Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Last week Open Source, Open Standards 2013 took place in London, an event focused on the public sector. Naturally these being two topics we’re very keen on here at OSS Watch I went along too. Overall the key message to take away from the event was just how central to public sector IT strategy these two themes have become, and also how policy is being rapidly turned into practice, everywhere from the NHS to local government.

Blender is a powerful open source 3D drawing and animation program. This software was previously a commercial product, but is now available as a free download. Blender has been used to create stunningly beautiful 3D animated videos, including Big Buck Bunny. Check out some of the gorgeous animated movies made with Blender at the web site's Features Gallery.

Mozilla released its first fully-baked simulation engine for Firefox OS, while the first Geeksphone “Keon” development phones for the open source Linux-based mobile operating system remain sold out. Firefox OS Simulator 3.0 adds rotation and geolocation API simulations, faster boot-times, and a push-to-device feature that lets users transfer apps to a developer phone. Firefox OS [...]

As anticipated, Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" has been officially released this weekend...

Just days after landing some OpenGL performance tweaks, Intel's Eric Anholt has committed some more performance optimizations for the Intel i965 Mesa driver...

Today is the seventh annual International Day Against DRM (Digital Rights Management). We've talked a lot here about DRM particularly in movies and books (read my two-part timeline, The DRM graveyard: A brief history of digital rights management in music and part 2 about video and TV). But what's most important for this year's Day Against DRM isn't any of that. Rather, it's the very future of the way we use the web, due to efforts to get DRM into HTML5. Read this post from the Free Culture Foundation to better understand why that's a problem.

I've been educating library professionals about open source software for nearly seven years now, and sometimes I feel like I've made huge strides and other times, like today, I feel like I have so much more work to do.

Shezhen, China-based Promate Technologies claims to have created the world’s first tablet-projector. The “LumiTab” sports a modest 1024×600 7-inch IPS screen, runs Android 4.2, and uses a Texas Instruments digital-light-processing (DLP) chip to render “incredibly sharp 1080p HD images” on walls and projection screens, according to the company.

As an open source project trusted by hundreds of millions of people around the world, defending Mozilla’s trademarks from this type of abuse is vital to our brand, our users and the continued success of our mission. Mozilla has a longstanding history of protecting users online and was named the Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy in 2012 by the Ponemon Institute. We cannot abide a software company using our name to disguise online surveillance tools that can be – and in several cases actually have been – used by Gamma’s customers to violate citizens’ human rights and online privacy.

The arrest of a 24-year-old Australian claiming to be the head of an international hacking ring and a Twitter hack that briefly sent Wall Street into a tailspin last week has shone the light on hackers as Perth prepares to host its first "hacker con". But the figures behind this weekend's WAHCKon conference say the term hacker has been hijacked and most hackers are simply curious people with a computer.

As the open source ethic has changed the way that we share and develop resources, crowdsourcing is redefining how we can create new resources based upon that willingness to share. One example of crowdsourcing at work for the betterment of us all is public health researchers turning to Twitter to collect real-time data about public health.

This week we release the Express and Community Editions of eXo Platform 4.0: The Open Source Enterprise Social Platform. For me, the eXo adventure started almost 10 years ago when I coded the first JSR 168-compatible Portlet Container (here's hoping 10 years works the same way Eddie Cantor had in mind). At the time, our first customer, the US Joint Forces Command (part of the Department of Defense) pushed us to create a company to help them build their content collaboration system during the Iraq war.

As we've noted recently, Mozilla, the nonprofit entity behind the Firefox browser and other open source tools, has detailed significant changes to its executive management as it positions nearly all of its momentum behind its new Firefox OS mobile platform. Even the CEO is stepping down this year as Firefox OS becomes job number one.

Almost a year after the last release of the Open Build Service (OBS), the openSUSE developers have announced version 2.4 of their software. The biggest new feature in the distributed packaging and build service is support for the PKGBUILD format from Arch Linux which becomes the third packaging format the service can now use – the other two being RPM and Debian's packaging system. Furthermore, OBS 2.4 introduces the 64-bit ARM AArch64 architecture as a target infrastructure and kernel, and bootloader packages can now be signed to work with UEFI Secure Boot.

Congatec AG announced a Linux-ready COM Express Type 6 computer-on-module (COM) based on AMD’s new Embedded G-Series system-on-chip (SOC). The Conga-TCG is offered in two quad- and two dual-core versions backed with up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and features extensive I/O, including HDMI, DisplayPort, SATA, and 10 USB ports.

On 30 April 1993, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau were given official permission by CERN in Geneva to distribute the libwww library free of charge, "to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint. Whew!" (Tim Berners-Lee in Weaving the Web).

Recently, a former student of mine wrote me asking how to handle an overzealous white-hat hacker. In this case, the hacker had probed the publically exposed computer networks and assets of my friend's company, then left multiple copies of a document describing the weaknesses he found -- and asked to be hired to close the holes and locate more weaknesses.

While LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler already has feature complete C++11 support and the developers have already been working on C++14 features, there are some open projects where the GCC alternative is in need of some assistance...

Churnalism US is a new web tool and browser extension that allows anyone to compare the news you read against existing content to uncover possible instances of plagiarism. It is a joint project with the Media Standards Trust.

The Linux 3.9 kernel was officially released late Sunday night marking the second major Linux kernel release of 2013 so far. The new release includes the usual long list of driver updates, but this time also includes a number of really interesting performance boosts as well. SSDs can now be leveraged to help speed up the operations of (soon to be legacy) spinning disks.