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Google is ramping up its plans to bring the Project Ara modular smartphone to market by scheduling its first developer conference. The company will hold the conference on April 15-16 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. A limited number of developers will be able to attend the conference in person, but anyone can participate online through a live stream and interactive Q&A.

Last October, I speculated on the best ways to go about designing and implementing a software backdoor. I suggested three characteristics of a good backdoor: low chance of discovery, high deniability if discovered, and minimal conspiracy to implement.

Today in Open Source: Linux gamers may have too many options these days. Plus: Local menus return to Unity, and VirtualBox 4.3.8 has been released.

The two largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet have been down for a few days, and will remain offline for another week. The tracker owners are performing maintenance and replacing hardware to cope with the billions of connection requests they get each day. Interestingly enough, most casual BitTorrent users are completely unaware of the prolonged downtime.

Serge Hallyn from the Ubuntu Virtualisation team has proposed recently the inclusion of the soon-to-be-released Qemu 2.0 application in the forthcoming Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) Linux operating system.

Other Linux distributions are moving to MariaDB for their default database management system, but Ubuntu is standing by Oracle's MySQL. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth explains why.

Those who keep up with my posts on Google Plus might know about my month-long struggle with Google Drive. For those who do not, here’s the deal. I split a 200 gig account with my organization Reglue. Half of it I pay for so I have a place to backup my important stuff. The other half is dedicated to files and other documents for Reglue.

In an early episode of GOL Cast I was the poltergeist, but today I am actually trying to catch them while managing my ghost busting business!

OSSEC gives system administrators and IT security pros the ability to learn an IDS for free. All you need to get started is a Linux, Unix, or BSD host.

The more I learn about OpenStack, the more I see why there is so much buzz about the technology as well as about the community of developers and users. In a poll hosted on Opensource.com, we discovered that many of our readers are curious and eager to learn more about OpenStack. For those new to this technology, OpenStack can be described as a set of software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private clouds.

The Fan Club is proud to announce the release of Grive Tools version 1.5. The new version features improved Ubuntu desktop integration for Unity, KDE, Gnome and LXDE. Translations for Afrikaans, Spanish, French, German, Russian and Japanese has also been added.

The GNOME Project has announced that the first Beta release of the upcoming GDM (GNOME Display Manager) 3.12 login manager for the GNOME desktop environment is available for download and testing.

There are different ways to manage virtual machines (VMs) running on KVM hypervisor. For example, virt-manager is a popular GUI-based front-end for VM management. However, if you would like to use KVM on a headless server, GUI-based solutions will not be ideal. That is when virsh comes in handy. virsh is a command-line tool for managing guest VMs. Underneath it, virsh relies on libvirtd service which can control several different hypervisors including KVM, Xen, QEMU, LXC and OpenVZ. In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to run KVM from the command line by using virsh on Debian or Ubuntu.

Nothing To Hide is an "anti-stealth game," in which you must carry cameras and spy gear to live in a world of self-surveillance and self-censorship. A world where you're made to be your own watchdog. Released for The Day We Fight Back, the game is now seeking crowdfunding to complete the open source game—10% of what's raised will first go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Demand Progress, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

I have recently published a first part of the love story between Jerry and Emma. That was a guest post by Cyriac Gbogou. Today is the time for the second part of the story.

The first Beta release of the upcoming Epiphany 3.12 web browser application that’s part of the GNOME desktop environment has been released with many interesting features, several bugfixes and updated translations.

The VAB-1000 Pico-ITX single board computer debuts the Via Elite E1000, which appears to be the first ARM-based Via Technologies system-on-chip developed in-house instead of designed by its Wondermedia subsidiary. It’s not, however, the company’s first ARM-based VAB Pico-ITX SBC. In October, Via announced a Springboard VAB-600 kit running on a single-core, 800MHz Cortex-A9 Wondermedia WM8950 SoC, and based on an earlier VAB-600 board. Also in October, Via announced the VAB-820, which taps the quad-core Freescale i.MX6.

Use free extensions to improve viewing web pages on your Chromebook.

Today, a beta version of Portal 2, one of the most successful game titles poduced by Valve and generally one of the most successful computer games, has been released for Linux. While the first Portal has been available on Linux for a year now, Valve was working on other titles for Linux, like Left 4 Dead 2, Dota 2 or the new game consoles “Steam machines”, before releasing Portal 2 for Linux.

At the former Wired editor’s start-up, 3D Robotics, open-source robots take to the skies. Friday is Fly Day at 3D Robotics, a maker of small robotic aircraft. So here we are, on a windswept, grassy landfill with a spectacular view of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, looking up at a six-prop copter with a gleaming metal frame. It’s like a spiffy toy from the future. Buzzing like a swarm of bees, it lifts off smartly, hovers, then pinwheels. “Jason’s making the hex twirl,” says CEO Chris Anderson, a trim man in jeans and an untucked oxford shirt. “That’s just for show—a human pilot couldn't do that.” That’s because Jason, the flight tester, did nothing more than figuratively push a button. The hexarotor—technically, the 3DR Y-6—is on autopilot, which it demonstrates by zooming off on a preprogrammed route. The Y-6 sells for US $619. That’s a lot for a toy, but it’s chicken feed for a capital investment.