Showing all newswire headlines

Valve has recently gone through a major PR debacle after the company announced that it's implementing paid mods for games and Skyrim in particular. Their decision was short-lived, and it was retracted, but they have managed to incur the rage of the community. Independent developers are now working on a new game launcher that will make Steam obsolete.

Top that, David Cameron and Ed Miliband Singaporean prime minister Lee Hsien Loong has decided to reveal the source code of the Sudoku-solving app he personally coded.…

We already covered the basics of shell scripting such as accepting inputs, process data through arithmetic operations and generating and displaying output in the previous series of this tutorial. In this series, we will go deeper to a more advanced topic in a programming language -- making decisions in a program, but this time we will do it using bash shell.

There are many commercial VPN gateways available, which come with their own proprietary VPN client software. While there are also open-source VPN server/client alternatives, they are typically lacking in sophisticated IPsec support, such as Internet Key Exchange (IKE) which is a standard IPsec protocol used to secure VPN key exchange and authentication.

In today's open source roundup: Ubuntu is working on a phone that doubles as a desktop PC. Would you buy it? Plus: DistroWatch reviews Debian 8 Jessie. And Android Lollipop adoption rate nearly at 10%.

I'm very excited about Joshua Lee's talk on the Drupal-powered International Biosecurity Intelligence System (IBIS) at DrupalCon 2015. Though I'm no biosecurity expert, the aggregation methods and process workflow for gathering biosecurity information is relevant to many industries. In his talk, the technology for creating this data aggregation system will be covered, as well as how the Drupal community can both benefit and contribute to this project. read more

I personally like Google's Chrome interface. It's simple, fast, elegant and did I mention fast? Unfortunately, I don't like how locked down the Chrome OS is on a Chromebook, nor do I like its total dependence on Google. I also don't like the lack of ability to install Chrome easily on generic hardware. Thankfully, Budgie is here to help.

The project will give libraries, museums, and archives of all types and sizes an out-of-the-box open source solution for managing their digital content and exposing what they have to the world. It will build on the work many academic libraries have done to create institutional repositories for their own organizations.

“Today we are announcing our intent to phase out non-secure HTTP,” said Firefox security lead Richard Barnes in a blog post. “There’s pretty broad agreement that HTTPS is the way forward for the web.”

Retired pastor James Anderson, age 84, has never worked in IT or had any formal computer training, but over the past two years he has rebuilt more than a hundred IBM ThinkPad laptops and sent them to schools and nonprofits in Africa – all running Linux.

The spread of encryption is posting public safety challenges and making it harder for the government to fight both criminals and terrorists, said Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. But for security vendors providing encryption technology to enterprise customers, any tampering with encryption protocols would do more damage than harm. Here are seven ways security pros believe the DHS is wrong on encryption.

The Bq Aquaris e4.5 Ubuntu Edition has been out for some time and is available for purchase right now. It's the only Ubuntu phone on sale, and one of the users found out how to access a hidden Factory Mode that gives access to all kinds of cool stuff.

Some major open source foundations now require "patent pledges." Here's what they are, and why they're being requested.

In my last Opensource.com article, I wrote about biicode's decision to go open source once we reached 10,000 users. After the announcement, our community growth skyrocketed. Our investors were so impressed by the welcoming of our open source announcement that they let us go ahead with open sourcing biicode early. We worked hard to release most of it in biicode 3.0. read more

Team Tiny Core is proud to announce the release of Core 6.2. Changelog for 6.2: tce-audit - similar speedup patch from aswjh; tc-config - nfs4 mount changes from gerald_clark; tce-load - 2% speedup from aswjh; tce-size - apply patch from Greg Erskine for no-deps files; tce-remove, rc.shutdown - update copy2fs name; tce-ab - convert to a symlink; tce-load - awk recursion changes changed to a subshell, so exit status needs to be passed; tce-setup - wait for slow CD drives. In addition, TinyCorePure64 6.2.iso is now legacy-BIOS/(U)EFI multi-boot.

People in tech companies and particularly in open source communities believe in and value meritocracy—letting the best ideas win. One thing that's become increasingly clear to me over the past few years is this: meritocracy is a great driver of innovation, but if we want to get to the best ideas, we need diversity of thought and an inclusive environment where everyone feels welcome to participate and offer different perspectives. Indeed, to live up to our ideal of meritocracy, we must consistently question and seek to improve it. read more

The future is coming, Still Review Systemd is here. It’s arrived in Vivid Vervet, the latest, just-released distro of Ubuntu – 15.04.…

Welcome to the third installment of my monthly column, where I explore how open source software and the open source way are used in the digital humanities. Every month I take a look at open source tools you can use in your digital humanities researc, as well as, a few humanities research projects that are using open source tools today. I will also cover news about how transparency and open exchange, and principles of the open source way, being applied to the humanities. read more

Folks, I’m not talking about a stern communication. I’m talkin’ finger-poking-into-my-chest-slathering-frothing-yelling-losing-all-composure pissed off. He more than adequately suggested: How Dare Me! If I don’t write or understand software programming or the brilliance required to do so, then I don’t get a pass on judging what needs to be done, how it should be done, when it should be done, and finally, to what quality I might accept as “usable.”

Today we’re excited to announce two new additions to the leadership team at Mozilla, one joining us for the first time today, and the other returning. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff joins us this week as Mozilla’s new Chief Marketing Officer with responsibility … Continue reading