Showing all newswire headlines

If you read the technology press lately, odds are you already know about the launching of the AllSeen Alliance (a Google News search I just did produced 412 results in a wide range of languages). That's not a surprise, because this is an important and ambitious project. But there's a story behind the story that likely won't get the attention that it deserves, and that's what this blog post is about. (Disclosure: the AllSeen Alliance is a Linux Collaboration Project—the 11th so far—and I assisted in its structuring and launch.)

Security researchers have published a report that Ars is having a tough time swallowing, despite considerable effort chewing—a botnet of more than 100,000 smart TVs, home networking routers, and other Internet-connected consumer devices that recently took part in sending 750,000 malicious e-mails over a two-week period.

The line between traditional, paid advertising and organic editorial content on the Internet can sometimes be hazy. A recent stealth promotional campaign between Microsoft and Machinima highlights just how hazy that line has become, and how behind-the-scenes payments can drive ostensibly independent opinion-mongering on by users on services like YouTube.

In Linux, the 'free' command is used to show memory usage; but the information presented is more complex than just 'used' and 'free'. This article explains what the additional fields mean, and shows you how to determine your system's actual memory usage.

Linux 3.13 is out bringing among other thing the first official release of nftables. nftables is the project that aims to replace the existing {ip,ip6,arp,eb}tables framework aka iptables. nftables version in Linux 3.13 is not yet complete. Some important features are missing and will be introduced in the following Linux versions. It is already usable in most cases but a complete support (read nftables at a better level than iptables) should be available in Linux 3.15.

True story. A project team was in need of an open source tool. Following their company's policy, the team requested their Information Systems (IS) department download the tool. They were soon bombarded with a host of questions and a form that needed to be filled out, which they complied with. Not satisfied with the information provided and unable to take a decision, the IS department then forwarded the request to the Legal department. After due diligence, the Legal department allowed the use of the tool, provided that the team obtain an approval from their customer (read: the customer takes all responsibility and liability). The tool in question? The humble, unix2dos!

A recent Georgia Tech study found that Kickstarter projects often find success thanks to the use of effective marketing buzzwords like “guaranteed.” That word never shows up the Rex project’s Kickstarter page, which is perhaps one reason why this promising project has yet to reach a third of its $90,000 funding goal, with less than two weeks to go. We think Rex is worth a closer look. (Satisfaction guaranteed!)

Question2Answer (Q2A) is a popular open source Q&A platform for PHP/MySQL, currently running on more than 11,000 sites in 40 languages. Here is what's new in Q2A v1.6.3.

I have started developing a Gtk front end for the Linux uTorrent server. I know there is a Web UI but you can not click magnet links in web pages to add them. I was developing this for myself but if there is any interest in the project I will make it public.

RusDeb 1.01 is available. RusDeb is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution made in Russia. It uses the MATE desktop and has a focus on performance and stability.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and its descendant TLS (Transport Layer Security) are the most widely used protocols for encrypting data that is exchanged between a server and a client. These protocols often use X.509 certificates and asymmetric cryptography. In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to add security to a mail server through TLS/SSL-based encryption.

We are extremely sorry to inform all users of the Pear OS Linux operating system that David Tavares, the creator of Pear OS, has announced a few minutes ago on Goolge+ that the Pear OS distribution will no longer be available for download.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes & Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols debate about how much of an impact, if any, Android desktops are going to have. As you might have guessed, Vaughan-Nichols thinks Android PCs may prove to be a very big deal. Kingsley-Hughes... not so much.

Today in Open Source: The Chinese launch their own mobile operating system. Plus: Best Bitcoin clients for Ubuntu and Linux, and Linux 3.13 released.

It's been delayed by many months but the official release of FreeBSD 10.0 has shipped today!

Here's how you can install Pepper Flash Player 12.0 in Ubuntu 14.04.

The latest Linux 3.14 kernel activity is the Intel MID update.

Well now this is an odd combination, Heroes of a Broken Land combines an RPG/First Person Dungeon Crawling with a town management game with interesting results.

Here’s a 12 minute demo that shows you how to deploy OpenShift Enterprise 2.0 on Red Hat’s distribution of OpenStack (RHOS 4).

The GNOME2-forked MATE desktop is now officially available from the Arch Linux package repository...