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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that its Open Accessibility Workgroup is releasing IAccessible2 for Windows under the BSD license. It is also announcing the availability of AccProbe, a new desktop application testing tool that is available under the BSD license. AccProbe uses IAccessible2 platform services to assist developers in discovering and correcting code problems in their Windows applications. It was developed in Eclipse by IBM and donated to The Linux Foundation's Open Accessibility Workgroup.

LG announced an LG Optimus Series of mobile devices, including two Android 2.2 smartphones -- the Optimus One and Optumus Chic -- and promised an Android-based Optimus tablet. Meanwhile, a rumor about an Android 3.0 "Gingerbread" platform split-up has been squelched, and a photo of the Android-based "HTC Vision" emerged as the device's manufacturer announced robust 2Q financials.

In a post on his blog, developer Jon Lech Johansen, also known as DVD-Jon, says that, "Google does far too little curation of the Android Market, and it shows." Among other things, Johansen, the co-founder and CTO at doubleTwist, is well known for his involvement in reverse engineering the content-scrambling system used for DVD licensing enforcement and for doubleTwist, an iTunes-like application for managing and synchronising content on various devices including Android mobile phones, BlackBerry devices and Palm smartphones.

Google is updating the stable version of its Chrome Web browser for Windows, Mac and Linux, addressing a handful of security vulnerabilities -- including four that could put users at risk simply by viewing a maliciously constructed image file. Those vulnerabilities addressed in Chrome 5.0.375.99 are rated as "high" severity, and include a high-memory corruption flaw that could be triggered by an invalid PNG image file. Google awarded security researcher Aki Helin $1,000 for the discovery of the vulnerability, which he reported June 7.

Have you ever felt that you are being watched in whatever you do online? Websites seem to know who you are and can greet you with your name when you visit them. Google always seems to know what you are searching, even before you started the search. Getting scared? Perhaps it’s time to turn your privacy filter on. Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released five new stable Linux kernels, correcting minor errors of their predecessors and including improvements which are unlikely to generate new errors. As so often with kernel versions in the stable series, it remains undisclosed if the new versions contain changes which fix security vulnerabilities, although the number of changes and some of the descriptions of those changes certainly suggest that all the new versions contain security fixes.

In a move to bring screen-orientation awareness to mobile Web applications, Google has added accelerometer APIs to the WebKit HTML renderer. The APIs are based on the DeviceOrientation Event Specification, a W3C Web standard draft that describes DOM events for monitoring orientation changes and accelerometer activity.

Two popular Linux distributions recently released new developmental versions on the road to their finals. One is early in its cycle and the other is about to cross the finish line.

Although digiKam supports watermarking, this feature is hidden so well that you might not even realize that it’s there. This is because the watermarking function in digiKam is tucked under the Batch Queue Manager tool which you can use to watermark multiple photos in one go. Here is how this works in practice.

Have you been looking for open-source storage management tools that are easy to use and provide a graphical representation of your storage. Alas, there are no comprehensive tools but there are graphical tools that you can pair with command-line wizardry, particularly LVM.

opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM Version 1.4.1 is now released and ready for download from SourceForge.

Getting a bit tired of the font selection your distribution ships with? Want a bit more variety for presentations or publications? Tons of fonts are available under open licenses, but only if you know where to look. You'll find plenty of "free" fonts online, but not all of them are licensed under free or open source licenses. You have to be a bit careful when choosing free fonts if the licenses matter. Some are free to download but not distribute or modify, others are distributed without any licensing information at all. Those make me a bit nervous, as it's hard to tell whether someone is distributing a font legitimately or not. Other fonts have custom licenses that wouldn't qualify as OSI-compliant but might be good enough for personal or business use.

Many Linux enthusiasts associate desktop Linux with their repetitive daily routine. Same old, same old. Looking to mix things up a little, I thought it’d be fun to take a more entertaining look at what we can do with our Linux boxes. I’m listing ten noteworthy Linux applications that I find very fun to use. After all, Linux is more than a mere efficient platform. It can also provide a great deal of entertainment as well.

GIMP Plugin Registry 3.5 (3.5.1) which has just been released, integrates GIMP FX Foundry which consists of 124 plugins has been integrated into the GIMP Plugin Registry. But it also got some other cool new plugins. Read on!

Redo is an easy point-and-click GUI tool for full system backup and recovery from bare metal, it allows fast cloning of hard disk images to and from local or network-shared drives. Extremely user friendly interface boots from CD or USB.

Like most community-run events, the second SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) featured the standard set of positive talks on Linux and open source. It also featured a somewhat more controversial talk about failures to get some features merged into the Linux kernel by Ryan "icculus" Gordon.

Firefox is a great open source web browser for Linux and other OSes, but have you checked out Opera? The Opera web browser runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You'll also find its available on many mobile phones and devices. Yes, its closed source, but its still free. Plus its packed with some great features. Right now we're going to look at six of them, not really in any particular order.

Whilst cloud is being sold as the newest most flexible and therefore sensible approach, SME’s who are considering the dazzling benefits of having “technology on tap” would do well to consider where cloud has come from before re-thinking their entire IT infrastructure…

Qmmp is a simple, fast and versatile Winamp or XMMS like music player for Linux. It is written primarily with the help of Qt library. Qmmp supports almost all kinds of music formats out there and it is down to earth simple to use and configure.

This guide explains how to set up software RAID1 on an already running Ubuntu 10.04 system. The GRUB2 bootloader will be configured in such a way that the system will still be able to boot if one of the hard drives fails (no matter which one).