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From the files of J. K. Rowling.

Dear Ms. Rowling,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We will be happy to consider it for publication. However we have some concerns about the excessive length of this manuscript. We usually handle works of 5-20 pages, sometimes as much as 30 pages. Your 1337-page manuscript exceeds these limits, and requires some trimming.

We suggest that this rather wide-ranging work could usefully be split into a number of smaller, more tightly focussed, papers. In particular, we feel that the “magic” theme is not appropriate for our venue, and should be excised from the current submission. Assuming you are happy to make these changes, we will be pleased to work with you on this project.

It seems that Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), a Canadian spy agency, has been using the free Wi-Fi at “a major Canadian airport” to track wireless devices, which presumably would include laptops as well as phones and tablets. The surveillance would continue for days after visitors passed through the airport.

I'm a newcomer to the tech industry. I don't have a degree in Computer Science or Engineering. I'm a writer by trade and training, so coming to work for Red Hat after years of freelancing and crappy office jobs was a real shock. Which is to say, a pleasant shock. Tattoos? Sure. Pink hair? Oh, yes. Start time? Whatever suits you best. And unlike other places I've worked, not a single man has expected me to make them a cup of coffee, and nobody tells me to "smile love, nobody likes a sadsack in the office!" (I frown when I concentrate. I'm sorry! And by that I mean I'm totally not sorry.)

A few days after Asus announced the first Chromebox mini-PC to be introduced the original Samsung Chromebox, HP unveiled its own Chromebox model, which similarly runs on Google’s Linux-based Chrome OS. Meanwhile, Google announced “Chromebox for Meetings,” an enterprise video-conferencing system that initially will be built on the Asus Chromebox, but later this year be available with the HP Chromebox and an upcoming Dell Chromebox

We've written about the problems of DRM and anti-circumvention laws since basically when we started way back in 1997. Cory Doctorow has been writing about the same stuff for just about as long (or perhaps longer). And yet, just when you think everything that can be said about this stuff has been said, Doctorow comes along and writes what may be the best column describing why DRM, combined with anti-circumvention laws, is so incredibly nefarious. Read the whole thing. It's so well done, and so important, I'm actually going to write two posts about it, because there are two separate issues that deserve highlighting.

If you've been thinking that there must be a better way to handle email than the email client supplied natively in Android, I bring good news: There is, and it's called "Aqua Mail." As things are right now, my on-device solutions are a bit of a mess. I have my Gmail-produced work emails appearing in the Gmail client, while my personal, custom-domain email is housed in the Android-native client.

I'm not telling you not to run Linux. I'm not even telling you that I won't run Linux. I'm just telling you that I'd rather run Windows. It's that simple.

As a result of the first article on KMail, three things emerged. First, while some users may like the semantic desktop, there is serious dislike for the semantic desktop (as has been implemented in KDE4) amongst a considerable number of other users, and these people set about disabling the software in various ways. Second, why does the implementation of the semantic desktop produce such apparent deterioration in the performance of the KDE4 desktop and what happens if you try to remove it altogether ? Third, what are some possible solutions ? This second article tries to explore those three items.

Newark Element14 launched the RIoTboard, a $74 open source SBC for IoT applications that runs Android 4.3 or Linux 3.0 on a 1GHz Freescale i.MX6Solo SoC.

For several months now Intel developers have been working on a new Ozone-Wayland project that allows Google's Chrome/Chromium browsers and other applications to work on Wayland. Google's Ozone component provides the windowing system / input abstraction layer that is where this implementation for Wayland is being plugged into. After much investment, the Chromium browser is now starting to run great with Wayland.

I've already written one piece about Cory Doctorow's incredible column at the Guardian concerning digital rights management and anti-circumvention, in which I focused on how the combination of DRM and anti-circumvention laws allows companies to make up their own copyright laws in a way that removes the rights of the public. But there's a second important point in Doctorow's piece and it's that the combination of DRM and anti-circumvention laws make all of our computers less safe. For this to make sense, you need to understand that DRM is really a form of security software.

With significant breaches becoming a near daily occurrence, it's clear that attackers are managing to stay one step ahead of many organizations. It's clear that security professionals and CIOs aren't focusing closely enough on the threats and the data that matter.

After yesterday's article about the new Firefox UI landing in the Aurora channel, here's some screenshots showing what the new Firefox marked at 29.0a2 looks like on Ubuntu Linux.

After patiently waiting for Ubuntu to officially announce their 12.04.4 update and once the number of seeders of LXLE grew to an adequate level to 'serve' it, LXLE 12.04.4 has been released. This particular release builds on the idea that many 'at idle' processes can be replaced by 'on demand' solutions.

Fans of story-based 2D RPG games will love this, it has a good mix of story, beautifully done art and some pleasant music making it well worth the $10.

As an interesting turn of events after Richard Stallman called LLVM a "terrible setback" and the discussion that ensued, it turns out that the GCC and LLVM/Clang developers might start to better collaborate under some sort of open-source compiler initiative.

A new GLSL intermediate representation (IR) approach has been proposed for Mesa in replacing its existing tree-based representation for shaders.

The JavaScript programming language has been in the wars over the years. Oft derided for security concerns, its ‘amateur’ web designer following and for ‘borrowing’ its name from the beefier brew that is Java itself, it has been a rough 19 years or so.

Leslie Hawthorn is the new community manager at Elastic Search, an open source real time data and analytics company, and a member of the program committee for the Grace Hopper conference that is held each year to increase "visibility for the contributions of women to computing."

Lightworks is a professional-grade nonlinear video editor now available for Linux. It is a cross-platform editor from a well-known player in the media market, so this first-time Linux release could be a big thing. Lightworks version 11.5 for Linux was released late last month, following three years of development. Linux users now can download a free version or pay for a Pro version.