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In an effort originally known as Project Sputnik, Dell dedicated resources into doing Linux on an Ultrabook "right"—writing code where necessary (and contributing that code back upstream like a good FOSS citizen) and paying attention to the entire user experience rather than merely working on components in a vacuum. The result is a perfectly functional Ultrabook with a few extra tools—that "Developer Edition" moniker isn't just for show, and Dell has added some devops spices into the mix with this laptop that should quicken any developer's heartbeat.

Civil liberties advocates have asked the US Federal Trade Commission to take action against the nation's four major wireless carriers for selling millions of Android smartphones that never, or only rarely, receive updates to patch dangerous security vulnerabilities.

One company—Taiwan's Foxconn—makes a staggering 40 percent of the world's consumer electronic devices. Starting now, Microsoft will be getting paid a toll on a large number of those devices. The company's long patent-licensing campaign has landed its biggest client yet in licensing Foxconn, formally named Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Foxconn has agreed to take a license for any product it produces that runs Google's Android or Chrome operating systems.

Android co-founder Andy Rubin disclosed that Android was once considered as an operating system for cameras. "The exact same platform, the exact same operating system we built for cameras, that became Android for cellphones," said Rubin, speaking at the Japan New Economy Summit in Tokyo.

The 10-year-old Xen hypervisor was formerly a community project sponsored by Citrix, much as the Fedora operating system is a community project sponsored by Red Hat. Citrix was looking to place Xen into a vendor-neutral organization, however, and the Linux Foundation move was announced today. The list of companies that will "contribute to and guide the Xen Project" is impressive, including Amazon Web Services, AMD, Bromium, Calxeda, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, Google, Intel, Oracle, Samsung, and Verizon.

Forget Sputnik then, at least for the moment. It turns out that Dell's main effort has been to deliver a premium Linux notebook on which all the hardware works out of the box. "We went above and beyond with the hardware enablement we did with this," said Limonciello. "We got the touchpad to be full multi-touch, we went and got drivers from all the vendors we deal with in the laptop. It should really be a first-class experience."

Is it a first-class experience?

Tatu Ylonen, author of the SSH protocol, isn't afraid of criticising his own work: he's calling for a new version of the Secure Shell to make it more manageable and get rid of the problem of undocumented rogue keys.

Microsoft and Oracle say it's "predatory" for companies to give away software.

On Tuesday, we reported on a new complaint filed by "Fairsearch," an anti-Google group that counts Microsoft, Oracle, Nokia, and about a dozen other Google competitors as members. In recent years, European regulators have become more aggressive at policing anticompetitive behavior in the tech sector than their American counterparts. Microsoft and its allies hope that officials will conclude that Google's mobile OS strategy violates the EU's competition laws.

US antitrust regulators have recently developed great interest in patent trolls, which they have taken to calling "patent assertion entities" or PAEs. But it seems like they still haven't decided what to do about trolls. At recent hearings, critics lamented extortion-like demands, while supporters proclaimed trolls’ benefits to "invention markets."

Starting late last year, hundreds of US businesses began to receive demand letters from secretive patent-holding companies with six-letter gibberish names: AdzPro, GosNel, and JitNom. The letters state that using basic office equipment, like scanners that can send files to e-mail, infringes a series of patents owned by MPHJ Technologies. Unless the target companies make payments—which start at around $9,000 for the smallest targeted businesses but go up from there—they could face legal action.

On Saturday, Wikimedia France posted a press release regarding the recent deletion of a Wikipedia entry titled “Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre-sur-Haute.” According to the foundation, France's Homeland Intelligence agency had demanded “classified” information taken down from Wikipedia.fr, and when the Wikimedia Foundation (which hosts Wikipedia) refused, it allegedly sought out a volunteer systems operator with the power to delete articles, brought him to the agency's office, and demanded that he take the article down there or face legal charges.

This post is coming to you courtesy of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. While I could tell you I thought it would be cool to use Ubuntu Linux as my primary desktop OS for a while, I would be lying. The fact is I don't have a choice because I messed up the Windows 8 boot partition on my laptop last night while trying to install Ubuntu in a dual-boot situaion. I wasn't going to keep Ubuntu on for long. I had booted it from a USB stick previously. So why wasn't booting Ubuntu from a USB stick good enough, and how did I wind up stuck in Linux land? I'm glad you asked; it is a bit of a long story.

Ubuntu 13.04, scheduled for release on April 25, is now available for testing in its second and final beta release. Nicknamed "Raring Ringtail," Ubuntu 13.04 is one of the final releases that's just for desktops and servers. By this time next year, Canonical intends to release a single version of Ubuntu targeting all form factors, including smartphones and tablets.

On Saturday, a federal court in New York ruled in summary judgment within the case of Capitol Records v. ReDigi. The court decided that no, users do not have the right to resell digital music files, as doing so violates existing copyright law. ReDigi, the judge found, is also liable for secondary copyright infringement and likely will have to pay damages.

This week on Spark - Gadgets, and the endless cycle of upgrading to the latest shiny toy. How can we be more thoughtful about our tech devices? The Get it, Keep it, and Fix it guide to gear!

OAKLAND, CA—Four years ago, Code For America (CFA) was founded with the mission to "help governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the Web." Within two years, the San Francisco-based nonprofit set up a fellowship program, inviting American cities to receive a team of three young motivated developers, activists, and policy planners. The Washington Post's description captured what everyone was already thinking: CFA is the “technology world’s equivalent of the Peace Corps or Teach for America.”

The developers behind the Shotwell photo manager for Linux-based operating systems are setting their sights on a weak spot of the Linux desktop: e-mail.

More than two years after LibreOffice came into being, it's hard to call the open source office software anything but a success. There are possibly tens of millions of people who use it—or at least have it installed on their computers. But how close is LibreOffice to overtaking OpenOffice, the king of open source productivity suites?

The short answer is that LibreOffice has a long way to go.

You know the issue of the broken anti-circumvention rules in the DMCA are going mainstream when even USA Today is writing editorials condemning the whole thing as an archaic bit of copyright law that makes little sense today. It is, of course, focusing mainly on the question of unlocking mobile phones that has brought the issue forward lately, but USA Today's editorial board doesn't just focus on the unlocking question, but notes how ridiculous our copyright laws are that lead to this result:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." That is the purpose of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, which is sometimes referred to as the "copyright clause" (or "the patent clause"), which enables both areas of law to be created via Congress. It's also the part that is most often ignored. As we've discussed, the whole purpose of this clause is to make it clear that the public are the sole stakeholders when it comes to proper policy making decisions regarding these laws. However, with this new push for comprehensive copyright reform, it appears that the copyright lobby is already working on ways to make sure that the public is marginalized in the discussion.