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Imagine yourself walking down the middle of a crowded street in a complex city like Cairo. Suddenly a protest builds ahead. A mass of people, cutting off the road. You try to evade, but then violence breaks out in mere seconds. You need help. Someone else, a car to get you out. A phone call might suffice, but wouldn't it be easier to notify all your friends that this place is dangerous and that you need their assistance? This is where a map-based social network could come into play. read more

The Ubuntu MATE project is progressing nicely and the developers have provided a short update about the work that's been done already and about the things that still need to be improved.

Humans have always formed communities. They are necessary for support both physically and, according to psychologists, emotionally as well. Until recently, though, the development of communities was constrained by geography. If you wanted to raise a barn or have a quilting circle, for example, only the folks nearby could participate. The Internet, though, has allowed communities to grow in ways that are not bounded by geography. read more

What SHOULD Microsoft call its browser? Internet Explorer could be getting a new name as Microsoft tries to escape the browser’s troubled past.…

In part one of my interview with Pia Mancini, a political activist, I investigated the technologies and background of DemocracyOS, a project aiming to become the operating system of choice for government workers. In part two of my interview with Mancini, she discusses the challenges DemocracyOS faces and how her organization, Democracia en Red, is working to overcome them. read more

Working with permissions on Linux is rather a simple task. You can define permissions for users, groups or others. This works really well when you work on a desktop PC or a virtual Linux instance which typically doesn't have a lot of users, or when users don't share files among themselves. However, what if you are a big organization where you operate NFS or Samba servers for diverse users. Then you will need to be nitpicky and set up more complex configurations and permissions to meet the requirements of your organization.

When I first started using Linux twelve years ago, no one I knew, other than folks on the local LUG, were interested in giving Linux or FOSS a try whatsoever. Don’t get me wrong; my friends were nice. They supported my enthusiasm for this Linux thing I’d discovered, but were politely uninterested when I suggested they might want to give Linux a try too. That didn’t surprise me at all. Hell, I’d been trying to get people to give Star Office a try since the turn of the millennium and they wouldn’t go for that either, even though they were paying through the nose for MS Office.

Finally, the KDE project has released KDE Plasma 5, a major new version of the venerable K Desktop Environment.

Plasma 5 arrives in the middle of an ongoing debate about the future of the Linux desktop. On one hand there are the brand new desktop paradigms represented by GNOME and Unity. Both break from the traditional desktop model in significant ways, and both attempt to create interfaces that will work on the desktop and the much-anticipated, tablet-based future (which may or may not ever arrive).

Cisco has released a guide for deploying Hadoop as a Service on Ubuntu OpenStack, Canonical's open source server platform for the cloud and Big Data.

LXer Feature: 17-Aug-2014

In the Roundup this week we have how to remove file metadata on Linux, USB ports are no longer our friends, Linux use grew 50% year-over-year in India, open source education for kids, hackers unveil their evil plans for e-mail, a new distrosharing website and a big conversation starter on why or why isn't all government software open source? Enjoy!

There are untold riches awaiting those who can create smartphone apps – luckily getting started with Android is really easy

The latest version of m23 extends the spectrum of supported client distributions by adding support for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Linux Mint 17 Qiana.

A few months ago, the Heartbleed bug was discovered in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which plays an absolutely critical role in securing confidential online transactions. We then discovered that for years this critical piece of infrastructural software has been maintained by a handful of overworked volunteers. The industry was rightly shocked by Heartbleed, and some companies – notably Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Cisco and Amazon – agreed to donate $300,000 each over the next three years to support the OpenSSL project. You can interpret this as "corporate social responsibility". I call it common sense.

The net neutrality saga continued today as well as the FCC made September 15th the final day for public opinions. It was just yesterday that the Federal Communications Commission asked for an explanation for their act of slowing down the internet for specific kind of data. According to the recent reports, the FCC has for the time being officially postponed the implementation of the new set of rules.

The speakers and sessions planned for this year’s events showcase how leaders in diverse industries are using the power of open source and collaboration to innovate and advance technology for all. The open source principles espoused by Linux and other projects have grown and expanded to now be used in many other areas including healthcare, manufacturing, data science and more.

In the world of consumer electronics, if you don't give the buyer what they want, they'll go elsewhere. We've recently witnessed this with the Firefox browser. The consumer wanted a faster, less-bloated piece of software, and the developers went in the other direction. In the end, the users migrated to Chrome or Chromium.

Customer reports of blue screens of death and reboot loops have led the company to withdraw several updates and recommend that users uninstall MS14-045. Since Patch Tuesday this past week, Microsoft has been receiving reports of severe system errors caused by one or more of the updates. In response, the company has pulled several updates from download channels and offered advice on how to remove them. In one case, it recommends that users uninstall the update.

Create a custom build of the Gentoo distro from the ground up, to suit your preferences and even speed up your system

If the owner can disable a phone with nothing but access to a computer or another mobile device, so can Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Nokia or Apple. Google and Apple have already demonstrated their ability to remove software from all devices using their respective operating systems. If the designers of a phone’s operating system can brick a phone, guess who else can do the same? Everybody from the NSA to your friendly neighborhood police force, that’s who. At most, all they’ll need is a convincing argument that they’re acting in the interest of “public safety.”

It has often been said that information confers power, and that the most important currency in our culture today is information. Keeping track of my bits and pieces of information has unfortunately been an issue for some years. In part, this is because of my passable short term memory, coupled with what can only be described as 'brain fog'. To combat this, I arm myself with open source software that helps me efficiently capture a lot of information.