Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Last week, Wayland/Weston was forked by a long-time contributor, Scott Moreau. The fork of the Wayland/Weston display server ended up becoming known as Northfield/Norwood, following disagreements within the Wayland development camp. Scott Moreau was ultimately banned from the Wayland mailing list and IRC channel, so he's written an exclusive, independent article for Phoronix to explain his actions and why he felt a fork of the Wayland display server protocol and the reference Weston compositor were necessary.

This February marked the 50th year anniversary of the "Please Please Me" single in the US and the start of a year-long program of events to celebrate the Fab Four (The Beatles) in their hometown of Liverpool.  Throughout the year of 1963, the popularity of The Beatles had been growing steadily with fan frenzy increasing. Beatlemania was officially declared on October 13, 1963 when The Beatles performed at the London Palladium to a British television audience of 15 million. Though The Beatles have been the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed act in the history of pop music, their role in fostering the open source movement is often forgotten or slighted.

Developer Brian Behlendorf has announced the release of version 0.6.1 of the native ZFS on Linux port. After over two years in experimental status, the developers now say the file system "is ready for wide scale deployment on everything from desktops to super computers." The native ZFS on Linux is based on the Solaris Porting Layer (SPL) which emulates underlying features of Solaris in the Linux kernel.

Journalistic scepticism was lacking when stories about a DDoS attack 'breaking' the internet surfaced. This is a real future risk. A veteran Reuters reporter related a piece of advice given by his editor: "It's not just what you print that makes you an authoritative and trusted source for news, but what you don't print." He wasn't talking about censorship, he was talking about what separates journalism from stenography and propaganda: sceptical scrutiny. The professionalism of the craft isn't simply learning to write or broadcast what other people tell you. Crucially it is the ability to delve, interrogate and challenge, and checking out stories you've discovered through your own curiosity, or robustly testing what other people tell you is true.

Anonymized mobile phone location data produces a GPS fingerprint that can be easily used to identify a user based on little more than tracking the pings a phone makes to cell towers, a new study shows. Analyzing 15 months of anonymized mobile phone data for about 1.5 million users, researchers at MIT and the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium found that it took very few pieces of data to uniquely identify 95 percent of the users — that is, trace the activity to a specific anonymous individual.

April Fools' Day is not a national holiday, so no, you don't get to stay at home and play with your Raspberry Pi or read HackerNews all day. But, you do get to the opportunity to join a community of pranksters around the globe who will invariably succeed in some knee-slapping, good humor. 

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is running its annual Document Freedom Day campaign today to raise awareness of the importance of open standards. This year's Document Freedom Day involves over 50 groups from 30 countries and focuses on open standards in web-based streaming technologies, especially on increasing the awareness and usage of HTML5. This year's campaign is sponsored by Google and openSUSE.

The Linux kernel can now be set up to use SSDs as cache for hard drives; Btrfs has native RAID 5 and 6 support. The kernel development team has also resolved two performance problems caused by previous changes.

Wind River announced today that it has registered the Wind River Linux Carrier Grade (CG) profile for compliance with the Linux Foundation’s Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) v5.0 requirements. Accordingly, the company claims Wind River Linux to be the first Yocto Compatible CGL-registered Linux distribution.

Data on the products we buy is rarely viewed as something to be opened. But in fact, the international standards that make it possible for products to be traded across borders can be used by consumers for their own ends—to help improve information—sharing and choice across the planet. There is currently no public database of this information, but we’re working to change that at Product Open Data.

A DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack of unprecedented scale that targeted an international spam-fighting organization last week ended up causing problems for Internet users around the world, experts say. The DDoS attack started more than a week ago and targeted the Spamhaus Project, an organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, and London that maintains databases of IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, domain names, and other Internet resources involved in spam, malware, and other abusive online activities.

Mozilla, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web, is advancing the Web as the platform for high-end game development. With Mozilla’s latest innovations in JavaScript, game developers and publishers can now take advantage of fast performance that rivals native while leveraging scale of the Web, without the additional costs associated with third-party plugins. This allows them to distribute visually stunning and performance intensive games to billions of people more easily and cost effectively than before.

An extensive slide presentation on using Android in embedded systems is available for free download on the website of Free Electronics. The presentation provides an efficient technical introduction and overview of the process of developing embedded Android software, on both the OS and application levels.

Founded in 2010 by trading technology experts, OpenFin is growing on the heels of HTML5 standards edging out ill-fitting older Web solutions. Built onto an open source platform, OpenFin Desktop helps financial institutions to bridge the security gaps in their outdated Web-browser technology. OpenFin is developing software to bring the next generation of trading applications to the financial services industry via HTML5.

In a ceremony at last weekend's LibrePlanet 2013, FSF president Richard Stallman presented the Free Software Award 2012. The Free Software Award is given out each year by the Free Software Foundation to one person for their contribution to Free Software and to one open source organisation or project for its social benefit.

Developer Break – catch up on the smaller but important notes for developers, from libraries to APIs and from people to postings. In this edition: Ruby 1.8.7 EOL, Eclipse Kepler milestone, eXo goes LGPL, Derby approaching, Eclipse Sirius proposed, Apache Karaf technology preview, new Dart editor, and fixes for Lazarus.

In recent years, there has been no shortage of new Ubuntu derivatives to cater to different needs. Those have including different desktop editions (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu) and needs (ie. Ubuntu Studio Edition). Now Canonical, the lead sponsor behind Ubuntu is building a new version of Ubuntu specifically for China. The new version is call Kylin and is being developed in partnership with government agencies in China. Kylin will have Chinese language input and localization and will also have a Chinese calendar. The first version of Kylin will coincide with the Ubuntu 13.04 release set to debut in April. Moving beyond the initial release, Canonical plans on providing further specific Chinese integrations including the use of Baidu maps and Taobao shopping.

Steve Kondik, founder of the CyanogenMod project and creator of its popular alternative ROM for Android devices, has left Samsung. Kondik revealed that he is no longer employed by the company as an aside in a Google+ post concerning the Galaxy S4 hardware. The well-known Android hacker, who also goes by the online name Cyanogen, started at Samsung's mobile division in August 2011 to work on "making Android more awesome". It is not currently known what Kondik's future plans are; when queried he replied "ask me in a couple of months".

One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.

There's been much ado about office suites over the past year or so, thanks in large part to the anticipation and then arrival of Microsoft's baffling Office 2013. We've seen the ascendance of LibreOffice, we've seen Redmond's wacky pricing plan, and we've even heard rumors -- as yet unsubstantiated -- of a launch that would blow more than a few minds. None of that could have prepared us for what came to light last week.