Showing headlines posted by jhansonxi

Google will soon make its VP8 video codec open source, we’ve learned from multiple sources. The company is scheduled to officially announce the release at its Google I/O developers conference next month, a source with knowledge of the announcement said. And with that release, Mozilla — maker of the Firefox browser — and Google Chrome are expected to also announce support for HTML5 video playback using the new open codec.

With the news coming out that the US International Trade Commission (ITC) has agreed to investigate both RIM and Apple over patent claims brought by Kodak, it makes you wonder if we'll soon be able to have any smartphones at all. As you hopefully know the ITC process is a sneaky loophole used by patent holders to get two totally unrelated shots at putting the same company on trial for infringing on the same patents.

Yahoo hosted a search event at its headquarters Wednesday that seemed designed mainly to remind the Silicon Valley press that it is still working on Internet search. Meanwhile, the European Commission plans to approve the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo to install Microsoft as the exclusive provider of search technology on Yahoo's network of sites, according to Reuters. Also, Carl Icahn has substantially cut his stake in Yahoo, according to regulatory filings made public Friday.

Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip [TPM] with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks.

Ahn Seung-kwon, president of LG's mobile communications division, said the world's third-biggest handset vendor after Nokia and Samsung, however, will heavily bet on phones with Google's Android operating system. "MS Windows Mobile operating system is rather unqualified in mobile interfaces. Despite such worries, the partnership with Microsoft is still safe,"

On Ubuntu I have a user account "administrator" which is in the admin group. It has a complicated password for security. OpenSSH by default allows all users to attempt to login remotely. Since user accounts often have weak passwords it's unsafe to allow this.

U.S. innovation slowed this year for the first time in 13 years as the recession cut into budgets, and costs to protect inventions rose. The system is broken.. Pushing patents through the system is easier said than done: The decline in filings this year has brought to light a number of problems with the antiquated American patent system.

As they plunged into a project on ancient Egypt this fall, Jay Martino's Cupertino Middle School students probably didn't realize they were on the front lines of a high-stakes battle between Google and Microsoft. But the sixth-graders, who did the entire research project on a "walled" network of student Web sites using document-sharing software and e-mail provided by Google for free, are among the thousands of students worldwide that Google and Microsoft are fighting over.

Microsoft has been ordered to stop selling Windows XP in China after a court ruled that certain fonts in the operating system infringe on a Chinese firm's intellectual property. On Monday, Beijing's 1st Intermediate People's Court decided that Microsoft had overstepped a deal with Zhongyi Electronics to include the company's Chinese fonts in Windows 95 by also slipping them into eight other versions of Windows without permission. The alleged font-pas includes Windows 95, 98, 2000, and XP — but not more recent releases: Vista and Windows 7. The court has ordered Microsoft and its China-based ops to immediately stop producing and selling the infringing operating systems, according to the English-language version of state television broadcaster,

Under the open-source model, thousands of people pick it apart simultaneously and increase security. It comes more cheaply than computer coding designed for a single client, such as the Executive Office of the President. It gives programmers around the world a chance to offer upgrades, additions or tweaks to existing programs that the White House could — or could not — include in daily updates. Yet the system — known as Drupal — alone won't make it more secure on its own, cautioned Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Americans buy new cell phones every 18 months, Europeans buy them every 15 months, and the Japanese every 9 months. Global replacement rates for digital cameras range between two and three years. And U.S. businesses replace their PCs every four years. Where do most of these used products go? Directly into the trash. Indeed, in the United States alone, consumers throw away 400 million electronic products each year.

[If that hardware ran FOSS it would keep much of it from having to be thrown out in the first place. - Scott]

Ubuntu's keyserver, keyserver.ubuntu.com, has a lot of problems lately. I was trying to add the Pidgin repository to work around bug #389322 but kept getting timeout errors from the server. One of my systems did successfully get the key so all I had to do was transfer it to the others. These are the commands you can use to do the same.

I've been setting up some Ubuntu Jaunty systems for relatives as an excuse to get rid of a lot of old hardware including some SCSI scanners. I encountered an HP scanner that was supported by sane but not recognized by Ubuntu. The device ended up with the wrong permissions preventing anyone except root from scanning. This is an explanation of how to create a udev rule to automatically fix this type of problem.

Winesharer is my attempt to eliminate some of the file management problems inherent with Wine and the *nix filesystem hierarcy. Currently, Windows applications are installed in each user's home directory which provides security but at a cost of space - especially when the same application is installed multiple times for different users on the same system. By combining Wine with a union filesystem this problem can be eliminated. Winesharer is a collection of unfinished scripts I used to prove the feasibility of this. Now I'm passing the torch to the community so that they can burn this mess and write something that is actually usable.

I have an old embedded system that uses an SBC-MAX board from Computer Dynamics. The unit was part of a vehicle monitoring system that used Windows 98 (one of many fundamental flaws in the design). It has a K6/2 333MHz CPU and 128MB of EDO DRAM. It features a whole bunch of integrated devices and a fairly broken BIOS. As an embedded system it has a PC/104 bus for which I have a few modules including a GPS. I'm would like to get that working but getting Ubuntu to even install on it has been a pain.

Several of the best-funded and most-publicized tech launches of the last ten years have ended in failure. Many large technology companies which had significant market share and product advantages in large industries lost those advantages. Vista and Zune made the list.

For anyone with an historical perspective about our industry, the demise of Silicon Graphics Inc. is a scary example of the truism that great technology is no insulation from the changing vagaries of the marketplace. (Also, that iffy business decisions don't help.) Still, remembering the heyday of this one-time maker of the absolute coolest workstations on the planet, it's sad to see it acquired for a paltry $25 million.

After years of being a Windows user (since 2.0) and an administrator I've learned to ignore the marketing hype surrounding new Windows versions. But I tried out the Windows 7 beta just so I can settle arguments about what it can or can't do.

Passwords are the basis for much of the security on the Internet. Over the years intruders have exposed thousands of account passwords on various sites. Analysis of these passwords reveal that users have a very bad understanding of their importance. This article explains how to create strong passwords, manage them, and keep them secure.

Undoubtedly you've heard the old cliché that Windows is easier to maintain because it has GUI tools for everything while Linux requires commands lines and a terminal. Any experienced Windows administrator knows the point-and-click GUI tools don't cover everything.