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Wheels fall off 'one rogue engineer' claim Google knew its Street View cars were slurping personal data from private Wi-Fi routers for three years before the story broke in April 2010.…

Simon, KDE's speech recognition software, has recently migrated from Sourceforge to KDE's Git infrastructure. Developed to allow people with physical disabilities to control their computers entirely by voice, Simon has found its way into voice-controlled media centers in homes for the elderly and most recently in assistive care-giving robots. The move has also brought Simon into KDE Extragear, the kde-accessibility mailing list, and KDE's accessibility sub-forum for user support. The community around Simon has grown since the move, so this is a good time to join in for those interested in improving Simon or KDE's other accessibility projects. The Simon Listens e.V. is also accepting tax-deductible donations (translated from German) to further support development of their software. Simon's lead developer Peter Grasch shares his experience migrating to the KDE ecosystem. read more

For those that may have extra time this weekend and have been meaning to try out the experimental Wayland Display Server, one of the easiest ways to try out this eventual X.Org Server replacement is by using a Wayland LiveCD that's dubbed Rebecca Black. Besides including a recent snapshot of Wayland, it also integrates the support for various tool-kits and other applications...

We’re finding out more and more about Windows 8 as its beta release approaches. And, you know what? The more I find out, the more I feel secure about saying Windows 8 will be a flop.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, following a recent anti-piracy legislative debacle with SOPA and PIPA, will lead his second effort of 2012 to push Internet-regulating legislation, this time in the form of a new cybersecurity bill.

The Spark is the first tablet computer that comes with Plasma Active (based on kde/qt) pre-installed. It sports an open Linux stack on unlocked hardware and comes with an open content and services market.

No, it's sadly not a day for shopping. Today, some of the most visited websites are dark to raise awareness of two bills now making their way through the U.S. Congress.

Today the Red Hat legal team published its stance on the SOPA and PIPA bills currently pending in the US Congress. Here is the full text of their release:

Congress says SOPA is dead (for now).

"While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."

Previously a group of Indian hackers called The Lords of Dharmaraja had posted documents that were pillaged during the hack of an Indian military network... "The memo suggests that, "in exchange for the Indian market presence" mobile device manufacturers, including RIM, Nokia, and Apple (collectively defined in the document as "RINOA") have agreed to provide backdoor access on their devices."

Broadcom announced four "5G WiFi" chips, which implement the 802.11ac draft specification to provide wireless networking at speeds up to 1.3Gbps. The BCM4360, BCM4352, BCM43526, and BCM43516 operate at 5GHz, employ 80MHz channel bandwidth, and use a "beamforming" feature to increase signal strength, the company says....

The boot sequence today is far more complex than it was even a decade ago. Here's a detailed, low-level, step-by-step walkthrough of the boot up.

Apple Inc. was handed a legal victory that is bad news for rival Google Inc., as a U.S. trade agency ruled that some HTC Corp. smartphones that use the Internet company's Android software infringe an Apple patent.

'XSS on steroids' attacks to highlight web security holes A hacker has published code for potent cross-site scripting attacks that he claims go beyond the usual cookie stealing and phishing for users' private details.…

Senator Franken issued this press release making public the responses from carriers (AT&T, and Sprint) and manufacturers (Samsung and HTC) regarding the Carrier IQ privacy issue. No response yet from T-Mobile and Motorola.

While CentOS, Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux Server are all derived from the same upstream source (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), how does the system performance compare between these RHEL derivatives? Here are some benchmarks of each of the 6.1 releases for Oracle Server, CentOS, and Scientific Linux, as they all do not perform the same.

Would you like to know whether or not CarrierIQ – the dialer-and-location sniffing software installed in many mobile devices – is being used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for law enforcement purposes? They won’t reveal much about the controversial application to the concerned general public. Why not? Because, they claim doing so might interfere with ongoing cases or investigations.

The libbluray project put out its first official release a few weeks ago. This open-source (GNU GPLv2) library is intended to support Blu-Ray disc playback by media players such as VLC and MPlayer. The libbluray 0.21 release is the first from the project and it happened on the 30th of November. This release hasn't been widely publicized and I just happened to know about it this morning from an indirectly-related message on another mailing list. This project was born out of the Doom9 community and has been under development since 2009.

If you have been wanting to dabble with Arch Linux but don't want to jump directly into this leading rolling-release Linux distribution, you may want to give KahelOS a shot...