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Hispalinux’s complaint called the implementation of UEFI Secure Boot an “obstruction mechanism” and “a de facto technological jail for computer booting systems.”

Founded in 2010 by trading technology experts, OpenFin is growing on the heels of HTML5 standards edging out ill-fitting older Web solutions. Built onto an open source platform, OpenFin Desktop helps financial institutions to bridge the security gaps in their outdated Web-browser technology. OpenFin is developing software to bring the next generation of trading applications to the financial services industry via HTML5.

I recently installed NetBSD on my RaspberryPi. Although not all the hardware is fully supported, enough is there to make it a usable system. It's nice to have my RPi provide the same system experience (configuration, organization, etc.) as other NetBSD machines I maintain. A big "Thank you!" to the developers that made this possible. One concern I have, however, is that the boot drive is an SD card. Solid state cards have limited write cycles and I worry that, since most Unix systems assume a mechanical drive which allow essentially infinite writes, my SD card will not last very long. To measure this, I monitored the disk writes using 'iostat' and was disappointed in how many writes were occurring on an otherwise idle system.

In a ceremony at last weekend's LibrePlanet 2013, FSF president Richard Stallman presented the Free Software Award 2012. The Free Software Award is given out each year by the Free Software Foundation to one person for their contribution to Free Software and to one open source organisation or project for its social benefit.

Developer Break – catch up on the smaller but important notes for developers, from libraries to APIs and from people to postings. In this edition: Ruby 1.8.7 EOL, Eclipse Kepler milestone, eXo goes LGPL, Derby approaching, Eclipse Sirius proposed, Apache Karaf technology preview, new Dart editor, and fixes for Lazarus.

There is a proposal that is likely to be discussed in the next Board meeting of the OpenStack Foundation that will introduce an entirely new concept to the way projects are organized.

Recently, there are two updated news in the Linux world that got my attention. They are Ubuntu becomes the official OS of China and Dr Stallman calls Ubuntu spyware for sending users' search activities to Amazon. And these two news make me feel that Ubuntu is doing something really bad and evil here.

Several years ago, a pair of engineering students in Switzerland developed an Android-controlled oscilloscope as part of their bachelor’s thesis project. Though the “OsciPrime” was initially controlled by a Beagleboard, there’s now an app for tablets and smartphones running Android 3+, and ready-to-use OsciPrime boards are available for purchase. OsciPrime co-developer Andreas Rudolph provided this [...]

Online, we know what open education looks like: P2PU, MOOC, Coursera, MITx—pick your favorite acronym. But, what does open education look like in person, and how do we capture its value in transferable artifacts with lasting impact? At the University of Michigan School of Information, a group of students has been experimenting with leading unconferences as a site of professional development for librarians, archivists, and other information workers. We call these events Quasi-Cons, short for 'quasi-conference', and held our second this winter in Ann Arbor, Michigan, drawing nearly 70 students, alumni, and professionals for a day long mix of participant-driven discussion sessions, lightning talks, and panels.

A lot of sniffers, rootkits, botnets, backdoor shells and malwares are still on the wild today, which are used by malicious attackers after successfully pawning a certain server or any live network in order to maintain their access, elevate their access privilege, and spy other users in a network. In order to protect our network or server from such intrusions and further damage, there are free and open source detection tools that can be deployed and used as part of our security strategy. They are mandatory when our server or network is up and running, especially if a certain user is downloading a file which could possibly be malicious or harmful.

With this article, four of the best graphical applications that Windows users may use to transfer most actively-developed Linux distributions to a USB key, and, therefore, use it to install the Linux distribution to a computer that does not have an optical drive are presented.

In the next step of their mission to spread the magic of making music, Beat Making Lab has partnered with PBS Digital Studios to produce web episodes of the work they are doing with youth in Africa. Making music used to involve expensive technology and space built to record sound. Recently, Beat Making Lab has challenged that paradigm by making music produced with equipment that can fit into a carry-on bag. Using a Mac laptop, open source beat-making software, microphone, Midi controller, and speakers or headphones, the group can travel anywhere to teach youth in the tools and techniques to produce their own beat music.

iWave Systems has released a Pico-ITX motherboard based on Freescale’s single- and dual-core i.MX 6 processors, which integrate ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs plus 2D and 3D GPUs. Unlike SODIMM-style COMs (computer-on-modules), iWave’s i.MX6 Pico ITX SBC offers easy connection of audio, video, Ethernet, and USB I/O, without requiring a custom baseboard. iWave says its tiny 100 [...]

Since ISPConfig 3.0.5, it is possible to use multiple PHP versions on one server and select the optimal PHP version for a website. This feature works with PHP-FPM (starting with PHP 5.3) and FastCGI (all PHP 5.x versions). This tutorial shows how to build PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4 as a PHP-FPM and a FastCGI version on an Ubuntu 12.10 server. These PHP versions can be used together with the default PHP (installed through apt) in ISPConfig.

Five years of closed development and five years of open source collaboration have seen the keyboard-driven shell for Mac OS X finally feature-rich enough and stabilised to become a version 1.0

Upstart can now monitor files, reporting when certain files are created, deleted or modified. The event daemon also has a graphical monitor to track events that have been initiated

It's time to do a little prior art searching, don't you think? Can you help? Nokia just disclosed a list of patents that it claims VP8, the video compression format used by the WebM Project, infringes, and the way they filled in the form, the list looks as long and scary as it could possibly look, and just as the IETF was trying to reach consensus on VP8. But when you break the Nokia list down, country by country and then by patent, it's not so impressive after all. As it turns out, there are just a few patents repeated over and over. I think it's short enough that we can sensibly try to find prior art.

Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft (in no particular order) were recently attacked by hackers. This led to a number of questions being raised. How did they manage to get into the servers of such big corporations? Why did they want to do it? And most importantly: Is Google any safer than these websites? To find the answer, we must study the problem.

My point is you can’t force people to contribute to projects they don’t want to contribute to, so the idea of every distro being dropped to help support Ubuntu isn’t going to happen. There’s no boss here who can control the whole FOSS development resource like a big company. You just need to put this idea out of your mind. Accept it can’t happen. There is however more to discuss than just “can we coerce people to work together?”. The following is just my opinion and I’m certainly open minded enough to change if people bring forward new points, so lets investigate some of the gripes people have with fragmentation.

I'm among the first to admit that when I find a Linux distribution that I like, it takes a lot for me to be impressed with any of the alternatives. I've looked into countless distros, such as Arch, Fedora and Linux Mint, among others. Yet at the end of the day, I kept finding myself coming back to Ubuntu. And in many ways, I find this comical since I was one of the early naysayers about their use of Unity and other controversial decisions. But something happened over time – I found myself growing comfortable with the way Ubuntu does things. With my busy schedule, a distro that "just works" appeals to me.