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Ubuntu Edge is Canonical's forthcoming smartphone. It runs Ubuntu and Android, and becomes a full-blown PC when connected to a monitor, keyboard, etc. Canonical launched a $32 million crowdfunding campaign to get Ubuntu Edge off the ground. But the campaign has apparently stalled.

Although the TOR Project’s policies might have left the door open to allow this sort of security breach to happen, that in no way excuses those who took advantage of a situation to execute this exploit. Nor does the fact that the malware installed on TOR users’ computers did no harm other than calling home with an identification report make make this any less of a cybercrime.

Not all the attention may have been positive. Less than a month after Snowden was revealed to have used the service, it has been shut down. The owner of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, has left a cryptic and chilling message stating that he had to walk away from the ten years of work he put into Lavabit, lest he "become complicit in crimes against the American public." Until real reform happens, Levison says he "would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."

Certainly costs are a factor, and it is the very nature of the Open Source concept that has meant Linux has already won the race, sort of. There is an old saying which goes: “figures don’t lie, liars figure.” I have been a voracious reader of EETimes.com for many years. The amount of embedded Linux devices out there is frankly, staggering. In terms of sheer numbers, Open Source computers outnumber Macintosh and Windows computers, combined.

Google's Android mobile operating system has emerged to become a dominant force in the smartphone landscape. Sitting at the core of Android is Linux as well as a long list of open-source technologies. Many people mistakenly think that Android itself is all open source, but the harsh reality is that from a usable handset perspective, it's not always open source and an incident this week proved that fact beyond any shadow of a doubt.

New mozilla-firefox packages are available for Slackware 13.37, 14.0, and -current to fix security issues.

Desktop Linux must be growing more popular. Someone's finally created what appears to be a semi-successful Linux Trojan.

Linux offers a vast collection of open source small utilities that perform functions ranging from the obvious to the bizarre. It is the quality and selection of these tools that help Linux stand out as a productive environment. A good utility cooperates with other applications, integrating seamlessly. The applications featured in this article genuinely make a real difference to boosting productivity, well at least in our experience.

Twitter just rolled out a pretty nice two-factor authentication system using your smart phone as the second factor.

The JFS file system is a 64-bit file system created by IBM and ported to Linux in 1999. A stable version was released in 2001. The first implementation was the Linux Kernel 2.4.18. JFS was originally released in 1990 with AIX version 3.1. It is sometimes referred to as JFS1.

Win one of three Nexus 4s running Ubuntu Touch by porting or creating original apps in the new Ubuntu SDK for mobile

Linux Deepin is the leading community distribution from China featuring the Deepin Desktop Environment based on GNOME Shell. Linux Deepin 12.12.1 was announced today as an enhancement (and also a bug-fix) of the previous 12.12 release. New functions include the deepin-notifications plugin for the desktop, where users can check the notifications sent by utilities or the OS. As an important component of the desktop, Deepin System Settings now supports wallpaper selection via the personalization module and automatic login via the accounts configuration module. The Software Center has been upgraded for more convenient software installation/uninstallation. The dmusic-plugin-baidumusic plugin has been developed for better online music experience. Last but not least, the Deepin team has been maintaining a weekly archive on recommended applications.

The Reiser File System (Reiser3) was created by Namesys in 2001 and added to the Linux Kernel in version 2.4.1. Reiser3 was the first Journaling file system included in the Linux Kernel. Reiser4 was introduced in 2004 which was an improved Reiser3 file system.

The Wine development release 1.7.0 is now available.

Today in Open Source: An Ubuntu-based sport utility laptop. Plus: Open source satellites and voting machines!

The NVIDIA SHIELD portable gaming device/console was released at the end of July and now NVIDIA has come forward with the source-code to the whole operating system in hopes of encouraging enthusiasts to modify and improve the platform.

Signaling criminals' growing interest in attacking non-Windows computers, researchers have discovered banking fraud malware that targets people using the open-source Linux operating system.

Something I have been meaning to do an editorial about for a while is game Demo's, spurred on by PuppyGames blog posts on it (here and here) about them not supplying demo's for any of their games. They make some interesting points mostly because they are talking about themselves and how Demo's just didn't work for them.

You don’t have to look too hard at the slate of new smartphones to see Android’s “bigger is better” ethos. While iPhones have remained resolutely conservatively sized, Android manufacturers continue to push the limits with phones like the 5.5-inch LG Optimus G Pro or the 6.3-inch Samsung Galaxy Mega.....it’s actually impossible to get any of the latest models and also get a phone that’s smaller than 4.7 inches. They just don’t exist anymore.

Search giant Google has put its support behind an independent fork of MySQL, the famed open-source database that was gulped down by software giant Oracle when it acquired Sun Microsystems.