Showing all newswire headlines

This page discusses the relevant changes introduced in CRUX 3.0. Everybody upgrading from the previous release is advised to carefully read the following notes.

We've been discussing the ridiculousness of the prosecution against Aaron Swartz, including the fact that if a federal prosecutor decides to take you down, it's not at all difficult to find something they can try to pin on you, especially when it comes to "computer" crimes. Law professor James Grimmelmann explains how it's quite possible that prosecutors could go after him under the same laws as it went after Swartz. He notes that he used to run the (excellent) blog LawMeme (which we used to link to frequently). After it died, he wanted to preserve many of the articles, and so he wrote a script to pull the articles off of the Internet Archive. While it all depends on your interpretation, he shows how a prosecutor could make the argument that he violated the Internet Arvchive's terms of service -- and that some of the decisions he made in writing the script could be taken out of context to be used against him.

Fedora 18 was officially released this week for x86/x86_64, but the ARM version of Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow" is still under development. Fedora 18 for ARM went into beta last week and since then benchmarks were carried out comparing Spherical Cow on ARM to other popular ARM Linux distributions.

I'm very pleased to announce the release of UberStudent 2.0 Lightweight edition. It is designed to reinvigorate older or slower computers, and for netbooks, as well as for anyone who simply prefers a lightweight Linux distribution. Great care and testing has gone into aiming this release as the most feature-filled, polished, and stable lightweight Linux distribution available for education. It features a synergy of smartly chosen installed applications and web apps. The result is a remarkably full-featured desktop that enables you to be productive even if you lack Internet access.

Intel's Mesa DRI driver received a new patch this weekend that's capable of enhancing the open-source graphics driver's performance for some OpenGL games...

The folks at Fight for the Future noticed the proximity of Internet Freedom Day to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and decided an interesting form of celebrating internet freedom would be to share a video of MLK's famous "I have a dream..." speech.

A Phoronix reader has announced his work on SDDM within the Phoronix Forums this weekend. SDDM is a very lightweight display management that takes advantage of Qt's QML...

Redmond first announced CU-RTC-Web in August. Along with the specification itself, the company produced a rationale; a list of reasons why it felt that WebRTC was a bad fit for the problem at hand, and why CU-RTC-Web was a superior solution. Perhaps the most specific complaint was that WebRTC was quite deeply linked to a specification called SDP, an open industry standard used extensively for VoIP and video conferencing systems in conjunction with SIP, with Microsoft arguing that this is over-complicated and hinders interoperability with non-SDP systems. SDP is used to negotiate the parameters of the connection; things like the bandwidth, the IP addresses and port numbers to use, and so on.

It just happens that Microsoft has non-SDP products of its own—Skype (which remains stubbornly proprietary and undocumented) and Lync (which can bridge with SIP systems, and hence understands SDP, but offers alternative APIs too).

I have spent the last 3 or 4 years slowly getting a reputation for extending Emacs in mad ways. So much so that fsbot on #emacs will tell you that nicferrier-fix is:

most problems can be fixed by writing more elisp

I will be continuing this trend in 2013. There's a lot going on so I thought I'd write a summary of everything that I see happening.

Publishing science behind paywalls is immoral. There, I said it.

I know, I know. It's an easy trap to fall into – I've done it myself. To my shame, several of my own early papers, and even a recent one, are behind paywalls. I'm not speaking as a righteous man to sinners, but as a sinner who has repented.

The Wine development release 1.5.22 is now available.

Mozilla has released Firefox 18.0.1, a first update to Firefox 18, which was released ten days ago. According to the release notes, and the lack of any additional entries on the security advisories page, the release is a stability update addressing three issues.

Greg Rice and Nathan Martz recently took some time out of their busy schedules to talk about Double Fine's history and goals regarding cross platform support.

Sure, but what good is not losing your data if an unauthorized party can access it just as easily and readily as you can.

Welcome again to a brand new Let's Play! This time i'm going to show you how to install and run without too much pain in the ass, one of the games from the most famous series of fighting games in history: Street Fighter X Tekken!

PHP has been at the helm of the web for many years. It is an extremely popular, interpreted scripting language that is ideally suited for web development. This language powers millions of web sites on the net and is extremely well supported by its user community. It is released under a non-copyleft free software license / open source license. PHP can be deployed on most Web servers and also as a standalone shell on almost all operating systems and platforms.

A New Year, a new Amarok! The Amarok Team is proud to present the new Amarok 2.7, codenamed "A Minor Tune". This version comes with the following brand new major features, developed during last year's Google Summer of Code:

This is a new and interesting project that could be really useful both for companies that for private users, Guacamole is an HTML5 remote desktop gateway that provides access to desktop environments using remote desktop protocols like VNC and RDP. A centralized server acts as a tunnel and proxy, allowing access to multiple desktops through a web browser.

Be aware that Guacamole is only a remote desktop gateway, and cannot access your desktop’s display without a remote desktop server of some kind to connect to. Guacamole does not contain its own VNC or RDP server, it’s a java based program so it’s distributed as a .war package.

The client requires nothing more than a web browser supporting HTML5 and AJAX.

Redmond's low-rent tablet OS was doomed from the start Analysis Industry doomsayers were circling Windows 8 like buzzards before it even launched, but they picked the wrong carcass. Microsoft's real 2012 roadkill was Win8's ARM-powered cousin, Windows RT.…

Here's what it will really cost Say what you will about Windows 8; at least the upgrade from Windows 7 is cheap. Or it is for now. After January 31 will be a different story.…