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Customers who are concerned about the surveillance capabilities of Samsung’s smart TVs have another headache to worry about: Tampering with the machine to disable such components may be a felony.

... an interesting example of how sometimes very subtle product decisions in technology influence the way culture works. Apple uses a soothing, on-brand blue for messages in its own texting platform, and a green akin to that of the Android robot logo for people tweeting from outside its ecosystem (as people have pointed out on Twitter, iPhone texts were default green in days before iMessage—but it was shaded and more pleasant to the eye; somewhere along the line things got flat and mean).

There are all sorts of reasons for them to use different colors. (iMessage texts are seen as data, not charged on a per-text basis, and so the different colors allow people to register how much a given conversation will cost—useful!). However, one result of that decision is that a goofy class war is playing out over digital bubble colors. Their decision has observable social consequences.

Last week, the Library of Congress announced that it will “open up with OOXML.” Nine new OOXML format descriptions will be added to the LoC Format Sustainability Website. What?

sciamiko points us to an interesting study done by Stuart Graham, who was the first chief economist of the US Patent Office... looking at whether or not inventors choose to reveal the "secrets" of their invention prior to actually getting the patent. Graham and his co-author, Deepak Hegde, examined what happened after the American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA) went into effect in 2000.

The warm-hearted Warthogs of the Warty Team are proud to present the very first release of Ubuntu! Ubuntu is a new Linux distribution that brings together the extraordinary breadth of Debian with a fast and easy install, regular releases (every six months), a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of security and technical support for every release.

A collaboration between SUSE and Red Hat is going to bring relief to Linux users the world over: they'll be able to patch their systems without reboots. The live patching infrastructure looks set to become available in version 3.20 of the Linux kernel.

8th version 1.0.1 has been released. 8th is a cross-platform development tool suitable for both desktop and mobile applications. We just released the new version, which has a number of fixes and enhancements over the 1.0 release.

The other side of community involvement in an open source project is the end users. It's hard to be a successful open source project if no one is using it! But aside from providing documentation and forums, how else can projects and users connect?

Linux kernel 3.19 has been officially announced by none other than its father, Linus Torvalds, on February 8, 2015. It is a great release that brings some very interesting features. Because we didn’t have access to a complete list of its features at the moment of writing the news article about its availability, we have decided to drop another one that highlights Linux 3.19 kernel’s prominent features.

Ramiji, best known for being the first head of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, has just been appointed to be CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. I suspect there are as many Ubuntu-based Linux distributions as there are all other distributions combined. Many of them are designed with a specific purpose in mind. Whether the desire is for a different looking desktop, custom kernel or just pre-installed packages, there's probably a version of *buntu out there to fit every need. Elementary OS is just another in a long list of variants, but what it does, it does very well.

Former Unbounded Robotics execs have launched “Fetch Robotics” with $3 million in funding, and will ship a ROS-on-Linux mobile manipulator bot in Q2 2015. A startup called Fetch Robotics has announced $3 million in Series A financing from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and Shasta Ventures, along with a development team that jumped from the apparently now defunct Unbounded Robotics. Fetch Robotics plans to announce and ship two mobile manipulation robots in the second quarter that are aimed principally at the logistics and light industrial markets, “as well as for other human-robot collaboration opportunities,” says the company.

In today's open source roundup: A payment controversy swirls around Elementary OS. Plus: How to edit images on your Chromebook, and Samsung's Z1 Tizen smartphone is no match for Android phones.

CoreOS is developing its own Docker replacement, CoreOS Rocketboth in terms of technology with Rocket and in terms of an actual specification for defining what an application container is all about. The App Container Specification (appc) is currently in development and has some important differences in contrast to Docker.

Brandon Philips, CoreOS CTO, explained to ServerWatch that the appc spec has three parts:

The first major milestone release from the open-source Docker project in 2015 debuts with new features that will pave the way for the year ahead.

Well, after today’s Ubuntu phone flash sale roller coaster, we still don’t know how many devices were sold and how many people managed to get at least one BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone. All we know is that BQ stated on their Google+ page that they have received approximately 12,000 orders per minute, and that this is the main reason behind the premature failure of their online store.

Good news for all users of a GNU/Linux operating system, as Linus Torvalds announced the immediate availability for download of the Linux 3.19 kernel, which brings interesting features, the usual bugfixes, and general performance improvements.

After releasing the first GNU/Linux distribution with Linux 3.18 kernel a couple of days after its launch back in December 2014, Arne Exton did it again, as he just announced today on Twitter that the his Exton|OS with MATE has been updated to version 150211 and includes a custom 3.19.0-5-exton kernel package based on the upstream Linux kernel 3.19.

Pkg is that package manager and one of the its many commands I think you should get to know asap is the audit command. It’s used to audit installed packages against known vulnerabilities.

I’ve often thought that the movement to protect and advance the open Web requires the same type of focus and investment as other movements like the environment, civil rights and so many other social issues. After all, the Internet today … Continue reading

Amazing, simply amazing! We have no idea how many Ubuntu phone units were sold today, but after only three hours all available BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphones were sold out. Looks like the Ubuntu community in Europe is really strong, as they also had to face some server issues with BQ’s online store, which apparently was not prepared for a large crowd.