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Seth Vidal, a long time Durham resident most well known for creating the “yum” software used by several Linux distributions, was killed in a hit and run accident last night near Hillandale golf course. He was 36 years old.

With recent news that GitHub is banning storage of any file over 100Mb and discouraging files larger than 50Mb, their retreat from offering download services is complete. It's not a surprising trend; dealing with downloads is unrewarding and costly.

Hacker: It sounds vicious and destructive, just like the malevolent electronic villains it is used to describe. Yet this sense of the term is surprisingly new and, what's more, is completely at odds with the original meaning that arose within computer science...

Groundbreaking contributions to the global Internet are recognized every year in The Internet Hall of Fame by The Internet Society—a leading advocate for a free and open Internet, promoting the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world.

MontaVista Software announced that its MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) 6.0 is the first Linux distribution to have been registered for Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 5.0 under the ARM profile. The move reflects an expected surge of ARM processors in networking and telecom gear. According to the company, MontaVista Linux CGE 6.0 is the [...]

Boxee, the Israeli startup that achieved fame first as the developer of an innovative, free, media-streaming software platform, and later through its partnership with D-Link around the iconic Linux-powered Boxee Box device, has been acquired by Samsung. According to reports by Haaretz and the New York Times, the company’s selling price was less than the [...]

After recently delivering a 15-way open-source Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPU comparison, here are the benchmarks when tossing in the proprietary AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA graphics drivers too. Besides comparing a diverse selection of graphics processors from the three main desktop GPU vendors, this comparison also shows how the current open-source Linux graphics drivers compare to the official proprietary drivers.

Before the PC, computers were devices: custom hardware combined with software specifically written for the machine, and the machines themselves were usually designed for a select few (if not single) purposes. The problem that PCs seemed to address was diversity. Where customers had previously relied on one company to support both hardware and software, the PC clones opened the doors to a brave new world where anyone could build, support, or maintain a computer. It was a revolution that made computers affordable enough for anyone to own, for any business to adopt, and allowed countless entrepreneurs and skilled technicians to find work for themselves: outside the confines of long established corporate hierarchies. Unfortunately, the open source software revolution took much longer.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers' (PwC) 2013 Patent Litigation Study, 2012 was a "banner year for patent infringement litigation." Patent actions continued their dramatic rise in 2012 with 5,189 filings—the highest number ever recorded, and a 29% rise over last year, primarily resulting from the impact of the anti-joinder provision of the America Invents Act. Meanwhile, the 2012 median damages award, boosted by several unusually large damages awards, rose to nearly $10 million, which is double the average award seen over the previous six years.

Pre-release test images of Ubuntu Touch now launch an Ubuntu system directly, with the Android userland environment, used to run Android applications under Ubuntu Touch, running in an LXC Linux container within Ubuntu.

Towards the end of June I published AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D benchmarks, the open-source Linux graphics driver supporting the Radeon HD 7000/8000 series hardware on Linux. While the alternative to the Catalyst driver can accelerate OpenGL, it's very slow. Open-source driver benchmarks were shown in that article compared to older generations of AMD Radeon hardware backed by the mature R600 Gallium3D driver. In this article are benchmarks comparing the open-source "RadeonSI" driver to the proprietary AMD Catalyst GPU driver on the Radeon HD 7850/7950 graphics cards. As an additional driver reference point were also Radeon HD 7950 Cayman results; all testing happened from Fedora 19 Linux.

Intel wants to hire 50 former ST-Ericsson for an undisclosed Linux project in Lund Norway. Little is known about what kind of business Intel will be conducting in Lund, the only confirmation is that the workers have skills within Linux.

Open source news this week: July 1 - 5, 2013 What other open source-related news stories did you read about this week? Share them with us in the comments section. Follow us on Twitter where we share these stories in real time.

Android applications carry a signature that is designed to ensure APK package integrity. During installation, the operating system will use the signature to validate the package contents, and an alert will be issued if a manipulation is detected. US firm Bluebox, which was only founded in mid-2012, claims to have discovered a bug in this approach that allows arbitrary code to be injected into APK files without invalidating the signature.

The QXL KMS/DRM driver that was merged for Linux 3.10 and supports Red Hat's SPICE with guest virtual machines on QEMU, is picking up more features for Linux 3.11...

The technology migrating to the modern car contains millions of lines of programming code, some of which is open-source and a free license to a software's blueprint.

The open-source reverse-engineered Nouveau driver now has 2D EXA acceleration and X-Video support for NVIDIA's "NVF0" or better known as the GK110 GPU found in the NVIDIA GeForce TITAN and GeForce GTX 780. Updates to the Nouveau DRM and Mesa Gallium3D driver have also arrived...

Almost every Android phone has a big, gaping security weakness, according to the security startup who discovered the vulnerability. While news of a security vulnerability in Android might not exactly be surprising to users, the scope of the vulnerability does give one pause: "99 percent" of Android mobiles, or just under 900 million phones, are potentially vulnerable, according to the company.

The new study, an annual snapshot of court-ordered wiretaps produced by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, focused exclusively on law enforcement electronic surveillance and not on national security wiretaps approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which have become controversial in recent weeks.

...the report noted, U.S. law enforcement has encountered encryption schemes that prevented investigators from understanding the messages they’d intercepted.

UEFI Linux specialist Matthew Garrett is currently exploring the options for supporting Intel's Rapid Start Technology under Linux...