Showing all newswire headlines

If you own an Android the chances are you’ve heard, or experienced, one horror story after another about data theft and privacy invasion that comes as first nature to malware meant for Android phones. Android spyware is nothing new and the platform is home to a plethora of cell phone spy apps.

RedNoteBook is a open source diary and journal software for Linux, Windows and Mac. It includes a calendar navigation, customizable templates, export functionality and word clouds. You can also format, tag and search your entries. RedNotebook is Free Software under the GPL.

Dr. Roy compares and contrasts issues that present to Linux users with those of Windows and Apple users. Despite raised concerns of fragmentation FUD, Linux wins out owing to its POSIX compliance. A good read.

DarkTable, one of the leading open-source programs for dealing with photography workflow and RAM image handling, has reached version 1.2. DarkTable 1.2 brings with it many features to benefit the open-source photographer...

Linus Torvalds announced a few hours ago, April 7, that the sixth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.9 kernel is available for download and testing.

When it comes to public key cryptography, most systems today are still stuck in the 1970s. On December 14, 1977, two events occurred that would change the world: Paramount Pictures released Saturday Night Fever, and MIT filed the patent for RSA. Just as Saturday Night Fever helped popularize disco through its choreography and soundtrack, RSA helped popularize cryptography by allowing two parties to communicate securely without a shared secret.

Loïc Dachary, a Free Software developer and activist and the President of the Free Software Foundation in France, noticed something while attending the OpenStack summit in April 2012. As corporations joined the project and assigned developers to work on OpenStack, all of them knew about Free Software and some even contributed to it from time to time. They were all surfing the wave of the Cloud and it was an unprecedented opportunity for them to make a difference, to share their work on a daily basis.

Starting late last year, hundreds of US businesses began to receive demand letters from secretive patent-holding companies with six-letter gibberish names: AdzPro, GosNel, and JitNom. The letters state that using basic office equipment, like scanners that can send files to e-mail, infringes a series of patents owned by MPHJ Technologies. Unless the target companies make payments—which start at around $9,000 for the smallest targeted businesses but go up from there—they could face legal action.

Google, Red Hat, BlackBerry and Earthlink have called on the US regulators to start an investigation into the "outsourcing" of patent litigation to specialised patent assertion entities    

"Patent trolling" is a real problem to tech corporations nowadays. It means that to compete with other companies, some technology companies will sell patents to licensing and intellectual property firms, legally enforcing the patents they have bought. After that, these property firms will take the targeted companies to court action for the patents. And the the companies selling the patent will hide behind the property firms, they cannot be countersued as they don't stand to make money from court action.

Jos Poortvliet, the community manager for openSUSE, is refreshingly different from the norm. He is someone who brings intelligence and good sense to the role, someone who knows how to communicate in an effective way.

The Kindle Fire HD is a great tablet. However, things can go wrong if you install too many applications from other sources than Amazon's. In this case, you will need to reset it to the default factory settings. You will also need to reset your Kindle Fire HD if you want to sell or gift it to somebody else. This will erase the data and account stored in the tablet. Things you have bought from Amazon, like books, movies ... are still stored in the Amazon server tied to your Amazon account.

The Spearmint Game Engine, which aims to be a more impressive and feature-rich version of ioquake3, as well as Watermint, a "realistic" fork of Spearmint, are still actively being pursued...

When I exclusively reported last year that Valve would be releasing their Steam client for Linux and Source Engine, most Linux desktop users and gamers were filled with joy. However, now that the Steam client is out in the wild and more and more games are coming to Linux via this digital distribution system, it seems not everyone is happy...

Benchmarks for sharing this weekend are looking at the performance of GCC 4.7, GCC 4.8, LLVM/Clang 3.2, and the latest LLVM/Clang 3.3 development code. How does the performance of the newly released GCC 4.8.0 compare to the yet-to-be-released LLVM/Clang 3.3? It's interesting.

Linux Advocate Dietrich Schmitz shares a story about a fundamentally broken system: Email. Read how a fix is under way and how a new 'de facto' email privacy standard may emerge.

While the PHP-GTK project has basically been dead for years, to provide GTK2 bindings to the PHP programming language, there have been several other projects worked on in more recent times to advance the GNOME support for the PHP programming language...

While ioquake3 projects continue to thrive as open-source projects spun off from the id Tech 3 game engine, when it comes to the open-source Doom 3 (id Tech 4) engine, there is barely any public activity...

In a few weeks, the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu Linux will roll out. Here's what to expect.

The cost of spam is frightening, estimated to be approximately $130 billion each year. The tide of the daily spam is a continual thorn in the side for both providers and users. Spam is a waste of valuable network bandwidth, disk space and takes up users' valuable time to declutter their mailboxes.