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Holy copyright law, Batman!" So goes a line in the first paragraph of a federal appeals court ruling announcing that the iconic Batmobile is a character protected by copyright.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with DC Comics in its copyright infringement suit against Mark Towle, the operator of Gotham Garage, the maker of Batmobile modification kits. "As Batman so sagely told Robin, 'In our well-ordered society, protection of private property is essential,'" the three-judge court unanimously concluded Wednesday in its 28-page opinion.

"I think that it's a mistake to require companies that are making hardware and software to build a duplicate key or a back door even if you hedge it with the notion that there's going to be a court order. And I say that for a number of reasons and I've given it quite a bit of thought." As the the encryption access debate heats up in the United States and abroad, statements like the one above have become commonplace. read more

“Many Free and Open Source tools are fantastic tools but have a lack of easily accessible materials to help get people started with them,” the campaign site says. “We plan to try to help correct this by primarily producing video content that users will be able to use to help get them started in using these tools. The videos will be released under a Creative Commons license to allow the community to use them widely.”

Aaeon has added a new Bay Trail model to its 3.5-inch form factor SBC line, featuring three display outputs, dual GbE, dual Mini-PCIe, and soldered-on RAM. Aaeon’s Linux ready “GENE-BT06” SBC joins its growing 3.5-inch single-board computer family, which includes the similarly Intel Bay Trail-based GENE-BT05, as well as the soon-to-ship, Braswell-based GENE-BSW5. By now, […]

The Environmental Protection Agency should have listened to Ron Weasley’s dad. In the Harry Potter books and films, Arthur Weasley is a bureaucrat in the British magical world’s chief regulatory agency, the Ministry of Magic, where his job is to protect people from dangerous devices. He is known for his unusual fascination with nonmagical technologies, and toward the end of the second book, he delivers a deep lesson in living safely with technology. “What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”

PulseAudio 7.0 open-source sound server software is released for GNU/Linux operating systems with better detection of JACK Audio Connection Kit servers, especially when using the UCM system. Low-frequency effects (LFE) channel synthesis with low-pass filtering has been added, and the "srbchannel" IPC mechanism is now enabled by default.

This project focuses on advanced and experienced computer users, in contrast with the usual proprietary software world or many mainstream open source projects that focus more on average and non-technical end users.

Neutron DVR implements so called fip-namespace on every Compute Node where the VMs are running. So that VMs with FloatingIPs can forward the traffic to the External Network avoiding sending and receiving external data through VXLAN or GRE tunnels connecting them to Network Node (North-South Routing), wich is supposed to be a single point of failure for L3 routing in traditional configuration.

As its market share dwindles toward irrelevance, Mozilla updates its flagship Firefox browser.

Z-Wave Europe and Popp & Co. have launched a “Popp Hub” home automation gateway that runs Linux on a Raspberry Pi, and supports Z-Wave and IP smart devices. Z-Wave Europe GmbH, which bills itself as Europe’s largest distributor for Z-Wave wireless technology devices, is selling and distributing the Popp Hub smart IP home gateway on […]

In any collaborative environment, it's important to have good tools for communication. What tools work best for you depend a bit on your situation, but might include anything from mailing lists for email communication, Git or Subversion for version control, a wiki or Etherpad for collaborative authoring, a shared task list for organizing workflow, or even a full fledged project management suite. read more

Tails, the open source Linux-based operating system focused on privacy and security, released its latest version, Tails 1.6, this week.

Spark Streamliner coming at you via GitHub Apache Spark may be the fastest data processing engine around for big data, but unless you are conversant in Scala or Java, this cluster computing framework can be a pain to set up and manage.…

New features in Tesora Enterprise 1.5 include several from the upcoming OpenStack Liberty release, providing improved MongoDB and Reddis database support.

Senior VxWorks engineers laid off this week, we're told Exclusive Intel-owned Wind River – the maker of the VxWorks software used in NASA rovers, spacecraft, military computer systems, and industry – has laid off a number of its most experienced staff, sources tell The Register.…

One of the most important functions for any operating system, especially for the ones that are used by a lot of people, are the accessibility features. Ubuntu has support for people with disabilities, but there is still room for improvement.

Private code-signing cert revoked at last Microsoft has finally revoked D-Link's leaked code-signing key, which gave malware the red carpet treatment on millions of Windows PCs.…

Not surprisingly, the latest discussions around content blocking have resulted in a polarizing debate about the users who choose to block content as a way to control their Web experience, and the commercial interests who monetize that content. All of … Continue reading

The Jeb Bush campaign this week unveiled a major part of the candidate's technology platform, and it likely includes taking a hatchet to net neutrality rules. The new policy outline on Bush's website spends some time butchering the very definition of net neutrality as well, parroting several long-standing incumbent ISP narratives that net neutrality is somehow about content companies not paying their fair share, or that modernization of existing rules is somehow "antiquated." Indeed, Bush's definition of net neutrality is rather unique:

This guide shows how you can install and use incron on a Debian 8 (Jessie) system. Incron is similar to cron, but instead of running commands based on time, it can trigger commands when file or directory events occur (e.g. a file modification, changes of permissions, etc.).