticals".

American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setting case.

Software that controls vital human functions should always be open source, else it could prove to be a danger to one's existence, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation says.

Hack, Slash, Loot is a single-player turn-based dungeon crawler Linux. You take control of a lone hero and explore sprawling dungeons, fight dangerous monsters and plunder valuable treasures. The game features perma-death and randomly generated dungeons making it a nice coffee break game.

The Desura gaming client now has an open source brother, called Desurium and hosted on Github, licensed under GPL (GNU Public License) version 3. Detailed instructions about how to install and run the open source version of the Desura client on both Linux and Windows platform are also available on the Github page.

David Mandala of Canonical talked last week at Linux.Conf.Au 2012 about the history of Ubuntu Linux supporting the ARM architecture, what's coming up for Ubuntu ARM in the 12.04 LTS release, and even what's expected from Ubuntu on ARM as far out as 2015...

What everybody ought to know about emergency computer kits

LXer Feature: 24-Jan-2012

There has been a lot of worry lately about windows 8 secure boot making it (possibly) much harder or impossible to install certain Linux's (possibly all) on pcs with windows 8 secure boot. So I decided to list the arguments against making it possibly harder or impossible to install Linux's.

The desktop remains central to our everyday work and play, despite all the excitement around tablets, TV’s and phones. So it’s exciting for us to innovate in the desktop too, especially when we find ways to enhance the experience of both heavy “power” users and casual users at the same time. The desktop will be with us for a long time, and for those of us who spend hours every day using a wide diversity of applications, here is some very good news: 12.04 LTS will include the first step in a major new approach to application interfaces.

Linux and free/open source software are the best computing environments for children because they can get under the hood and learn to control and shape the technology, rather than be trained like lab rats to click buttons and be good little unquestioning consumers. Here is a batch of excellent educational and creative software for children, and for beginners of any age.

Notion Ink says it will switch to a Texas Instruments OMAP 4 processor running Android 4.0 for its next generation Adam II tablet. In other tablet news, Pew Research found the percentage of U.S. adults who own a tablet computer nearly doubled from 10 percent to 19 percent between mid-December and early January, and RBC Capital estimated that Amazon.com will earn $136 in content-related revenue from each Kindle Fire customer....

Fedora 17, codenamed the Beefy Miracle, has yet another new round of features. One of the items though includes this beefy release having DIET...

Honoring individuals for contributions to the advancement of software development

How to speed up web site performance by using Apache directives to control http cache headers

Workers today are more mobile than ever, so providing a secure link to your network for remote workers is crucial. Luckily, it’s also free and easy with OpenVPN. I’ll walk you through the process of setting up an OpenVPN server to authenticate and encrypt multiple client connections in just slightly more time than it takes to read this article.

Have you received a suspicious PDF or Flash file lately and are you curious about the malware it contains? Then start up REMnux to analyze it, as Koen explains…

We've seen, in the last years at least, a big rise of the Web in everything we do and everywhere we do it. Now, lots of people need only a browser window for work or for fun, making lots of previously-used pieces of software obsolete. With the launch of the Gnome 3 desktop environment, the Web made it's way inside our installed software in a very smart way: parts of the UI are actually writen in Javascript, a Web language by excellence. Or...maybe not that much. Fabrice Bellard wrote a PC emulator in Javascript, and here's another example: a desktop environment having important parts written in this language. So if you're feeling hacky and have some knowledge of Javascript, or even general programming concepts, this article is for you.

Cinnamon, the GNOME2-like GNOME Shell fork, has reached version 1.2, which is considered fully stable. The new release brings many new features, but also separates Cinnamon even more from GNOME Shell.

At SCALE 10x a new FUSE implementation was presented that while still having the file-system in user-space, the kernel component is now responsible for more of the work.

It has been announced, across the pond, that IT analyst firm, Gartner Inc has now positioned Drupal Acquia in the Visionaries quadrant of both the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Externally Facing Social Software and the Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, thereby raising Drupal’s visibility and promoting its accessibility amongst the top 10,000 global businesses.