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The on-going debate regarding the use of free and open source software in the Italian Public Administration (PA) seems to be coming to a satisfactory conclusion. Italian public administrations are now obliged to give priority to free and open source software. This preference, however, cannot be given without a "comparative assessment". One of the tasks of the Agency is indeed to establish procedures and criteria that will help to justify their choices in the acquisition of computer programs.

Over time, the curve for the cost of finding a new attack and the curve for the cost of defending against all attacks to date cross. Once those curves cross, the offender never has to worry about being out of the money. I believe that that crossing occurred some time ago.

On Friday I shared some updated 9-card NVIDIA GeForce Linux benchmarks of Valve's Team Fortress 2. Now for some Sunday viewing are Team Fortress 2 benchmarks from nine AMD Radeon graphics cards...

ViewSonic announced an embedded Linux-powered wireless receiver for rendering multimedia content on projectors, desktop monitors, large format displays, and HDTVs. The ViewSync WPG-370 Wireless Presentation Gateway streams HD content from Windows, iOS, and Android mobile devices via Miracast, Intel WiDi (Wireless Display), and other protocols, and can also play content from directly plugged-in USB flash. […]

OpenSSH could be made to run programs if it received specially craftednetwork traffic from an authenticated user.

AW-SoM Technologies has begun shipping the first of five Linux- and Android-ready computer-on-modules based on Allwinner’s ARM-based SoCs, including SODIMM and Coreboard models with Allwinner A10 and dual-core A20 SoCs, and a Coreboard with a quad-core A31 SoC. AW-SoM also offers a baseboard developer kit for the modules, and has launched an “open” baseboard development […]

We are analog and digital. One is old, the other new. Civilizing the latter will take some work.

Devs tired of all the junk downloads, and no we DON'T mean the free software The Gnu Image Manipulation Program, a popular and free Photoshop alternative that glories in the name “The GIMP”, has decided it can no longer permit itself to be downloaded from SourceForge.…

IETF promises PRISM-proofing plan for the future internet The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has vowed that the NSA won't be allowed to get away with its nefarious surveillance of the internet any more … as soon as 1,100 boffins can agree on a PRISM-proofing plan.…

In August, the Fedora Project held its first Flock conference, a replacement for the North American and European FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) events. Flock was a four-day, planned conference with talks, workshops, and hackfests, in contrast to FUDCon's barcamp model. In the interest of reaching beyond the community and reminding everyone that Fedora is so much broader than just a Linux project, the invited keynote speakers were from open source areas outside of the Fedora Project. One of those keynotes was by Dave Crossland, creator of the open font Cantarell and an active part of the free font movement.

I recently covered the release of Dropbox platform and my thoughts on the impending cloud storage lock-in. I was also fortunate enough to run across what the guys over at NimbusBase are doing over the weekend. They seem to be the answer to the open API for mobile and web applications, providing a cross-cloud storage layer and a GPL reference implementation while they do it. I also penned a few thoughts on their model.

Mainline Release (Linus's tree) News Linus Torvalds released 3.12 on November 3 2013 after seven 3.12 rc cycles. This time around, instead of opening the merge window right after the release, Linus chose to delay it by a week. The 3.13 merge window will be open on November 10th. In this release announcement, Linus started a discussion on bug-fix only 4.0 idea.

Learn how to install, benchmark and optimize this popular, shared-nothing and scalable open-source distributed filesystem in this special 12 page report.

Our survey of more than 3,000 developers and managers shows that after several years of being flat, salaries are on the rise once again

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, but Linux founder and “keeper of the flame”, Linus Torvalds, has put developers and the rest of the world on notice that a Linux 4.0 is coming sooner rather than later, “I don't want us to get to the kinds of crazy numbers we had in the 2.x series, so at some point we're going to cut over from 3.x to 4.x, just to keep the numbers small and easy to

Canonical and its partners will certify Ubuntu OpenStack cloud compliant hardware and software.

Here’s a development that could have enormous global implications for the search for a new commons-based economic paradigm. Working with an academic partner, the Government of Ecuador has launched a major strategic research project to "fundamentally re-imagine Ecuador" based on the principles of open networks, peer production, and commoning.

Docker (previously dotCloud) made a big splash this year when they open-sourced their software for creating "lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers" that powers their Platform-As-A-Service offering. Developers are excited because Docker offers an easier to use alternative to Chef and Puppet for managing server environments. Instead of wrangling with configuration files, Docker allows developers to simply take an image of their system and share it with their team. When a team member makes a change to their local environment, they just create a new image (a Docker container) and share it with the team. Its like git for disk images.

Axiomtek released two rugged, Linux-ready box computers with IP40 compliance, anti-vibration support, and extended temperature ranges. The tiny rBOX610 is a din-rail computer built around a Freescale ARM9-based i.MX287 processor, featuring CAN buses and isolated Fast Ethernet ports, while the eBOX660-872-FL offers 3rd generation Intel Core processors, four gig-Ethernet ports, and dual display support. Rugged […]

Higher education is not just about producing valuable workers, but about educating people to become thinking, lifelong learners who contribute in many positive ways to society, be that local or global.