Showing headlines posted by henke54

Now I will add a couple of words about MeeGo. At the end of January Nokia discarded a model known as N9-00, which became outdated even before its release. The company also had serious disagreement with Intel and is unhappy with their cooperation. Ongoing agreements do not allow Nokia to shut down the project single handedly that is why it will be an experimental one. By the end of the year Nokia plans to unveil one product. I have a gut feeling it will be a tablet, not a phone (Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.). I will not play guessing games, because Nokia is working on a tablet and two phones at the moment. Sadly, all announcements that MeeGo will be a flagship smartphone OS remained empty. It is just another promise, which failed to materialize. Nokia got used to give its word without delivering. Come tomorrow and everything will be fine. Tomorrow has already come and nothing is fine for Nokia.

At the ShmooCon hacker conference, security expert Jon Larimer from IBM's X-Force team demonstrated that Linux is far from immune from attacks via USB storage devices: during his presentation, the expert obtained access to a locked Linux system using a specially crafted USB flash drive, taking advantage of a mechanism that allows many desktop distributions to automatically recognise and mount newly connected USB storage devices and display the contents of the device, in this case, in the Nautilus file explorer. The desktop will do this even if the screensaver is already active.

In a just released "report card" on the use of open source technology at the federal level, the Defense Department received the highest rating -- 82 percent -- from Open Source for America. "The Department is looking to adopt transparent policies and procedures in line with President Obama's Open Government Directive," said Daniel Risacher, associate director of enterprise services and integration at DoD.

Two well-known members of the free and open source software community have kicked off an initiative to promote women's participation in FOSS technology and culture. Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora and open source advocate and developer Mary Gardiner are behind the non-profit The Ada Initiative, named for Countess Ada Lovelace, who is acknowledged as both the world's first programmer and open source programmer.

A government agency in Norway has reported Sony to the Consumer Ombudsman after floods of complaints over removal of "Other OS" functionality from PlayStation 3 consoles.

Norway's Consumer Council claims Sony breached the Norwegian Marketing Control Act, by withdrawing a key feature after sale. It says Sony's terms of service are unreasonable and leave the consumer without any legal protection.

Australia's Department of Finance has released a desktop policy that required all agencies to adopt Office Open XML as the standard document format - a move that in the short term ensures Microsoft's Office suite remains embedded in government.

Last Wednesday, Simon Phipps, former open source evangelist at Sun, reported on his blog, on a presentation he had given at a conference in Latvia concerning the Open Document Format (ODF). Speaking before him, a Latvian government official had made the announcement that, from now on, all government departments in Latvia must accept documents in ODF. As confirmed by OSEPA (Open Source software usage by European Public Administrations) figures, Phipps said that the move isn't limited to this small Baltic state, but that it is part of a larger development in progress among public administrations across Europe: nobody wants to force citizens to use a commercial office package when communicating with their public authorities. The Document Foundation's LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice has apparently become very popular, but Phipps stated that "many citizens will want to use software other than LibreOffice to edit ODF documents". He said that he is surprised about the incomplete support for ODF provided by Apple and Google Docs. "It's ironic that the best proprietary ODF support right now is from Microsoft", he concluded.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has confirmed Linux users will finally have access to its AUSkey authentication software within two months, following compatibility complaints in May when the service was launched for Windows and Mac OS X only.

But, there is more to this story. Reputed information security investigative journalist Brian Krebs reports that one of the two Microsoft IP addresses was involved in a denial of service attack against his website on September 23. According to him, the owner of his Web hosting provider, who is also a co-founder of the SURBL (Spam URL Blocklist) project, notified Microsoft about the possible compromise of its systems, hours after the attack. It's not very clear why Microsoft failed to properly investigate the report at the time and allowed the abuse to continue on its network for another three weeks. The websites promoted a rogue online pharmacy known as "Canadian Health&Care Mall," which is believed to be associated with a spam affiliate program called Bulker.biz. One thing the Bulker.biz gang is known for, is compromising poorly configured Linux or UNIX-like systems and using in their operations. By routing traffic through these servers, which use the IP addresses of well known organizations and companies, the spammers can evade various blocklists. This connection points to a high likelihood that Microsoft's compromised network hardware devices were running some Linux flavor.

Due to the international audience, all presentations will be in English. Thursday 14 October - Interoperability tests (suppliers only) The first day of the event is reserved for Abisource, DiaLOGIKa, Google, IBM, Itaapy, KO GmbH, Microsoft, Novell, Sun/Oracle, OOo... Interoperability testing starts at 09:30, the scenario's will be published on the OpenDoc Society wiki. Friday 15 October - Presentations Please note that the number of participants is limited. Registration is therefore required but free of charge.

[An excellent opportunity to meet LXer's Senior Technology Editor Sander Marechal in real person! - hkwint]

Arnijn Hemel, 32, lives with his parents in Tiel, a town smack-dab in the middle of the Netherlands. He works as a technology consultant, but spends several hours a week on his avocation: pestering some of the world’s most powerful consumer electronics and technology companies.

The Veterans Affairs Department sees advantages in using open-source software to modernize its Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) system, but it anticipates several problems if it takes that step. The VA issued a request for information Aug. 11 asking for industry to deal with anticipated concerns related to open-source development for VistA. The request follows a recommendation from an Industry Advisory Council working group in May 2010 that the VA create an open-source development program to update VistA. VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker has invited the group to submit advice on modernizing VistA.

As you've probably heard by now, Oracle has decided to file suit against Google, claiming multiple counts of infringement against Java or JVM patents and copyrights they acquired when they assimilated Sun Microsystems this past year. Since I'm unlikely to keep my mouth shut about even trivial matters, something this big obviously requires at least a couple thousand words.

The OIN's definition of "the Linux System" is controlled only by its six member companies although it also defines the scope of the license agreement between all supporters including licensees (not members) Oracle and Google. I have pointed out the problems with that arbitrary, constantly changing definition (it's simply a web page and the OIN can remove or add whatever it wants, whenever, without any objective criteria for that) in this blog posting. If you want to jump right to my suggestions for how the OIN's definition of "the Linux System" could be improved, you can go right here. If you read those suggestions, think of Oracle vs. Google. Any one of my four alternative suggestions would fix the problem for Dalvik and then Oracle wouldn't be able to sue Google.

A Windows host must be used to run Western Digital disk drive diagnostic software, forcing Linux, Unix and other O/S users to buy a Windows system if they want to use it. This was the message given to Keith Edmunds of Tiger Computing, a company specialising in Linux, who suspected he had a problem with a pair of Caviar Green WD20EARS drives.

Harnessing a pair of protocols developed by Google, the newly released version of Linux kernel should be able to speed network traffic throughput considerably. The technique is one of a number of new features that come with the latest update of the open source operating system kernel, Linux version 2.6.35, which Linus Torvalds released on Sunday.

Leuven, Belgium, 4 August 2010 – The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven) today released an extension for OpenOffice.org Writer that enables users to save documents as Braille or to send them directly to a Braille embosser. “odt2braille” (http://odt2braille.sourceforge.net/) is a freeware extension for OpenOffice.org, a office suite that is freely available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux/Unix and Solaris.

Steve Coast, a cofounder of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company founded the OpenStreetMap community mapping project in 2004, and CloudMade draws its data from OpenStreetMap. Through application programming interfaces and other tools, CloudMade helps developers take advantage of OpenStreetMap’s geographical data to power their own location apps, then takes a share from the apps’ advertising revenue.

Security company Qualys has released a new open source tool, 'BlindElephant', which can accurately fingerprint web applications down to version level in order to better manage the security issues which now plague such software. According to the company, the need for such a tool is pressing. Web applications, including open source apps, are a huge area of potential vulnerability for most organisations and the reason is that it is difficult to assess what is running on a website and to what version number.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are helping the U.S. military analyze and develop the advantages of open-source software -- programs that make their source code open to others so it can be changed and improved. Bringing many minds to bear on a given program can lead to software that is both high quality and low cost, or even free. For example, the Linux operating system, which licenses its basic source code for free, is now used to run many servers in companies, government and academia. The U.S. military is interested in open source, too, because it offers the potential for increased speed and flexibility, among other advantages. Scientists and engineers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are working with military agencies to maximize the open-source potential.