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A plan by Google, Microsoft and Netflix to integrate an extension for playing back encrypted media content in HTML5 has caused dissatisfaction among US civil rights campaigners. The bone of contention is a proposal to integrate "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME) that will serve as an interface for playing back DRM-protected content in the browser and which is currently being reviewed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The initiators of the proposal emphasise that this is not intended as a way of anchoring Digital Rights Management (DRM) facilities into the specification. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) translates this into: "We're not vampires, but we are going to invite them into your house."

If you have a Web hosting account, but not enough resources to host Piwik, OpenShift Online presents an alternative platform to host it on. OpenShift Online is a cloud computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) provided by Red Hat, Inc.

Members from the open source world will gather in Columbia, South Carolina for the Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) on March 27-28, 2013. For anyone looking to score a last minute ticket, the event is sold out. Last year, more than 600 people from 20 states and more than 20 colleges and universities, and 75 business and government organizations, came together in the spirit of open source to share knowledge and grow the open source community.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has signed a deal with the Chinese government to create a new version of Ubuntu. For China, this is widely seen as an attempt "to wean its IT sector off Western software in favour of more home-grown alternatives," the BBC reported.

South Korea was under a huge cyber attack recently and according to Symantec, the code used in the attack was tucked inside a Windows malware to target Linux computers. This is a very interesting case, according to the security firm. "We do not normally see components that work on multiple operating systems, so it is interesting to discover that the attackers included a component to wipe Linux machines inside a Windows threat," said the company on its blog.

Parasound, a purveyor of fanatically high-end consumer audio equipment, has introduced a CD player that’s controlled by an internal Mini-ITX computer running embedded Linux. Using a CD-ROM drive for playing CDs, the “Halo CD 1? sucks in the CD’s contents at 4x normal speed, giving its CPU time to detect and eliminate disc errors before outputting near-perfect audio.

A single TCP connection reaches more than 50 Gbps by using Multipath TCP to pool six 10 Gbps interfaces together.

As much fun as I’m having picking on poor Mr. Limi, these are all valid concerns, especially for someone who works in project design. Indeed, designers with any software project, especially when the product is as complex as a modern browser, need to constantly question how much control is useful and try to discover where the ability to customize gets in the way of the user experience. According to his blog, Limi believes in a 2% rule; if an option is used by less than 2% of the user base, then that option should be removed. To his thinking, the 2% who use the function wouldn’t be left in the cold, since they could simply use a plugin to reintroduce the missing option.

A little over five years after the creation of the Open Handset Alliance, Glyn Moody looks at Android's global market position and the challenges that Google faces to avoid Android disappearing under a plethora of other companies' interfaces and apps.

One of the cool projects that OKF France were hacking away on during Open Data Day last weekend was Open Food Facts. It’s a free, open collaborative database of food facts from around the world, which aims to help consumers make better choices about what they put in their body, as well as motivating industry to take more care over the production of food.

OpenShot, a leading open-source video editor for Linux, has turned to crowd-funding site Kickstarter to bring its popular application to Windows and Mac, along with many new professional-level features.

For those that didn't hear already, Canonical is collaborating with the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (the Chinese government) to develop Kylin, a new Chinese operating system based upon Ubuntu.

Gumstix shocked the embed-o-sphere today by unveiling a new board-level computer that’s neither the shape nor size of a gum stick. The “Pepper” board is based on a 720MHz TI Sitara ARM processor and is supplied in a bundle that includes a Yocto-built Linux filesystem on microSD, a 4.5-inch LCD, and a DC power supply.

In the second major news item this week involving corporate growth at an open source Big Data vendor, Pentaho has announced three new executive hires. Their addition, the company says, will help it to expand development of its Big Data analytics products as well as drive increased revenue growth.

Today I bought my 2nd Laptop windows free. The first one was a few years ago, the Asus eee 701. This one is a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and it is made in Portugal, at Inforlândia (Insys). Its a 15.6" low end desktop, With Intel B830 at 1,8Ghz a 320Gb SATA HD, wireless, a chiclet keyboard, and a integrated graphic.

Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" is now under 100 release-critical bugs. The release of Debian Wheezy is now not too far out...

What Mark Shuttleworth needs to realise is that a distribution cannot be both a community and enterprise system. It has to focus on one or the other.

Canonical to help government add "Chinese specific" features to OS Ubuntu is going to become the reference architecture for a Linux distribution, backed and developed by the Chinese government.…

Dot Categories: Community and EventsDigia, the largest Qt contributor, is the 2013 Platinum Sponsor for the co-hosted Akademy and Qt Contributor Summit. Digia is responsible for all Qt activities including product development and commercial licensing and, together with the Qt Project, open source licensing under the open governance model.

The DistroRank Weekly Popularity Rankings have now been posted for the week of 3/21/2103. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have several slug-fests going on here: Arch holds onto the number 4 spot, but Debian is within 13% of overtaking it.