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What started as an uphill battle in Burlington, Vermont on the National Day of Civic Hacking in June 2013, transversed into an understanding between local government, non-profits, the media, and the community four months later. What they came to understand was that we can grow stronger when we work together. When we partner. When we work on stuff that matters. Robert Coleburn, a Technology Librarian (and systems administrator) at Fletcher Free Library, jumped at the opportunity to partner with Code for Burlington, a Code for America brigade, to help host a hackathon on the last weekend in October called Hack the Stacks. The event drew over 30 people volunteering to improve their community through open source technology.

Run apps directly on the Glass hardware Google has unveiled what it's calling a "sneak peek" at its Glass Developer Kit (GDK), a new way to write software for the Chocolate Factory's privacy-stomping future-specs.…

In 2002, the GSyC/LibreSoft research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos successfully surveyed a broad swath of over 2500 respondents (mostly developers) from open source and free software communities. They have long been researching and collaborating with Free and Libre Open Sourse Software (FLOSS or FOSS) organizations and groups and are back again to recreate the survey with the goal of assessing where the community stands today after over ten years of evolution and innovation. This year, the Libresoft research group encourages anyone involved in a FLOSS project (not only developers) to participate in the survey.

Google's faster-than-expected upgrade of all its SSL certificates to an RSA key length of 2048 bits will make cracking connections to the company's services more difficult without affecting performance, experts say.

One of the best emails to get before a conference you're psyched to attend is the one that outlines all the final details. It links to the final speakers' schedule, reminds you of important things like where to park and when to check-in, and of course, that email tells you about the fun parties. That email revs you up and organizes you for the conference to come. So when I opened up the "final details" email for the recent All Things Open conference in Raleigh, I was expecting to see an outline of the typical who, what, when, where info. I wasn’t expecting the first item to be a reminder of the conference's anti/no harassment policy. But there it was—the first item on the list:

This is a condensed version of the blog post: Hey Civic Hackers! How about leaving the ninja skills at home and building really useful applications? It includes more analogies and cars. Comments welcome. Most hackers are deeply involved in the tech scene. They keep up to date with the latest technologies and will use tech that is in the early phases of adoption. They have no problem using cloud services, NoSQL data stores, languages with smaller communities, and target more recent browsers or phones. They don't mind doing custom configurations on server software, they probably already know some of the maintainers of the project and can get special help, and they know other hackers who they can reach out to. They generally come from a startup world or at least from software companies where budgets and skill sets are generally high for employees.

Recon Instruments announced an Android-based $399 heads-up display (HUD) designed to fit inside ski goggles. The Snow2 is equipped with a 1GHz, dual-core processor, a 428 x 240 mini-display, plus WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and sensors, and it syncs to Android and iOS devices. The Snow2 updates a previous MOD Live HUD wearable that was similarly […]

Olimex’s OLinuXino project announced a tiny, Android- and Linux-ready single board computer based on Allwinner’s 1GHz, Cortex-A8 based A10 processor, and the first one to be offered with a mini-PC enclosure. The open source A10-OLinuXino-Lime offers 512MB of DDR3 RAM, an optional 4GB of NAND flash, plus HDMI, SATA, USB, and Ethernet, starting at only […]

While (U)EFI is frowned upon by many Linux users due to the security disaster known as Secure Boot or other UEFI compatibility problems with running Linux on systems, there are a few benefits...

The latest edition of SUSE's community Linux distribution is ready to use.

AMD unveiled the Radeon R9 290 graphics card at the beginning of November as one step down from the new flagship Radeon R9 290X graphics card. Numerous Windows reviews praised the graphics card for its great performance, but what wasn't clear at the time was how the Linux performance and compatibility was for this new $399 USD graphics card. AMD hadn't offered any review samples to Phoronix for conducting any Linux-based testing and benchmarking, but it's more clear now why that didn't happen: the Linux performance isn't stellar. I bought an XFX Radeon R9 290 and now there's many Linux benchmarks coming out of this graphics card that's riddled by what might be driver issues. I already regret having purchased the AMD Radeon R9 290 for use on Linux; the graphics card is hot, power hungry, noisy, and the OpenGL results aren't too good.

Jailhouse virtualization was announced today by Siemens to address real-time, safety, and security requirements.

At the school district where I am the director of information technology, over 90% of our information systems have been transitioned to open source software. Ubuntu is the server operating systems at the district office and schools, while the Ubuntu desktop is deployed for students, teachers, and administration through the use of diskless clients. As a result, students and teachers use primarily open source programs which include LibreOffice, Scribus, the Gimp, and Inkscape, to name a very few. We are able to centrally control over 2300 workstations at 16 schools and keep software much more current than many districts attempting to maintain commercial software packages. We have achieved significant energy savings, over 70% on our clients, and greatly reduced licensing costs.

Security researchers have discovered a Linux backdoor that uses a covert communication protocol to disguise its presence on compromised systems. The malware was used in an attack on a large (unnamed) hosting provider back in May. It cleverly attempted to avoid setting off any alarm bells by injecting its own communications into legitimate traffic, specifically SSH chatter.

Requests from governments worldwide for user information have more than doubled since three years ago. Worse still, says Google, is what the US won't let us tell you...

Google also urged Washington to take action to shore up privacy protections for US citizens: We strongly believe that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) must be updated in this Congress, and we urge Congress to expeditiously enact a bright-line, warrant-for-content rule. Governmental entities should be required to obtain a warrant--issued based on a showing of probable cause--before requiring companies like Google to disclose the content of users' electronic communications.

Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman tried to get Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond’s judge to only hand down a community service sentence. Hammond, instead, received 10 years in jail...

Following my recent post on the initiatives now in place to rebalance the demographics of the Linux Kernel community, I would like to share a set of specific training activities to get beginners, specifically college students, involved in the kernel. These were created by an enthusiastic group at Red Hat, including Matthew Whitehead and Priti Kumar, and unfolded on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS), and State University of New York at Albany.

Yesterday there was news that OpenACC 2.0 parallel programming support was coming to GCC complete with GPU acceleration support for NVIDIA GPUs. While it was exciting on the surface, it appears that this work may be poisonous and could have a very tough time making it upstream...

Many programs exist that try to serve as a replacement for MATLAB. They all differ in their capabilities—some extending beyond what is available in MATLAB, and others giving subsets of functions that focus on some problem area. In this article, let's look at another available option: FreeMat.

I remember the first time a friend of mine introduced me to Linux and showed me how I didn't need to type commands and path names fully—I could just start typing and use the Tab key to complete the rest. That was so cool. I think everybody loves Tab completion because it's something you use pretty much every minute you spend in the shell.