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Edward Snowden, the former CIA technician who blew the whistle on global surveillance operations, has opened a new front against the US authorities, claiming they hacked into Chinese mobile phone companies to access millions of private text messages. His latest claims came as US officials, who have filed criminal charges against him, warned Hong Kong to comply with an extradition request or risk complicating diplomatic relations after some of the territory's politicians called for Snowden to be protected.

The real-time strategy game Planetary Annihilation, developed by Uber Entertainment, has been released in an alpha version for Linux, Windows and Mac on Steam.

Intel's Chris Wilson has done a Saturday morning release of the xf86-video-intel 2.21.10 driver to get out more performance tweaks and regression fixes. This xf86-video-intel 2.21.0 release also takes care of X-Video support for Haswell (though using VA-API is still the best video playback choice for Intel) and various other bugs. Chris lists the bugs.

A request from Reg forums, where dogged, a silver badge commentard, asks: I've decided to do something about my old Motorola RAZR V3xx. I love this thing. The form factor is perfect. It's pocket size, it's damage resistant, it's HSDPA, it's easy to use, it never drops calls, it gets four days usage from its tiny battery without issue.So, i thought, I'm still a programmer. I can do embedded work, I do it all the time. Why not? Why not? Because it's 2013 and there are no available resources to study from is why not.

Up this Saturday morning on Phoronix are some OpenGL/gaming performance benchmarks of eight different desktop environments currently available from the Ubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" package archive when using Intel Core i7 "Haswell" graphics with the Linux 3.10 kernel and Mesa 9.2.

For those wishing to play with the next-generation Unity 8 interface atop the Mir Display Server while running Ubuntu Touch, a Personal Package Archive (PPA) is now available. There's also been other Mir and Unity 8 progress made this week.

A Chinese startup called “Geak” (seriousy!) has developed an Android 4.1 smartwatch with built in WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and GPS wireless communications. The China-targeted Geak Watch runs on a 1GHz MIPS architecture SoC equipped with 512MB RAM and 4GB flash, and features a 1.55-inch 240 x 240-pixel touchscreen and IPX3 water resistance.

Speaking of Groklaw, it was déjà vu all over again this week, with PJ once again reporting on the case of SCO v. IBM. Yup, they’re back in court. We’re reminded of the early days of Saturday Night Live when week after week Chevy Chase on “Weekend Update” would reassure the audience that Spain’s late dictator Francisco Franco remained dead.

WordPress 3.5.2 is now available. This is the second maintenance release of 3.5, fixing 12 bugs. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

MongoDB is a high performance, open source, non-relational NoSQL database written in C++. The database does not come with a graphical user administrative interface. Instead, most administration on a cluster can be performed using the mongo shell. This is an interactive JavaScript environment with a complete access to the JavaScript language, and a database interface for MongoDB. However, independent developers have stepped up to the plate to provide some excellent open source graphical interfaces.

How to get a virtual keyboard in Linux Mint MATE

SphinUX OS 1.0 is available. SphinUX OS, a project of the SphinUX Free Technology Community in Alexandria, Egypt, is a general-purpose desktop operating system based on the Egyptian LSX kernel architecture, using KDE as the default desktop environment, and released under the GPL 3.0.

If you have ever installed Gentoo, this should be no news to you. However, new users who want to try out the distribution often hesitate, because of its complexity. In this tutorial, I will try to mention enough information (on their current distribution part), so the users wanting to try Gentoo can do so using the comfort of their existing distribution e.g Ubuntu (since that is what I have used in this tutorial).

The British spy agency GCHQ has secretly tapped more than 200 fiber-optic cables carrying phone and internet traffic and has been sharing data with the U.S. National Security Agency, according to a news report. One part of the operation, codenamed Tempora, has been operating for about 18 months and allows the agency to tap large volumes of data siphoned from the cables and store it for up to 30 days for sifting and analyzing. Each of the cables carries about 10 gigabits of data per second, which the paper likened to sending all of the information in all the books in the British Library through the cables 192 times every 24 hours.

A group of established business operators collude to lock a radical new upstart out of the marketplace (O’Toole, 2013). Does this sound familiar? It should: as proprietary software vendors tried to lock GNU/Linux out of the computer market, traditional car interests are trying to block Tesla Motors’ direct sales business model. In both cases, what is best for the consumer is a secondary concern to maintaining the old profit regimes.

Can Ubuntu smartphones and mobile devices connect with mobile carriers and telecom companies? Eager for a positive answer, Canonical has launched the Carrier Advisory Group (CAG) -- which aims to shape Ubuntu for the mobile industry. The move comes a few weeks after Ubuntu Founder Mark Shuttleworth told The VAR Guy that the world needs a Google Android alternative.

DAVE announced an SODIMM-style computer-on-module based on a Texas Instruments Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 system-on-chip, complete with dual CAN interfaces, Linux support, and two evaluation baseboard options. The Diva computer module is also available from U.S.-based Smart Embedded Systems, with turnkey support including Linux drivers and firmware for the processor’s programmable real-time unit (PRU).

Since the Computex launch of Intel's much anticipated Haswell processors at the beginning of the month, there's been much Linux coverage on Phoronix concerning the compatibility and performance of these new Intel processors from both the processing and graphics sides. Here's a summary of all of our discoveries and findings over the past few weeks.

Version 1.0 of the KScreen System Settings Module has been released for easy yet powerful RandR-based screen management from the KDE desktop. KScreen has been the talked about new way for KDE users for controlling your displays with support for preserving display configurations, setting up screens in a presentation mode, or virtually any other configuration you could desire for the KDE desktop.

One of the more painful areas of cross-platform computing is data sharing. While networking between Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux has gotten a lot easier thanks to SAMBA, disk sharing still feels like it’s in its infancy thanks to proprietary file systems and the unique legacy needs of the respective operating systems they run on.