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Supposedly we've won today. Both the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House of Representatives have been shelved by their respective sponsors. However, these acts have been shelved before, and the bags of money sent to DC didn't suddenly devalue, so I'm sure the next SOPA is being written as we speak. What did make me happy, though, was Neelie Kroes: the EU commissioner for the digital agenda has unambiguously distanced herself from SOPA, which she calls "bad legislation". Obama, the next time you want to make a statement with teeth, just wait for Kroes to do it for you.

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) released a security-enhanced version of Android based on the hardened SE Linux, featuring stricter access control policies. SE Android restricts the system resources available to an Android app regardless of user permissions, blocking malware such as the "GingerBreak" exploit at six different steps during execution, says the NSA.

Here's a look at what's coming up on Friday at the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 10X..

The School of Computer Science at the University of Windsor deployed their first network of diskless thin clients in August of 1987. Since then, the CS school has progressed through three operating systems, four thin client devices, and seven Sun server configurations. In the summer of 2011, UWindsor switched from Solaris and Sun Ray clients to Ubuntu and LTSP Thin Clients.

The question of whether Secure Boot technology in UEFI firmware could exclude Linux from PCs running Windows 8 has taken a fresh twist. Red Hat engineer Matthew Garrett, one of the first to flag up the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface issue, has blogged that Microsoft's rules for certified Windows 8 hardware do not make it easier to boot Linux despite what some have claimed. Redmond's requirements mention the existence of a boot option for PCs that can fire up a digitally signed Linux kernel. This custom boot-mode would allow the user to modify the contents of the machine's Secure Boot signature database and the platform key (PK) that verifies kernels during system start-up.

At any given point in time, there are multiple Linux kernel versions being developed and maintained. This past week, kernel developers outlined what's old and what's new for various kernels as work pushes forward in the New Year.

Windows and Linux use different file system architectures. Fortunately, your Windows experience can put you on the fast track to being comfortable managing and monitoring the Linux extended file systems. This article helps you learn your way around the extended disk file system family on Linux.

What may sound like a perverse concept is actually one of the many ways smartphones can change your life. If you play a musical instrument but don't happen to have perfect pitch (most of us, sadly), you can buy a tuner, pitch pipe, tuning fork or any number of other aids to keep yourself in tune. If you have a smartphone in your pocket, however, you also can simply download gStrings. Available in the Android Marketplace in either a free ad-supported version or an inexpensive ad-free version, gStrings will help you tune any number of instruments accurately.

The Linux Foundation posted a calendar of its 2012 conferences. These include the Linux Kernel Summit, which will be held Aug. 26-28 in San Diego, where it will be co-located with the larger LinuxCon North America event and the Linux Plumbers Conference, both held Aug. 29-31.

Marvell announced an education platform combining its Plug Computer, Arch Linux, and software developed in collaboration with Stanford University. The SMILE Plug micro server runs on a 2GHz Marvell Armada 300 processor, sets up a secure Wi-Fi cloud for up to 60 students, and provides a & Classroom 3.0& connected, secure, interactive learning environment....

Toward the end of December, LWN looked at the new push to move various subsystems specific to Android kernels into the mainline. There seems to be broad agreement that merging this code makes sense, but that agreement becomes rather less clear once the discussion moves to the merging of specific subsystems. Tim Bird's request for comments on the Android "logger" mechanism shows that, even with a relatively simple piece of code, there is still a lot of room for disagreement and problems can turn out to be larger than expected.

I hope all my readers have enjoyed the best of the holiday season. I've been busy with the predictable confusions and minor crises that attend this time of year, but I managed to find time to jot down some recommendations for my readers. Go on, you've been good, give yourself a few extra belated gifts and don't worry if your budget's busted - it's all free software, you can't beat these deals.

LXer Feature: 08-Jan-2012

In the Roundup this week we have 13 niche Linux distros, an OpenDNS freeze on Google, Linux on the Windows Cloud, Data predictions for 2012, some confusion about Gnome 3 and last but not least..could RMS have been right all along? Enjoy!

There's just four weeks to go until FOSDEM 2012 takes place in Brussels, Belgium. The initial schedule for this leading open-source European event is set, there's lots of interesting discussions to be had, and at least one surprise. The FOSDEM 2012 schedule is now available from this area of the FOSDEM.org web-site.

Innocent websites were blocked and labelled phishers on Wednesday following an apparent conflict between OpenDNS and Google's Content Delivery Network (CDN). OpenDNS - a popular domain name lookup service* - sparked the outage by blocking access to googleapis.com, Google's treasure trove of useful scripts and apps for web developers. According to reports, a flood of errors hit pages that used Google-hosted jQuery and hundreds of thousands of sites fell over.

As SCALE 10X rolls toward its Jan. 20 opening, sessions, speakers and events are starting to become finalized. Here’s a look at some of the things you don’t want to miss at SCALE 10X.

I used to have a paperweight sitting on my desk that read something like “Robert H. Lane, appointed President of Commodore Computers....” It was the sort of thing that they gave to executives. A brass plaque of their appointment as it appeared in the Wall Street Journal or the Globe and Mail.

Call it “Chromegate.” Just a few weeks after Google Chrome was reported to have overtaken Mozilla Firefox to become the second most popular Web browser in the world, Google’s glory has been tarnished by a “jaw-dropping,” massive online Chrome advertising campaign that would seem to violate Google’s own guidelines, uncovered by SEO Book blogger Aaron Wall. Essentially, Google was caught paying at least one PR company to spam the Web with hundreds of crudely written “sponsored posts” from bloggers promoting Google Chrome — posts comprised of what would seem to be just placeholder text and unsubstantiated pro-Google Chrome statements.

The autonomous region of Extremadura in western Spain, which has pioneered the use of open source solutions in public administrations since 2005, has abandoned the development of its custom LinEx distribution. The Spanish newspaper Público reports that the project was abandoned after control of the Centro de Excelencia de Software José de Espronceda, which was responsible for the development of LinEx and other projects, was handed over to the central Spanish government in Madrid. In May 2011, the Extremadura branch of the Spanish Partido Popular (PP) party won the government elections in the autonomous region.

Looking ahead to this new year, "I wish and expect that the world will discover FLOSS, particularly Debian GNU/Linux, to be the rich and efficient software system I have been using for years," said blogger Robert Pogson. "It is as different as night and day from that other OS, with all its restrictions and fragility."