Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

ecurity vendors analyzing the code used in the cyber attacks against South Korea are finding nasty components designed to wreck infected computers. Tucked inside a piece of Windows malware used in the attacks is a component that erases Linux machines, an analysis from Symantec has found. The malware, which it called Jokra, is unusual, Symantec said.

A plan by Google, Microsoft and Netflix to integrate an extension for playing back encrypted media content in HTML5 has caused dissatisfaction among US civil rights campaigners. The bone of contention is a proposal to integrate "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME) that will serve as an interface for playing back DRM-protected content in the browser and which is currently being reviewed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The initiators of the proposal emphasise that this is not intended as a way of anchoring Digital Rights Management (DRM) facilities into the specification. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) translates this into: "We're not vampires, but we are going to invite them into your house."

Members from the open source world will gather in Columbia, South Carolina for the Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) on March 27-28, 2013. For anyone looking to score a last minute ticket, the event is sold out. Last year, more than 600 people from 20 states and more than 20 colleges and universities, and 75 business and government organizations, came together in the spirit of open source to share knowledge and grow the open source community.

Parasound, a purveyor of fanatically high-end consumer audio equipment, has introduced a CD player that’s controlled by an internal Mini-ITX computer running embedded Linux. Using a CD-ROM drive for playing CDs, the “Halo CD 1? sucks in the CD’s contents at 4x normal speed, giving its CPU time to detect and eliminate disc errors before outputting near-perfect audio.

A little over five years after the creation of the Open Handset Alliance, Glyn Moody looks at Android's global market position and the challenges that Google faces to avoid Android disappearing under a plethora of other companies' interfaces and apps.

One of the cool projects that OKF France were hacking away on during Open Data Day last weekend was Open Food Facts. It’s a free, open collaborative database of food facts from around the world, which aims to help consumers make better choices about what they put in their body, as well as motivating industry to take more care over the production of food.

There's no denying that those of us here in the Linux community see our fair share of ups and downs in any given week or month, as events unfold that either advance or set back our favorite operating system. Sometimes, though, it's difficult not to be amazed by the way things often balance out "Even Steven" -- much the way they did for Jerry Seinfeld way back when.

A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force -- for both attackers and defenders. One side creates ceramic handguns, laser-guided missiles, and new-identity theft techniques, while the other side creates anti-missile defense systems, fingerprint databases, and automatic facial recognition systems.

Crudebyte has released an SDK for the JACK Audio Connection Kit for iOS developers. JACK, which is already available for Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS X, can route audio streams between applications and different audio hardware. To do this, JACK synchronises applications that read and write audio data at certain intervals with low latency.

In the latest evidence of the growing recognition that our patent system needs reform, last week the House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet held an informative and well- attended hearing on "Abusive Patent Litigation".

Open Xchange has announced that the major new feature of its OX App Suite will be OX Text, a web-based collaborative word processor which handles DOCX and ODT documents natively, without conversion to an intermediate format. DOCX is Microsoft Office's native XML format and ODT is the document format of OpenOffice and LibreOffice; both are ISO standard document formats.

For those curious where the common Linux file-systems stand performance-wise for the Linux 3.9 kernel, here are benchmarks from a solid-state drive and hard drive when comparing the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS file-systems from this yet-to-be-released Linux kernel.

If anyone is a paid-up member of the open source club, surely it is Miguel de Icaza. He helped found the GNOME UI and desktop beloved by millions and claimed to be the most popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems.

Embedded board-maker Seco has rounded out a series of three SODIMM-like COMs (computer-on-modules) built to µQseven form-factor specifications. They’re based on three different ARM-powered system-on-chip (SoC) processors, from Nvidia, Freescale, and TI.

In a meeting of the Ubuntu Technical Board last night, the technical leadership of Canonical's Linux distribution decided to halve the support time for non-LTS releases to nine months. At the same time, the developers want to make it easier for users of the distribution to get up-to-date packages on a regular basis without the need to perform explicit upgrades of the whole distribution. Attending the meeting, Matt Zimmerman, Colin Watson and Stéphane Graber unanimously agreed on these points and also clearly voted against moving Ubuntu into a rolling release model. The changes will be implemented in the maintenance schedule starting with the release of Ubuntu 13.04 ("Raring Ringtail") on 25 April.

Mentioning open source to a typical consumer will no doubt result in puzzled looks or a reference to that "free stuff." Even in some business circles, the open source concept may only be synonymous with an alternative computer operating system known as Linux. On the software development side of the computing industry, however, open source is known for much different reasons.

A project to develop a low-cost ARM Cortex A15-based single-board computer (SBC) reportedly has been abandoned. Initially named “ARMBRIX Zero,” the $145 board got as far as its prototype debug phase when the company behind it abruptly shuttered its doors.

Digikam has released a new version of their popular photo management software. Exciting new features and plug-ins are now available for users to try. Unfortunately 3.1 has also just been released, though the changes are not as significant. I still wanted to look back to make sure nothing important was overlooked. Here I will investigate some of the most important changes offered with the Digikam 3.0 release.

A lot of the software packages I've covered in recent articles have been focused strictly on doing computations on your machine, separate from the real world. So in this article, I explore how to use your computer to design something you can build and use in the real world: your own model rocket. Let's take a look at the OpenRocket utility and see how it can help you design your own rockets. OpenRocket even can run simulations on your designs to show how they should behave in flight.

Wikimedia has activated Lua-based templating on several of its sites including English Wikipedia. Driven by a new MediaWiki extension called Scribunto which allows scripting languages to be embedded in MediaWiki, it is hoped that the Lua templating will help improve performance where editors take advantage of its capabilities.