Showing all newswire headlines

The Steam beta for Linux has been running for little over two months now, and there has been a slow trickle of new titles being added to the list. Here’s a look at a few titles.

Many of the current games are ones that featured in the Humble Indie Bundle previously, so I imagine sales figures for those would not be that great, but it is nice to now be able to have these games as part of Steamplay, the buy-once-play-anywhere feature of Steam.

An internet forum application is an online discussion site where individuals hold discussions in the form of posted messages. This type of software is a very powerful tool to run online communities, to disseminate information, share experiences and ideas, receive online support, interact with others learning new intercultural skills, and much more.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

Decided to do a short video review of Rebellin Synergy which can be downloaded at a cost. Rebellin Synergy is super fast! It’s faster than Windows and what’s more, it’s faster than several other major Linux distributions out there! Feel the nimble response of the Synergy kernel.

Well now this interesting a new Unity3D game popped up on Desura called Frozen Nightmare, I contacted the developer about possible Linux & Mac ports and I am pleased he has now confirmed them and even said thanks to me for it!

The GNOME Disk Utility developers have announced earlier today, January 12, the immediate availability for download and testing of the GNOME Disk Utility 3.7.1 storage device management tool for the GNOME 3 desktop environment.

In addition to the two peculiar games coming to Linux being done by Replay Games, another unique title coming to Linux is Euro Truck Simulator 2...

oday i return to the topic of encryption and security and in particular I’ll show how to simply encrypt a file with GnuPG, this can be really usefull to encrypt a single file where you have your passwords or some personal information that you want to keep safer.

GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a GPL Licensed alternative to the PGP suite of cryptographic software. GnuPG is compliant with RFC 4880, which is the current IETF standards track specification of OpenPGP. Current versions of PGP (and Veridis’ Filecrypt) are interoperable with GnuPG and other OpenPGP-compliant systems.

This software is frequently integrated with mail client so it can sign, crypt or do both actions on the mail you send and receive, and now we’ll see how to use it on the command line to encrypt a file.

Aaron Swartz, who was arrested in 2011 and charged with stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at MIT, is dead at 26.

A co-founder of Reddit and activist who fought to make online content free to the public has been found dead, authorities confirmed Saturday, prompting an outpouring of grief from prominent voices on the intersection of free speech and the Web.

Indeed, it's not news that the DMCA process is subject to abuse. And as McIntosh's case shows, the incentives provided by the law enable that abuse. One section of the DMCA, section 512(f), is supposed to discourage abuse by holding false accusers liable. But as examples like this one demonstrate, the threat of section 512(f) is not enough.

In fact, the senders of this notice were quite brazen about the shakedown operation they were executing. When McIntosh contacted the rightsholders, he got this message in response:

Quoting: Had our requestes to monetize this video not been disputed, we would have placed an ad on the cotent [sic] and allowed it to remain online. Unfortunately after appeal, we are left with no other option than to remove the content.

No consideration of fair use, no conception that the remixer may be in the right. Simply: allow us to generate revenue off your video, or we will shut it down.

For those not busy playing around with the Snowshoe web-browser, the beta of Mozilla Firefox 19.0 has been released and is ready for testing...

Unwired Planet, formerly Openwave Systems, said in a regulatory filing today that it has received more than 1,900 patents, including 753 US patents, from Swedish telecom company Ericsson.

There's not much to Unwired Planet beyond its patents. The operating parts of Openwave were sold off before the transformation to Unwired last April. In September, Unwired launched patent suits against Apple [PDF] and Google, following a time-tested recipe: use patents on old, unsuccessful technology to ask for royalties on new, popular technology. It also had cases against Apple and RIM at the International Trade Commission, but dropped them in October.

For those developers wishing to dive into the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) world on Linux, committed to the libdrm tree are improved man pages that cover various areas of this key component to the open-source Linux graphics stack...

The critical Java vulnerability that is currently under attack was made possible by an incomplete patch Oracle developers issued last year to fix an earlier security bug, a researcher said.

According to Gowdiak, the latest vulnerability is a holdover from a bug (referred to here as Issue 32) that Security Explorations researchers reported to Oracle in late August. Oracle released a patch for the issue in October but it was incomplete, he said in an e-mail to Ars that was later published to the Bugtraq mailing list.

NetBSD developers have announced the release of pkgsrc-2012Q4, the latest quarterly release of the package management system used by many BSD operating systems and other Unix-like platforms. This latest release also marks fifteen years that this open-source "package source" program has been around...

Last year UBO and TBO for the Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver was talked about and early patches proposed, but merged on Friday was finally this support for Uniform Buffer Objects and Texture Buffer Objects. With the OpenGL UBO/TBO support, the Radeon R600g driver is now advertising GLSL 1.40 as needed for OpenGL 3.1 compliance...

Here is a small tip on how to determine OS of the remote computer using nmap command. This can be quite handy if you are trying to create inventory list of your LAN hosts or you simply do not know what is running behind certain local or remote IP address and you need some hints. Using nmap for this kind of job does not mean that you will be able to identify remote OS with 100% accuracy but nmap will certainly provide you with some quite solid educated guess.

Back in June last year, Techdirt reported on the warning from the World Health Organization's Director-General that we risked entering a "post-antibiotic era". That was in part because the current patent system was not encouraging the right kind of research by pharma companies in order to develop the new antibiotics that we desperately need.

Stephan Kinsella points out that the World Economic Forum's 8th Global Risks Report (pdf), based on a survey of over 1,000 experts worldwide, has singled out precisely the same issue as one of the most serious facing humanity today: Those experts also offered their views on why they thought this worrying situation had come about. Their answer turned out to be the same as the key problem outlined in the earlier Techdirt story -- the failure of patents to encourage the development of drugs that maximized public health rather than private profits:

Of course, the reason for doing this was not to make their subscribers happier but rather to attempt to force Google to pay them more money for carrying their traffic. It was related to the story we just had about France Telecom degrading YouTube performance. Both were examples of these French companies effectively seeking to break basic end-to-end principles of the internet, in an effort to get Google to pay more, since Google is so popular. As we've noted, some European telcos have been desperately trying to make the argument that successful internet companies should pay them more money to carry their traffic.