Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Open Knowledge and the Open Definition Advisory Council have announced the release of version 2.0 of the Open Definition. The Definition “sets out principles that define openness in relation to data and content,” and is the baseline from which various public licenses are measured. Any content released under an Open Definition-conformant license means that anyone can “freely access, use, modify, and share that content, for any purpose, subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness.”

Android 5.0, codenamed Lollipop, has introduced a key change to the WebView component, used by app developers to display HTML 5 content within their apps, making new features more readily available. WebView — based on the open source Chromium project (Chrome without the proprietary bits) — will now be updateable via Google's Play store, according to a recent official post.

Proprietary clouds in particular come from Microsoft, Google and Amazon, while open-source cloud offerings are provided by OpenStack. On OpenStack, it’s the 1990s Linux time again, only this time around tech firms are slapping their badges on the OpenStack APIs instead and selling support to go with them.

OpenStack has presented a huge opportunity for technologists at many levels. Niki Acosta is one of those technologists who strives to pull together all aspects of the OpenStack community for the betterment of everyone. Niki is the Director of Cloud Evangelism at Metacloud, now a part of Cisco. Metacloud delivers private infrastructure as a service based on the popular and open source cloud platform, OpenStack. As an active OpenStack participant, tweeter, and blogger, she has become a recognized name in the cloud industry. Find out more in my interview with Niki.

Are you attending the OpenStack Summit in Paris? OpenStack Summit Paris is a five-day conference for OpenStack software users, developers and administrators, with a main conference encompassing keynotes from leading figures in the OpenStack community and a design summit focused around collaborative working sessions

Patches have been flung out to cover vulnerabilities in PHP that led to remote code execution and buffer overflows. The flaws were detailed this week by Swiss researchers High-Tech Bridge in versions 5.4.33, 5.5.17 and 5.6.1 on a machine running Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS and the Radamsa fuzzer.

Rajan attends a school in a small village located around 140 kilometers from my hometown of Amritsar, India. Otherwise an active boy who is adept in handling numbers in the ledger book at his father’s convenience store and who loves playing flute, he falls into the depths of apathy and indifference the moment he enters his classroom. Rajan is not at fault for the abrupt change in his behavior at the school. He attends a school that has one teacher for all its students from classes starting from the first standard through the fifth standard, that has no proper infrastructure, a dilapidated library, and an obsolete teaching methodology.

Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's an inexpensive single-board microcomputer powered by a system-on-a-chip! There's a lot of them though!

Julien Danjou is a free software hacker almost all of the time. At his day job, he hacks on OpenStack for eNovance. And, in his free time, he hacks on free software projects like Debian, Hy, and awesome. Julien has also written The Hacker's Guide to Python and given talks on OpenStack and the Ceilometer project, among other things. Prior to his talk at OpenStack Summit 2014 in Paris this year, we interviewed him about his current work and got some great insight into the work going on for the Ceilometer project, the open source telemetry project for OpenStack.

Laforge is prepping a $399 beta version of its Linux-based Icis eyewear, as well as a $549 Bold model due in 2015 that adds a camera and higher resolution. Relatively few of the smart eyewear products now coming to market compete directly with Google Glass as a general-purpose consumer device. Most are vertical-market helmets for industrial or field service use (Vuzix M100), or are designed for specific activities such as skiing (Recon’s Snow 2) or motorcycle riding (Skully AR-1.) Laforge Optical’s Icis stands out from the pack with its consumer focus and its foundation in embedded Linux rather than the stripped-down Android stacks used by most smart eyewear.

MEN Micro announced a rugged, industrial temperature “XC15? carrier board for its Linux-ready Rugged COM Express modules, including a Core-i7 CB70C COM. For years, MEN Micro, which offers a wide variety of embedded systems and components, focused its computer-on-module efforts on its Linux-ready “Embedded System Module” (ESM) form-factor. The company still sells several dozen ESM, ESMini, and ESMexpress variants, but more recently has launched a new line of COM Express modules it dubs Rugged COM Express. Now, the company has a carrier board that is just as tough as its new modules.

RIPS is a tool written in PHP to find vulnerabilities using static source code analysis for PHP web applications. By tokenizing and parsing all source code files RIPS is able to transform PHP source code into a program model and to detect sensitive sinks (potentially vulnerable functions) that can be tainted by user input (influenced by a malicious user) during the program flow. Besides the structured output of found vulnerabilities RIPS also offers an integrated code audit framework for further manual analysis.

The ever rising cost of academic journals is a major burden for researchers. Academic libraries cannot always keep up with increases in subscription fees causing libraries to drop journals from their collection. This makes it harder for students and professors to quickly and easily access the information they need. Inter-library loan requests are an option but they do take time. Even if it only takes a few days to fill an inter-library loan request, that is still time wasted for a researcher that has a deadline. While there is no single, quick fix to the problem with the academic journal prices, there is a movement applying the open source way to academic research in an attempt to solve the problem—the open access movement.

The Ubuntu 4.10 release debuted on October 20, 2004. At the time the goal of the project was to succeed where Debian was failing, namely offering users the promise of a steady release cadence.

"Microsoft loves Linux" is generally not something one expects to hear, but that was one of the messages that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivered at a San Francisco media event touting Redmond's cloud offerings on Monday. According to Nadella, 20 per cent of Microsoft's Azure cloud is already Linux and the software giant plans to always have first-class support for Linux distributions in its public cloud offerings.

Doug Cutting is founder of numerous successful open source projects, including Lucene and Hadoop, and currently the chief architect at Cloudera and sits on the Board of the Apache Software Foundation. In this interview, he tells me how working on open source is more about common sense than creed and dives into open source adoption in the enterprise. Prior to his keynote at the All Things Open conference, I asked him about open sourcing Lucene, what his role is like on the board of the Apache Software Foundation, and what the open source way means to him. read more

Linux Lord Linus Torvalds has admitted that his tendency to use strong language has alienated other members of the Linux community. In a Q&A with Intel's chief Linux and open source chap Dirk Hohndel at LinuxCon Europe in Düsseldorf on Wednesday, Torvalds was asked what he'd do differently if given the chance.

Dwight Merriman is executive chairman and co-founder of MongoDB, an open source document database. Prior to MongoDB, Dwight was co-founder of DoubleClick and Panther Express (CDNetworks). He will give a keynote at the upcoming All Things Open conference in Raleigh this year. In this interview, I asked him a few questions about open source, MongoDB's business model, the challenges of hiring developers, and more. Dwight discusses open source and how it has moved from being accepted to expected.

Mozilla adds a new feature to the overlooked Firefox mobile browser that allows you to play any web video on a compatible device. Interconnected devices are becoming more and more ubiquitous, with TV-connected devices such as Chromecast being easily controlled from any phone, tablet or computer with a Chrome browser installed. This remote play feature is now being made available for Firefox on Android, similar to YouTube remote play.

Mozilla is extending its relationship with Telefonica by making it easier than ever to communicate on the Web. Telefónica has been an invaluable partner in helping Mozilla develop and bring Firefox OS to market with 12 devices now available in 24 countries. We’re now expanding our relationship, exploring how to simplify communications over the Web by providing people with the first global communications system built directly into a browser.