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... We were troubled to learn that the Federal Government, in the form of Homeland Security's ICE division, had also started using the same videos, never once mentioning that they were NBC Universal's videos. That's troubling enough, but it's even worse to find out that New York City has ratcheted up the campaign, still using the same NBC Universal video with false claims in it, and going into city high schools and colleges, asking students to create their own bogus propaganda video that repeats NBC Universal and the MPAA's debunked talking points.

It starts with a press release or an announcement from an organization like the Free Software Foundation or the Linux Foundation. It ends with remarks about someone's smelly underpands. The discussion goes something like this . . .

Open Source Ecology and the Global Village Construction Set take a collaborative approach to building civilizations.

OpenShot, one of the most popular video editors for Linux has reached version 1.4, getting a many improvements and bug fixes:

Red Hat is taking on VMware with five enterprise heavyweights through a vendor-neutral virtualisation community project based on its RHEV-M stack. Red Hat has been joined by Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp and SuSE to lead oVirt Project, planning on building a pluggable hypervisor management framework along with an ecosystem of plug-in partners around its virtualisation management tool for KVM.

Welcome to the 166th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!

IP Webcam is a free Android application that turns your Android smartphone into a network camera with multiple viewing options. You can view your camera using VLC player or any modern web browser. Windows, Mac and Linux platforms supported.

Looking at the trends in the IT industry, virtualization has seen quite a boom in the last few years, because it fits the concepts of utility computing and/or software as a service. Virtualization can be useful to you if you are an enterprise architect, developer, a home user or basically everything in between. We will begin with a short introduction about virtualization in general, then we will specifically treat VirtualBox and KVM as they seem to be most popular open source full virtualization solutions.

Microsoft has hit back at concerns that secure boot technology in UEFI firmware could lock out Linux from Windows 8 PCs, saying that consumers will be free to run whatever they want on their PCs. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specifications, designed to reduce start-up times and improve security, allow computers to verify digitally signed OS loaders before booting. The feature in UEFI, the successor to BIOS ROM, is designed as a countermeasure against rootkits and other bootloader nasties.

This week we look at Android Malware problems, MySQL moving away from open source and a cartoon on how to identify underperforming developers.

Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 has been released and iso images are now available for download. Most of the changes are under the hood since beta 1 so there are only few visible Changes. Beta 2 is based on Linux Kernel version 3.0.4 and Gnome 3.1.92 and brings improved multiarch support.

So just what are the benefits of paying Microsoft a licensing fee for free software, especially when said software was not developed by Microsoft? If these quiet settlements are any indication, the sole benefit would be to avoid being dragged through the courts by one of the largest software developers in the world.

This tutorial will teach Linux users how to make a script to easily turn off their monitors (LCD screens) of their netbooks or laptops with a keystroke, in order to save battery life.

Of all the priorities Meg Whitman now must face as Hewlett-Packard's CEO -- and HP has many priorities -- deep and long commitment to open-source technology must be near the top of the list. HP’s software business is simply not a strength for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company -- whether it’s on the desktop, the server, the data center or in the cloud. Perhaps the best piece of software that comes from HP is its Universal Print Driver, which is actually a powerful piece of software but not exactly positioned in the IT industry’s growth areas.

The accelerated Firefox release cycle may be great for many users, but enterprise IT folks were not thrilled. To their credit, the folks at Mozilla eventually took the complaints seriously and founded a working group to address enterprise desktop needs. However, it seems clear that the ESRs will be a second-class citizen.

This document describes how to install and set up Alfresco Content Server Community Edition by "Alfresco Software inc." on a Fedora 15 based webserver from a WAR package on a Tomcat webserver with PostgreSQL database as backend. This guide will not only help install the product, but also understand why certain points are done the way they are done (this is most helpful for users with little or no knowledge who, like me some time ago, have only started using Linux).

Oracle Corp. has launched a Database Appliance, a Linux-based server that targets midmarket partners and Microsoft SQL Server customers. The Oracle Database Appliance runs on Intel x86 hardware, but partners should not confuse the appliance with commodity servers that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison loathes. Here's why.

The quality of patent filings has fallen dramatically over the past two decades, claims a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).­ The rush to protect even minor improvements in products or services is overburdening patent offices, which in turn slows the time to market for true innovations and reduces the potential for breakthrough inventions they claim. The Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2011 finds that patent quality has declined by an average of around 20 per cent between the 1990s and 2000s, a pattern seen in nearly all countries studied.

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot beta 2 is finally available for download. There aren't any major new features, but there is a cool Ubuntu Software Center feature that's finally working: "Sync between computers". Read on!

Since September 18th I’ve been saying that Hewlett-Packard needed to get rid of Léo Apotheker sooner rather than later. Well, the deed’s been done and Apotheker’s been shown the door. The trouble is, HP’s board doesn’t seem to have learned their lesson. They’re replacing him with former eBay CEO and would be California governor Meg Whitman, who might even be even less qualified than Apotheker to run the ailing tech giant. The announcement of the switch came early this evening, pretty much timed to coincide with the closing of the stock market.