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We’re always focused on making the best Firefox experience we can offer. We want to give you complete control over your web experience, while also making sure to protect your privacy and security the best we can.

DrupalCon is underway in New Orleans, Louisiana, and it kicked off with the always energetic keynote from Drupal project founder, Dries Buytaert.

Also in today's open source roundup: Viking Horde malware targets Android devices, and the Fedora 24 beta has been released.

Schmidt himself used to work at Sun Microsystems after getting his PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley in 1982. Schmidt was at Sun while the Java language was developed. "Was the Java language released for anyone to use?" asked Van Nest. "There was no charge to use the language," Schmidt explained.

On Tuesday Mozilla announced a new program for Firefox that allows users to try features that are in the works but not yet ready for prime time. The news of the new program, called Test Pilot, came by way of a Mozilla Blog post by Nick Nguyen, the organization’s vice president of Firefox product. He said that the program will not only allow users an early look at yet to be implemented planned features, but will give Firefox’s developers a chance to get feedback from the community.

The folks at the Open Data Platform Initiative (ODPi) have heard the concerns and the criticisms of the Hadoop community, and today John Mertic, the standards organization’s Director of Program Management, took to Apache Big Data in Vancouver to clear the air.

Mozilla quietly pushed the first maintenance version of the Mozilla Thunderbird 45 email, news, and calendar client to users of Linux, OS X, and Windows operating systems.

People learn by doing, but they also learn by reflecting. Technical books tend to focus on the former, but not necessarily on the latter. Reflection is an important part of learning any technical framework, but it’s especially important with desktop Linux which might be used in a much more personal way than a programming language.

You know that debug mode you wrote? You forgot to delete it A root backdoor for debugging Android gadgets managed to end up in shipped firmware – and we're surprised this sort of colossal blunder doesn't happen more often.…

Cars are more than engines and good looking bodies. They're also complex computing devices so, of course, Linux runs inside them.

Countless organizations around the world are now working with data sets so large and complex that traditional data processing applications can no longer drive optimized analytics and insights. That’s the problem that the new wave of Big Data applications aims to solve, and the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has recently graduated a slew of interesting open source Big Data projects to Top-Level status. That means that they will get active development and strong community support.

This article is co-authored by Jon Haddad. There's been a huge surge of interest around the Apache Cassandra database due to the increasing uptime and performance demands of modern cloud applications. read more

The folks Unity3D are currently doing a "HackWeek" when they work on special projects. It looks like the Linux team are working on using SDL instead of X11 directly which will bring Mir & Wayland support amongst other things.

gNewSense has announced the release of gNewSense 4, codenamed Ucclia. It's based on a solid Debian, modified to respect the Free Software Foundation's and is available for 3 architectures: i386, amd64 and mipsel

According to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, "Passwords are a common form of authentication and are often the only barrier between a user and your personal information. There are several programs attackers can use to help guess or 'crack' passwords, but by choosing good passwords and keeping them confidential, you can make it more difficult for an unauthorized person to access your information." read more

Following on last year's bold announcement that they will attempt to migrate from proprietary Microsoft Office products to an open-source alternative like LibreOffice, Italy's Ministry of Defense now expects to save up to 29 million Euro with this move.

Shenzhen Xunlong has launched an open-spec, $12 “Orange Pi Lite” SBC with a with a quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC, 40-pin RPi expansion, camera input, and WiFi. Shenzhen Xunlong continues to churn out new versions of old boards with slight adjustments in features and prices. In the case of the new Orange Pi Lite, the company took […]

Oracle is making its case to a jury that Google should be forced to pay massive copyright damages, due to the search company's use of 37 Java APIs in its Android operating system. It's the second courtroom face-off for the two software giants. Google argued that APIs shouldn't be copyrighted at all, but lost on appeal. Now Google's only hope is that the jury finds that its use of the APIs was a "fair use."

A disappointing trend has become clear to Linux users in recent years. Whenever Canonical offers a new Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release, it tends to be conservative in nature. (See our Ubuntu 14.04 review, which earned a "Missing the boat on big changes" headline.) Apparently no one wants to try to support a brand new, potentially buggy piece of code for half a decade.

Covered in this report: The Pi gets new cameras, another U.S. Picademy, monitoring health conditions with MedPi and the AstroPi in low Earth orbit.