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Generally, good programming is considered to be the measured application of an art form, craft or discipline, with the objective of producing a competent and evolving business solution. In traditional environments, computer programming is a practice that has multiple phases, such as designing, developing, testing, debugging and maintaining application code.

Sandra Aistars of the Copyright Alliance issued a statement during the recent DMCA-related hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee. As was noted earlier, a bunch of effort was made to turn the "notice and takedown" system into a "notice and stay down" system, and weirdly, the word "free" was thrown about as if it was synonymous with "infringement."

The Debian Installer team has just announced that the first Alpha build of the Debian 8 "Jessie" version is now available for download and testing.

Google debuted a Google Now-infused Android Wear platform for wearables based on a lightweight version of Android, which will first appear in an LG G Watch. Google announced a wearable development platform called Android Wear, and released it as a developer preview. Based on a lightweight version of Android, Android Wear will first appear in […]

Lars Doucet, the developer of Defenders Quest has written an interesting blog post about Flash and his thoughts on Flash dying.

Add the Elementary OS file manager Pantheon to your Linux Mint 16 computer.

While Google Fiber has managed to get ISPs to compete in the areas it's deployed, the project has also managed to spawn a new, misleading but entertaining phenomenon I've affectionately labeled "fiber to the press release." In a fiber to the press release deployment, a carrier (usually one with a history of doing the bare minimum on upgrades) proudly proclaims that they too will soon be offering 1 Gbps broadband. The announcement will contain absolutely no hard specifics on how many people will get the upgrades, but the press will happily parrot the announcement and state that "ISP X" has suddenly joined the ultra-fast broadband race. Why spend money on a significant deployment when you can have the press help you pretend you did?

Chris Clark is the IT director at SparkFun Electronics in Boulder, Colorado. He talked with Opensource.com community manager Jason Hibbets, late last year during the All Things Open conference about open hardware. He answers a lot of awesome questions about open hardware, where it's going and where it's been. Plus, a big one for a lot of hardware makers out there right now:

Windigo, as the attack campaign has been dubbed, has been active since 2011 and has compromised systems belonging to the Linux Foundation's kernel.org and the developers of the cPanel Web hosting control panel, according to a detailed report published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During its 36-month run, Windigo has compromised more than 25,000 servers with robust malware that sends more than 35 million spam messages a day and exposes Windows-based Web visitors to drive-by malware attacks. It also feeds people running any type of computer banner ads for porn services.

The Linux servers occupy the largest share of this market, which means that they are the most prone to attacks from hackers and other malevolent cyber-criminals. ESET researchers and a few other agencies have shown that Unix servers have been used to spread malware and send spam emails.

Meet Ellie, a six week old robot weighing 100 lbs who can launch a two foot diameter exercise ball over 10 feet in the air! Ellie even has eyes: a webcam fitted to the front of her chassis that uses code written in Python running on a Raspberry Pi to process images. Ellie’s main code is written in Java and allows her mecanum wheels to drive, her claw to catch exercise balls, and her kicker to launch balls into the air. In just a few weeks Ellie will be competing along with more than 50 other robots in her first competition.

So, Unity 5 is now a thing, I hear the sound of many developers who recently purchased version 4 crying out in horror at having to pay to upgrade so soon. Looks like a lot of new goodies for developers!

Distributed systems researcher Leslie Lamport has been awarded the A.M. Turing award, computer science's equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

Updated ruby193-rubygem-actionpack packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Software Collections 1. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having Moderate security impact.

A number of commits to KDE Workspaces were pushed to Git this morning that will ultimately benefit the next-generation KDE desktop with its Wayland support.

Add the GNOME Do application launcher to your Ubuntu 13.10 system.

At Google's Pwnium hacking competition, two new security exploits in Chrome OS were demonstrated, while at Pwn2Own a Chrome Web browser problem was found that also impacted Chrome OS. All three problems have now been patched.

Unity has partnered with Mozilla for bringing their popular Unity Game Engine to web browsers via WebGL and ASM.js.

Add the GNOME Do application launcher to your Linux Mint 16 computer.

In today's open source roundup: Asus might release an Android gaming console called the Game Box. Plus: Watch Netflix in Linux with Pipelight, and Ubuntu 13.10 versus Windows 8 while running Portal 2.