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By design, the research company’s numbers don’t reflect the amount of money spent by U.S. taxpayers funding the NSA’s operations. Nor do they indicate how much of this $47 billion is being born by the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, as far as I can tell. What I do know is that many foreign governments have been publicly investing in Linux and open source projects since Snowden’s revelations that back doors for the NSA have been built into many proprietary U.S. enterprise software products.

SystemRescueCd 4.5.2 has been released. Changes include:

Standard kernels: Long-Term-Supported linux-3.14.35 (rescue32 + rescue64) Alternative kernels: updated to stable linux-3.18.10 (altker32 + altker64) Updated GParted to 0.22.0 (support for unpartitioned whole disk drives) Updated Xorg environment and drivers to x11-base/xorg-server-1.16.4 Updated Network-Manager packages to 1.0.0

In today's open source roundup: A Linux user installs Windows 10. Plus: Is the Linux server market disappearing? And a Microsoft executive hints that Windows could go open source someday.

Physiological computing focuses on the use of biosignals for the development of interactive software and hardware systems capable of sensing, processing, reacting, and interfacing the digital and analog worlds. read more

This article provides a detailed analysis about the new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) built-in functions provided by IBM XL compilers. It explores the code that the compilers generate to demonstrate the performance gained by using the built-in functions. This is critical for high-performance AES applications, especially when many of them cannot be parallelized due to the nature of operation modes, such as chaining mode [for example, cipher block chaining (CBC) and propagating cipher block chaining (PCBC)] or feedback mode [cipher feedback (CFB) and output feedback (OFB)]. If you are a software engineer who is interested in achieving high performance for applications on IBM POWER8 processors, this article is for you.

The stable edition of Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) is just around the corner, so this is a good time to take a look at the features that are going to be implemented in the new release and see what important packages have been updated.

This document describes the basic installation of a CentOS 7.1 server. The purpose of this guide is to provide a minimal setup that can be used as basis for all kind of CentOS server setups.

Could Microsoft's open source advocacy ever result in the company offering its cash cow Windows OS up to open source? It's possible, according to one Microsoft official, though his comments Wednesday should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.4.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 "fresh" family, with over 50 fixes over LibreOffice 4.4.0 and 4.4.1.

In mid-April, members of the open source community will gather in Austin for ApacheCon North America where Annie Bryant Burgess, a postdoctoral fellow in the computer science department at the University of Southern California and project assistant at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA/JPL), will give a particularly interesting talk. Annie has a PhD in geography with a focus on satellite remote sensing of snow and ice, and in the past year she has become an Apache Tika PMC committer and advocate for the involvement of women in ASF. In this interview, she offers a preview of her talk, explains how her PhD is related to her involvement in open source, and tells us what Apache Tika has to do with studying polar data. read more

Abandoned OS takes deepest market share dip for ages It's the first of the month (US time), so off we go to Netmarketshare and Statcounter to see what operating systems are getting a run on the world's desktop computers.…

Today we are releasing Black Lab Enterprise Desktop 6.5 RC1. This is the first Release Candidate of what will become the final product of Black Lab Enterprise Desktop 6.5. We are now in feature freeze meaning there will be no more changes to the application lineup and we will be working on polish. We have introduced quite a few new features. Enterprise Filesystem support, Built in virtualization utilities, and webapp integration.

The Blender Institute's sixth film project, codenamed Gooseberry, is in deep into the most open production from the Blender Institute yet. If you've been following the project so far, then you already have a sense of what Blender means by an "open production"—lots of sharing. read more

Now that Google is letting any developers bring their Android apps to the Chrome Web Store, the company needs to give developers a way to test their apps. It turns out the same tool lets anyone run Android apps in Chrome… even if you’re using the Chrome web browser on Windows, OS X, or Linux rather than Chrome OS.

Ubuntu takes another step forward as a cloud operating system by incorporating Chef support into its enterprise Linux distributions.

The Kodi development team has announced today, April 2, that the second Alpha release of the forthcoming Kodi 15.0 “Isengard” media center (formerly XBMC Media Center) is now available for download and testing. This a great milestone in the development cycle of Kodi 15, as it introduces even more new features and improvements when compared with the first Alpha release of the software.

Via announced an Android-based turnkey IVI system for buses called Via BLISS, with 7- and 10.1-inch touchscreens, a VOD server, and networking hubs. The Via BLISS (Bus Line In-Seat System) Platform provides an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) VOD network of the type typically found only on airlines, says Via Technologies. The Android-based system has been deployed […]

Solomon Hykes, CTO and chief architect of Docker, joins Randal and Gareth this week to talk about Docker's 2nd birthday and the vast ecosystem it has developed during the time. Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications.

Another month, another ISO image of one of the most acclaimed distributions of GNU/Linux, Arch Linux, is now available for download, today, April 1, 2015. Arch Linux is a highly customizable, powerful, and lightweight computer operating system with a rolling-release model.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that no leader of the Debian GNU/Linux Project has had to cope with more troubling times than Lucas Nussbaum. The extent of debate and acrimony that broke out within the project last year over the decision to adopt systemd as the default init system for the next release, Jessie, would have taxed the patience of even the most suave diplomat.