Showing headlines posted by RandallDownes

Motorola's G2 goes a step further than the Droid X in combating hackers' attempts on rooting by automatically detecting when a phone is rooted and then automatically reinstalling the stock Android OS back onto the device.

The Fedora team announced the public release of Fedora 14 beta. The beta features a number of new features including KDE 4.5 and Spice for virtualization.

Open source blog CMS WordPress became the default platform for Windows Live today following an announcement from TechCrunch Disrupt. Windows Live currently uses Windows Live Spaces as its blogging platform. After this announcement, Spaces users will have six months to migrate blogs to WordPress before they become unavailable.

MeeGo developers eager to test the operating system on a mobile device have brought the Linux-based mobile OS to the Nexus One, HTC Desire, and Dell Streak. Maybe Nokia should hurry up and announce an official MeeGo smartphone.

Delicious Morsel have open sourced Feeds, the popular RSS feed reader for webOS. It is now available on GitHub along with WootOn!, another Delicious Morsel app designed to alert users of daily deals.

The Mozilla Foundation announced that it has joined the Open Invention Network as a Licensee. A bold move for the usually patent-averse company, Mozilla touted the OIN's defensive patent use and its free catalog as reasons for joining.

Nokia released Qt 4.7 and with it comes several features geared toward smartphones. 4.7 features improvements to Webkit compiling, OpenGL support, and Webkit scrolling. The application framework also got an object-oriented scripting language called QML.

Diaspora, the open source social networking project, has some pretty bad stuff lying in its contributor agreement. Basically, the company owns any contributions and can sell, license, and create solely owned derivative contributions based on a user contribution.

Samsung's Galaxy Tab, the 7-inch, Android-powered, smart device has lost telephony functionality in the US version. It was also confirmed that the device will work on Sprint's network, but will only have access to the 3G network, rather than Sprint's newly implemented 4G service. What still hasn't been revealed is the price.

Startup Diaspora has released a dev build on github. The project has the admirable goal of decentralizing social networks like Facebook and Twitter, putting the power back into users' hands. It aims to do this be deploying locally hosted, customizable "seeds" that allow users to import all their social network feeds. Once that's done, all incoming and outgoing information is encrypted.

A recent security hole in Flash Player and Adobe Reader that can crash the player and give attackers access affect Adobe's Flash Player 10.1.92.10 for Android, in addition to the usual desktop editions. Patches are scheduled for the last week of September, first week of October. Until then, tread lightly.

Palm webOS design VP Peter Skillman has left the troubled company to head the MeeGo user-experience at Nokia. Skillman joins Matias Duarte, the UI designer for webOS, as the second senior ranking webOS employee to leave for another mobile OS.

Google's latest build of Android, version 2.2, codename: Froyo, has been trickling out to smartphones since its May announcement at Google's I/O Conference. Based on recent data collection by Google, Android 2.2 now accounts for 28.7 percent of the operating system's overall market share.

Global wireless chip leader Broadcom has released an open source WiFi driver for Linux with the intention to float the driver into the mainline kernel once it's been thoroughly evaluated. The first Linux distro to make use of the driver will be Ubuntu 10.10. A kernel developer at Canonical also said there are tentative plans to retroactively add driver support to 10.04.

Mozilla Labs announced the creation of a browser-based gaming platform built on Open Web technologies such as HTML5, webGL, and open source touch, orientation, and geolocation libraries. The initiative, appropriately titled Mozilla Labs: Games, is planning to build developer interest by launching a game design contest at the end of September.

Canonical released Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat into public beta and the operating system features quite a few updates. Ubuntu 10.10 is built on GNOME 2.31 desktop environment and sports a revamped Ubuntu Software Center and better integration with Ubuntu One.

ApacheCon 2010 is now open for registration. The three-day convention takes place in Atlanta at the Westin Peachtree hotel. Lots of speakers and informative sessions. There will be professional training sessions during the two days prior to the conference. Early bird special runs now to September 10.

Samsung showed off its Galaxy Tab, an Android-powered iPad alternative at Germany's IFA 2010 trade show. The device features a 7-inch display, front-facing camera, 3G and is the first tablet to come loaded with Android 2.2 Froyo and Flash 10.1.

Ksplice, the technology that allows Linux kernel updates without the need to reboot, is now free for Fedora. Ksplice was originally designed with Fedora in mind and the company behind the technology also announced that it would be integrated into future versions of Fedora. Currently, Ksplice is available in Enterprise flavors and free to Ubuntu Desktop.

Palm revealed the webOS 2.0 SDK beta today and with it, the company gave an outline of the new features expected in webOS 2.0. The Linux-based OS will support multi-tasking through a feature called Stacks, which organizes similar applications into tidy, um, stacks. webOS 2.0 will also support JavaScript node.js, which opens it up to a variety of existing modules, and improved HTML5 support was also highlighted.