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This morning, Representatives Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced the SHIELD Act, which would create a "loser pays" system for some types of patent litigants. The bill is meant to stymie companies that do nothing more than file patent lawsuits.

Google has open sourced a new compression algorithm called Zopfli that it says is a slower-but-stronger data squasher than the likes of zlib. The product of Googler Lode Vandevenne's 20 per cent time, the day a week Google allows its staff to work on side projects, Zopfli is said to reduce files to sizes 3.7–8.3 per cent smaller than its rivals (PDF). The catch is that it takes one hundred times longer to do so.

If you find yourself spending more time on graphics these days, you're not alone. We're all taking more pictures, creating graphics for visual appeal in online properties and more. For real graphics muscle, it's essential to get familiar with GIMP, one of the very best open source graphics applications. OStatic has covered GIMP on a number of occasions, and the active community that drives the application forward continues to deliver improved versions. In this post, you'll find our latest, updated collection of free resources for getting started with GIMP and becoming an advanced user.

Following the recent release of the real-time strategy game Wargame: European Escalation for Linux, a new Linux MMORPG, Champions of Regnum, has been released on Steam by the publisher NGD Studios.

The Xen hypervisor is now officially using git as its source repository.

I've owned two different Android phones since they first were released, and I eventually rooted both of them. My Droid (original) was such a popular phone that rooting it was very simple. I used my rooted Droid until it wore out and rebooted every time I slid open the keyboard. My second Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy S2, is the phone I have right now. It actually was quite a bit more challenging to root, but in the end, I couldn't resist the lure of total control. Sadly, no amount of rooting can supply a hardware keyboard for my S2, but at least I can run whatever ROM I want on it now. Before I go into how to root an Android device, it's important to discuss why you might want to do so, or why you might not.

Gnome 3.4 introduced a new application called Gnome Boxes. The 3.6 release brings many improvements for Gnome Boxes, and now here is a hasty preview. The various bug fixes and stability improvements make the 3.6 release far more refined, so try it today.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development class to be held in San Francisco Bay Area from March 13th - 15th, 2013.

The Wiki list of games known to work with the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver has been updated. For those curious about the games that are reported to work on the different generations of open-source Radeon graphics, the table has been updated today and yesterday on the X.Org Wiki.

System managers are in serious need of the right tools to help manage their systems and environments. There are many different Linux tools that can help administration managers deal with unruly environments. These tools are some of the most highly rated in the business. While the following list of tools may not be the most well known tools, they are by far some of the best Linus tools that can help administrators in a variety of ways. The benefits of these tools are truly limitless.

Why is everyone asking for cloud portability?? Haven't we figured out that it's a red herring?

Wind River has introduced "patent-pending" packet acceleration method, said to offer up to 300% faster UDP throughput relative to Linux's standard networking stack. Basically, the technology works by automatically steering traffic to a faster path.

The merge window for the Linux 3.9 kernel is coming to a close and most of the major merges have already occurred, so let's take a look at some of the best new features coming to this next Linux kernel release...

It used to be a bit of an art to strip down Red Hat or CentOS down to the absolute minimum needed for a server install. I’ve ranted at length about how the default install for servers included a full blown Gnome desktop, including games. Thankfully, CentOS 6 has a special iso download, which I feel is built specially for me, called the Minimal install. After installing this image a few times, I’m convinced that every Linux install should be a minimal install.

PhUSE, a non-profit community with the goal of furthering advances in clinical information technology, has opened a repository for open source software and is inviting contributors to submit code and documentation. The goal of the initiative is to create a collection of standard processes and tools to gather and analyse data from clinical trials. The repository will be used by researchers from the fields of medicine, from pharmaceutical and biotech companies, as well as academics and government regulators. The repository is hosted at Google Code and is accepting contributions through the PhUSE Wiki.

SolydX is released. SolydX and SolydK are Debian-based distributions with the Xfce and KDE desktops. SolydXK aims to be simple to use, providing an environment that is both stable and secure. SolydXK is an open-source alternative for small businesses, non-profit organisations and home users.

Two weeks ago, 11 bit studios offered gamers a chance to buy its secret next game at half price. Today, that secret game was unveiled as 11 bit studios announces Anomaly 2, the sequel to the award-winning strategy game, Anomaly Warzone Earth.

Some big movement this week in the popularity rankings! While the top ranks are unshakable, SnowLinux gets a huge bump up 2 spots to number 17.

The copyright surveillance machine known as the Copyright Alert System (CAS) is finally launching. CAS is an agreement between Big Content and large Internet Service Providers to monitor peer to peer networks for copyright infringement and target subscribers who are alleged to infringe—via everything from from “educational” alerts to throttling Internet speeds.

After almost exactly a year of development, SpringSource has released Spring for Hadoop 1.0 with the goal of making the development of Hadoop applications easier for users of the distributed application framework. VMware engineer Costin Leau said in the release announcement that the company has often seen developers use the out-of-the-box tools that come with Hadoop in ways that lead to a "poorly structured collection of command line utilities, scripts and pieces of code stitched together." Spring for Hadoop aims to change this by applying the Template API design pattern from Spring to Hadoop.