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This week, we look at 10 mobile security tips, rolling your own servers and open source software copyright issues.

Developer Brian Behlendorf has announced the release of version 0.6.1 of the native ZFS on Linux port. After over two years in experimental status, the developers now say the file system "is ready for wide scale deployment on everything from desktops to super computers." The native ZFS on Linux is based on the Solaris Porting Layer (SPL) which emulates underlying features of Solaris in the Linux kernel.

Given that there were issues in connecting to the repositories, I can't be too conclusive about Pardus, but it seems like it could be quite good.

New kernel patches by AMD for the Linux kernel provide "frequency sensitivity feedback" for the powersave bias in cpufreq. This hardware feedback feature is to be introduced on future AMD processors. This patch-set allows the system to make more power conscious frequency changing decisions based upon hardware feedback. The hardware bits are to be found on "AMD Family 16h" processors and above, which is the forthcoming AMD "Jaguar" product. AMD provided the original Linux kernel support for "Family 16h" at the end of 2012.

As many of you know, part of my popularity analysis of GNU/Linux distributions includes search engine results. One thing I immediately noticed when I started analyzing the data was how fewer results Bing has compared to Google specifically for the term "Ubuntu Linux". At first, I thought that perhaps Bing simply hasn't indexed as much as Google and it will catch up. But over several ranking periods now, Bing is still, in my opinion, unusually low in "Ubuntu Linux" results.

Journalistic scepticism was lacking when stories about a DDoS attack 'breaking' the internet surfaced. This is a real future risk. A veteran Reuters reporter related a piece of advice given by his editor: "It's not just what you print that makes you an authoritative and trusted source for news, but what you don't print." He wasn't talking about censorship, he was talking about what separates journalism from stenography and propaganda: sceptical scrutiny. The professionalism of the craft isn't simply learning to write or broadcast what other people tell you. Crucially it is the ability to delve, interrogate and challenge, and checking out stories you've discovered through your own curiosity, or robustly testing what other people tell you is true.

We’ve all heard about flexible displays coming…coming…coming—but where are they? Rollable and foldable displays could create more possibilities for developers, who could create software to take advantage of dynamically reconfigurable screens. Do technical hurdles make these devices a mirage, or are they really on the horizon, and if so, what’s the ETA? Here’s a (flexible) look into the future.

The lastest version of the open source desktop for Linux and Unix systems adds a new Clocks application, a number of new settings panels and a number of design changes throughout the desktop environment. A Classic Mode has also been added

Groupware is a tough domain to break into. With competition from giants the likes of Lotus Notes and Exchange, how can an open source offering, like Kolab, ever hope to compete?

Google has announced that it will not be asserting ten patents it has received for its MapReduce technology when it comes to their use in open source or free software. The promise comes with a pledge that is specifically designed to reduce the patent threat to open source software.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced a few minutes ago, March 28, the immediate availability for download of the fifth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.8 kernel series.

Having recently introduced asm.js as a way of running C/C++ applications using a highly optimisable subset of JavaScript, Mozilla has joined Epic Games to present the technology being applied to a well-known platform at the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco. A port of the Unreal Engine 3 game engine to JavaScript allows games to be played in the browser without a Flash plug-in. The port only uses HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript technologies, and asm.js ensures that the games are almost fast enough to meet the performance levels of native implementations.

On Windows, however, Your Multiboot Installer (YUMI) makes the process as easy as can be. YUMI is one of the applications I wrote about in 4 gui applications for installing Linux from USB key.

Starsector (originally Starfarer) is a space combat sim I have been following for a long time now, it is constantly evolving and becoming more awesome, it has everything a decent space combat sim needs...including a new trailer to show it off!

I’ve griped for years about Roku’s retro one-dimensional menu. Finally, in conjunction with the release of the Roku 3 model, the company is giving the Linux-based media streaming player a 2D facelift, making it quicker and easier to access favorite channels and find new ones.

When companies like Apple and Microsoft are abusing the already broken patent system and using their patents as 'weapons' against competitors Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In it's pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies.

A newly-minted BYOD survey yielded some surprising results about usage, security, and the industries most prepared for BYOD. Guess which phone OS users password protect their the phones the most?

"Well-documented code and robust testing are key no matter what language is being used, and we have to remember that the more mature programming languages have a wealth of reference material and, thanks to free and open source software, excellent examples of code," said Google+ blogger Brett Legree. "This means that it may be easier for a new user to learn the older languages."

Today something struck home and really punctuates the current state of affairs we now have with Linux Desktops. Insync 1.0 was introduced, which, by itself, is a good thing, particularly because Google chose to pass on writing a Drive client for Linux but provided one for Microsoft Windows and Apple OSX last Spring of 2012. That's to be expected I guess. After all, they represent two very big markets with essentially one codebase for each operating system--fairly simple in view of long-term maintenance. I think that's a safe assumption.

I manage the crunchtools lab and the infrastructure for this blog similar to a development data center. I have a rigorous weekly checklist, which includes applying operating system patches as they are available. Most of my infrastructure is built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but I run this blog on Linode which doesn’t have an image for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They have the ability to create a custom image, but I have continued to use the CentOS build, partially to better understand the differences from a hands on perspective.