Showing headlines posted by Ridcully

With the end of May comes our usual end of the month summary about the most popular Linux news stories this month that appeared on Phoronix and other announcements. For this month on Phoronix there were 202 news postings (an average of over six original news articles per day) and 13 featured-length articles.

Jeremy Hammond was arrested in a major federal sweep last year on charges of computer hacking conspiracy, computer hacking, and conspiracy to commit access device fraud. The self-described hacktivist pled guilty to these counts in court on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

In the post-9/11 atmosphere of ever-increasing government secrecy and surveillance, the real surprise to me about the Department of Justice’s secret snooping on Associated Press phone records was that it would be such a surprise, given the visibly vast security and intelligence apparatus erected by the U.S. government over the past decade (admirably totted up by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin in the 2010 Washington Post project Top Secret America and criticized by Glenn Greenwald and others). But the same technological advances that have empowered the rise of Big Brother have created another wrinkle in the story. We might call it the emergence of Little Brother: the ordinary citizen who by chance finds himself in a position to record events of great public import........

A new feature being worked on for the Intel DRM Linux kernel graphics driver is IPS. Short for Intermediate Pixel Storage, this feature should allow modern Intel HD graphics cores to let the CPU enter deeper PC states to increase power-savings...

Linux crept up slightly in the EE Times 2013 Embedded Market Study,” representing 34 percent of current projects while Android showed the greatest growth, jumping to 16 percent, for a total of 50 percent for Linux-based platforms. Meanwhile, ARM processors continue to attract more embedded developers.The results should be seen as a general, but imperfect, guide to trends in the immensely broad and varied world of embedded development.

MediaTek announced its first quad-core system-on-chip aimed at tablets. The MT8125 integrates four 1.5GHz Cortex-A7 cores with Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR Series5XT GPU, enabling 1080p video recording, 1920 x 1200 resolution, and a 13-megapixel camera, and offers integrated 3G HSPA+, 2G EDGE, and WiFi communications.

'Let's focus on our own excellence, not someone else's product'. Ubuntu headman and part-time astronaut Mark Shuttleworth has declared victory over Microsoft's domination of the PC industry, noting that the competitive landscape today is far different from what it was when Ubuntu launched in 2004.…

As those steeped in the policy wonk geekery of open data are likely already aware, last Thursday the President of the United States issued an Executive Order Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information. This is, quite frankly, a big deal. Further down in the post I’ve got some links and some further explanations why. That said, the White House called and asked if I would be willing to provide some context about the significance of the order – which I did. You can read my reaction, along with those of a number of people I respect.

As technology advances, video codecs come and go naturally enough. But while H.265 is still waiting in the wings, we should pay tribute to the groundbreaking H.264, which is a decade old this month. H.264 is possibly not the snappiest or most memorable name, but even 10 years on it remains an important video coding standard, one that made HDTV possible. John Watkinson has had the phrase "industry standard" attributed to most of his numerous publications on digital audio and video – he really did write the book on MPEG – and he examines the life of this enduring codec for The Register.

Champions of open access to publicly funded academic research had something to celebrate last week. Creative Commons is reporting (with just a touch of cautious optimism) the progress of California's Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act (AB 609, for short), which has successfully moved through the State's Assembly Appropriations Committee and is ready for a vote. If passed, the bill—which requires the final copy of any peer-reviewed research funded by California tax dollars to be made publicly accessible within 12 months of publication—will become a matter for the California State Senate (see the Public Library of Science blog and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more detail). This could very well become the first state-level bill to mandate open access to publicly funded academic research.

Many user-facing features coming to the GNOME 3.10 desktop are starting to see the light of day. This article lists some of them...

With the testing of the very latest Intel X.Org graphics driver, the SNA 2D acceleration back-end for the Ivy Bridge graphics is now the clear-cut winner for the Linux desktop over using the default UXA back-end...

A tech-savvy China-based Redditor has spotted a hassle-free way of ensuring he or she is always able to bypass the Great Firewall, even when out and about, using the Raspberry Pi to connect to a virtual private network (VPN).

Apple OEM contractor Foxconn is prepping several products based on Mozilla's Firefox OS, says an industry report. The new products, one of which is rumored to be a tablet, are expected to be announced on June 3 in collaboration with Mozilla. On May 27, Focus Taiwan reported that Mozilla and Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known as Foxconn, will on June 3 unveil a device running Mozilla’s Linux- and HTML5-based Firefox OS. The story also noted that an industry insider told the publication the product was likely to be a tablet.

A new version of xine-lib was released today, which is the library that powers the Xine multimedia playback engine. The xine-lib 1.2.3 release brings numerous features including VA-API hardware video decoding and support for OpenGL 2.0 output.

I'm still amazed how most companies, even when they've been breached and their reputation has been ruined, fail to fight malicious hacking correctly. Instead, they erect security defenses that have little to do with the threats they're hoping to prevent. Let me give you a common scenario: I frequently consult with large companies that have been the victim of APT (advanced persistent threat) attacks. Usually those attacks occur because one or more users were silently infected by a vulnerability that had a vendor patch. Unpatched Java is to blame in more than 50 percent of these cases, but common culprits include unpatched Adobe Acrobat, Windows, and so on.

The AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for supporting the Radeon HD 7000/8000 series of graphics cards now has GL Shading Language 1.30 support exposed by default...After adding in a few other RadeonSI commits, including supporting new TGSI opcodes, Michel Dänzer enabled the RadeonSI GLSL 1.30 support unconditionally in the AMD open-source driver, per this commit.

While Apache is the predominant open-source web-server software currently used by Linux systems, including Ubuntu, NGINX continues to rise in popularity. NGINX continues its push with high performance while having a smaller memory footprint and carrying a BSD license. The NGINX server might be included in future releases of the Ubuntu Server and part of the Ubuntu "main" repository...

Fedora 18 was slow to arrive, but Fedora 19, “Schrödinger's Cat," Red Hat's latest community Linux, is on schedule. It's official. Red Hat community Linux, Fedora 19, code-named “Schrödinger's Cat," is now available in beta.

It's already time for another Humble Indie Bundle to get your hands on more multi-platform DRM-free games at whatever price you want. All of the games this time around are compatible with Linux via native clients except for a CrossOver/Wine-based copy of Dear Esther...