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Why don't academics discuss research before starting the work? In a recent blog post, Jack Kelly asked this simple question, and it is a striking one for those of us who are familiar with collaborating at high levels as part of an open source community. One of the pillars of the open source way is rapid prototyping and the idea of: release early, release often. In the scientific research community, however, the history of and current state of affairs is closed and secretive. Jack Kelly even began his post with: Warning: this is a hopelessly idealistic proposal...

According to a new report from Der Spiegel based on internal NSA documents, the signals intelligence agency's elite hacking unit (TAO) is able to conduct sophisticated wiretaps in ways that make Hollywood fantasy look more like reality. The report indicates that the NSA, in collaboration with the CIA and FBI, routinely and secretly intercepts shipping deliveries for laptops or other computer accessories in order to implant bugs before they reach their destinations. According to Der Spiegel, the NSA's TAO group is able to divert shipping deliveries to its own "secret workshops" in a method called interdiction, where agents load malware onto the electronics or install malicious hardware that can give US intelligence agencies remote access.

Last week I began sharing my Linux performance benchmarks from the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VD, an Intel ultrabook with some nice hardware and build quality. In last week's initial testing I carried out NVIDIA Optimus benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux and compared it to Windows 8.1. In today's article I have a number of reference benchmarks comparing the performance of the ASUS Zenbook Prime to six other systems, all running Ubuntu 13.10.

Samsung’s first Tizen phone reportedly will debut at Mobile World Congress Feb. 23, and will reach consumers in Europe and Japan in the second half of 2014. Samsung will likely announce the first Tizen phones at Mobile World Congress on Feb.23 in Barcelona, according to a recent report in IDG News Service. The story repeated […]

Open-source developers this week achieved a pleasant late Christmas present for Fedora users of having a working system with using the in-development Linux kernel DBus implementation (KDBUS) paired with the latest systemd code can now yield a booting system...

"Check Engine Soon"—that little orange light on your car's instrument panel is possibly one of the more annoying things about modern automobiles. Ever had it pop on during a trip and wonder whether it was just something mundane, like your gas cap being loose, or whether it's something deathly serious and a piston could come shooting out the side of your engine block at any time?

The year 2013 brought great progress for the adoption of open source in the health and science industries. We covered some excellent open source stories, here the highlights from 2013.

Giulio Camuffo has announced a new pet project he's been working on for Wayland: Termistor. The open-source Termistor is a drop-down, tabbed, terminal for Wayland...

I gave a talk at this year's TEDx Albany event, "Saving Science - Open Up or Perish," where I talked about something that I am very passionate about. For me, TEDx was an opportunity to try out a very different format from my usual technical talks and dig deep down to tell a very general audience about what's going on in science that should matter to them. I shared my journey from my education in Physics to becoming a software developer working almost exclusively on open source software for scientific research and development.

While extensive benchmarks of the GCC 4.9 development compiler are currently ongoing, here's a preview of the performance that the GNU Compiler Collection is set to offer in 2014 with its next major update. For this article an Intel Pentium "Haswell" dual-core processor was tested on a GCC 4.9 development snapshot and compared to GCC 4.8.2 and GCC 4.7.3 in a wide variety of C/C++ workloads. New LLVM Clang 3.4 benchmarks are also happening.

RSA denies the Reuters report published Friday that said the NSA paid RSA $10 million to use a flawed encryption formula. The agency-developed Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG) was used in RSA's BSAFE product.

In my last article, I started discussing Compojure, a Web framework written in the Clojure language. Clojure already has generated a great deal of excitement among software developers, in that it combines the beauty and expressive elegance of Lisp with the efficiency and ubiquity of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

The most-read posts this year on the Opensource.com Law channel showed a strong interest in diverse legal issues in the open source world. Many readers were reaching out for a better understanding open source licensing and related questions, such as:

Is that a Grub in your pocket or are you booting up? Canonical has just given curious Reg readers something interesting to to do in the dead days between Christmas and whenever you go back to work: figuring out how to dual boot an Android phone.…

The Ruby project has done a new major release on Christmas for their popular programming language. Ruby offers performance speed-ups but without severe incompatibilities, according to the release announcement...

Last week was marked by the first Wayland/Weston 1.4 Alpha release ahead of the planned general availability in January. For those that aren't up to date on all of the development activity, I've now had the time go through and highlight all of the major changes that landed in Git...

Bloomberg Philanthropies recently launched the Mayors Challenge, a contest for funding in the European Union where large cities submit new, innovative ideas for solving local problems. The EU contest is modeled on a similar competition for cities in the United States, where more than 300 cities submitted ideas covering issues ranging from sustainable development to education to citizen development. The grand prize of that contest went to a program in Providence, R.I. that works to improve the vocabulary of children in low-income households.

The VideoLAN project has announced the release of libbluray 0.5.0, the latest version of the open-source Blu-ray library. This latest release has better BD-J Java support and other new/improved features...

Hardkernel and its community Odroid project have announced an open-hardware single board computer based on Samsung’s quad-core 1.7GHz Exynos 4412 Prime SoC. The Odroid-U3 is claimed to be “100 percent software compatible” with the Odroid-U2 that began in Dec. 2012 and is now being discontinued. As with other Odroid SBCs, the U3 runs a variety […]

Gummiboot 41 was released this weekend with new features and was followed immediately by Gummiboot 42 to correct the build system for this open-source simple UEFI boot manager...