Planet Gnanet

bonch writes "A massive Android malware campaign may be responsible for duping as many as 5 million users into downloading the Android.Counterclan infection from the Google Android Market. The trojan collects the user's personal information, modifies the home page, and displays unwanted advertisements. It is packaged in 13 different applications, some of which have been on the store for at least a month. Several of the malicious apps are still available on the Android Market as of 3 P.M. ET. Symantec has posted the full list of infected applications."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 28, 05:01

New submitter Required Snark writes "UC Davis researchers have found a mechanism where the sodium in sea water can cause uranium nano-particles to be released from nuclear reactor fuel rods. Normally the uranium oxide compounds composing the rods are very resistant to leaching into water. This could have serious consequences for the Fukushima disaster, since sea water was used for emergency cooling."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 28, 04:00

New submitter MikeatWired writes "If you're like most people, you're annoyed by passwords. So who's to blame? Who invented the computer password? They probably arrived at MIT in the mid-1960s, when researchers built a massive time-sharing computer called CTSS. Technology changes. But, then again, it doesn't, writes Bob McMillan. Twenty-five years after the fact, Allan Scherr, a Ph.D. researcher at MIT in the early '60s, came clean about the earliest documented case of password theft. In the spring of 1962, Scherr was looking for a way to bump up his usage time on CTSS. He had been allotted four hours per week, but it wasn't nearly enough time to run the detailed performance simulations he'd designed for the new computer system. So he simply printed out all of the passwords stored on the system. 'There was a way to request files to be printed offline by submitting a punched card,' he remembered in a pamphlet (PDF) written last year to commemorate the invention of the CTSS. 'Late one Friday night, I submitted a request to print the password files and very early Saturday morning went to the file cabinet where printouts were placed and took the listing.' To spread the guilt around, Scherr then handed the passwords over to other users. One of them — J.C.R. Licklieder — promptly started logging into the account of the computer lab's director Robert Fano, and leaving 'taunting messages' behind."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 28, 02:11

An anonymous reader writes "A bit early, but just a reminder that January 28 is international Data Privacy Day in the U.S., Canada, and many European countries. Various events are being held around the globe: the head of the FTC opened a weekend forum on the topic by calling out Facebook and Google, the Ontario Privacy Commissioner is holding a symposium on 'Surveillance by Design', and of course Google recently announced they'll be tracking you more thoroughly in the future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 28, 01:08

sighted writes "This week's huge solar storm will benefit future astronauts, thanks to the rover Curiosity, now on its way to Mars. The rover is equipped with an instrument that measures the radiation exposure that could affect a human astronaut en route to the Red Planet. Scientists are just starting to pore over the data from the blast of particles. Don't worry about the poor robotic geologist, though: 'No harmful effects to the Mars Science Laboratory have been detected from this solar event,' says NASA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 28, 00:19

slew writes "This is a followup to this earlier story about 2 of 3 of Rambus's 'critical' patents being invalidated. Apparently now it's a hat-trick." There's something that seems unsavory and wasteful about a business environment in which a company's stock value "fluctuates sharply on its successes and failures in patent litigation and licensing." The linked article offers a brief but decent summary of the way Rambus has profited over the years from these now-invalidated patents.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 23:55

New submitter Krazy Kanuck writes "The White House is running a story on their OSTP blog that Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra is stepping down after being appointed to the post by President Obama in 2009. There is some mention of him returning to his home state of Virginia, and the Washington Post suggests a possible bid for lieutenant governor."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 23:35

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Shmoocon security conference, researcher Brendan O'Connor plans to present the F-BOMB, or Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors. Built from just the disassembled hardware in a commercially-available PogoPlug mini-computer, a few tiny antennae, eight gigabytes of flash memory and some 3D-printed plastic casing, the F-BOMB serves as 3.5"-by-4"-by-1" spy computer. With a contract from DARPA, O'Connor has designed the cheap gadgets to be spy nodes, ready to be dropped from a drone, plugged inconspicuously into a wall socket, (one model impersonates a carbon monoxide detector) thrown over a barrier, or otherwise put into irretrievable positions to quietly collect data and send it back to the owner over any available Wi-Fi network. O'Connor built his prototypes with gear that added up to just $46 each, so sacrificing one for a single use is affordable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 22:56

We have uploaded a new Precise linux kernel. Please note the ABI bump. The most notable changes are as follows:

* Rebase to v3.3.2
* Revert seccomp_filter patches
* Switch CONFIG_GPIO_TWL4030=y back on arm[el|hf]
* Add Hyper-V modules to virtual inclusion list

The full changelog can be seen at:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/3.2.0-12.20

2012 január 27, 22:50

sciencehabit writes "The North Star, a celestial beacon to navigators for centuries, may be slowly shrinking, according to a new analysis of more than 160 years of observations. The data suggest that the familiar fixture in the northern sky is shedding an Earth's mass worth of gas each year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 22:34

New submitter BraveThumb writes "One independent rap group found it impossible to post their song on YouTube. When they tried to put up their video, they were informed that the copyright belonged to Universal Music, even though the rap group wasn't signed to any label. Another group working with Universal had used the music in a video of their own, which then accidentally leaked online. YouTube's filtering software then blocked the original. The Hollywood Reporter shares what happened and concludes by saying, 'For an industry that's pursuing copyright reform, the portrayal of a copyright regime that works against young artists can't be a good thing.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 22:14

An anonymous reader writes "Bitdefender reports that there exist viruses which, when they encounter other viruses, will merge and combine effects so that they create a new virus. 'A virus infects executable files; and a worm is an executable file. If the virus reaches a PC already compromised by a worm, the virus will infect the exe files on that PC — including the worm. When the worm spreads, it will carry the virus with it. Although this happens unintentionally, the combined features from both pieces of malware will inflict a lot more damage than the creators of either piece of malware intended. While most file infectors have inbuilt spreading mechanisms, just like Trojans and worms (spreading routines for RDP, USB, P2P, chat applications, or social networks), some cannot replicate or spread between computers. And it seems a great idea to “outsource” the transportation mechanism to a different piece of malware (i.e. by piggybacking a worm).'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 21:33

There have been several interesting conversations this past week. The two main topics of discussion were the possibility of compizconfig-settings-manager being dropped from the repositories:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1915533

And secondly, the release of HUD for testing:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1914440

The question of why the old two panel interface isn’t available any more came up again, and after a bit of discussion, an answer that was acceptable to the original poster was provided:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1914498

effenberg0x0 and I will be hosting a session during Developer Week on running a release during the testing cycle. Join us in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net on Feb 1/2012 at 18:00 UTC

2012 január 27, 21:19

I just wanted to provide a quick update on how the team is doing on our set of commitments in the 12.04 cycle. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

In terms of general team progress, this is how our burndown chart looks today:

I asked each of the guys on the team to follow up with their respective community members to start moving the needle on those work items. As such, if you committed to something in 12.04 for our team’s burndown, expect Jorge, Daniel, or David to come knocking on your door soon.

With Nick and Michael joining the team recently, their work is not reflected in this burndown – their work will appear in the 12.10 burndown.

Developer Growth

Daniel’s core focus in this cycle is developer growth. The first step here is ensuring that our developer processes are working effectively. Over the holiday period the sponsorship queue got a little out of shape, so I asked Daniel to work with the patch pilots to get this back on track. Good progress is being made:

You can see how the queue is falling back down at the end of the graph since Daniel started hammering on this over the last few weeks. Thanks to all the patch pilots for their hard work.

Daniel has also been fixing up some metrics so we can track this work more effectively, and putting together a developer outreach team to provide a more personal level of support to get developers through the process. He will be speaking more about this in the coming weeks.

Cloud and Juju

Jorge is focused on growing the Juju charming community and is making great progress. A tour of events is planned and Jorge has a hit-list of upstream projects which he is focusing on to get charms put together for. We are seeing good progress on this list and I am confident Jorge will hit his goals in this cycle.

Juju really is awesome. You should check it out.

App Developers

David has been focusing on app developers in this cycle. A first chunk of work here is helping the App Review Board to get in shape. The ARB has a large queue of content to get through, so in Budapest we sat down and dissected the ARB process and made a bunch of optimizations. David has been coordinating with the team to help coordinate this work, and we are seeing progress happening.

We have recently seen three lenses get through the ARB, and David is going to be starting a regular cadence of queue reviews to keep the ball rolling. Thanks to the ARB for all your contributions.

David originally planned a Phase II set of additions to developer.ubuntu.com, but with some re-structuring from the Canonical web team, those plans have been put on hold a little. Instead d.u.c is now being put into maintenance mode and we identified a set of things that need fixing (particularly on the publishing side), and David is coordinating those changes.

The next chunk of work will be outreach to grow our app developer community. Stay tuned for more…and an up-coming competition…

Upstream Relations

Michael is the new upstream community coordinator, and will be focusing on Unity in particular as he gets started. I have asked him to first work with the Desktop Experience team to help get their community merge proposals in shape. There are a number of branches that have been sitting around for a while, and Michael is coordinating a patch pilot scheme to ensure these get reviewed regularly. We expect to see this in place over the next week.

Michael has also been performing an assessment of Mozilla’s SUMO for a potential solution for help in Ubuntu. He has put together an extensive report and a test instance to play with and he will be working with the docs team to continue assessing this as a solution. I am excited to see what work happens here.

Finally, next week we will be putting together an upstream target list for Michael to reach out to to start engaging app authors more effectively around our technology. I am excited to see this work progressing.

…oh, and one other thing: Michael is working with Didier to merge Singlet into Quickly. This should make creating Unity lenses a piece of cake. Bring it!

QA

Finally, the latest addition to the team has been Nick Skaggs. Nick has been working with the QA around a few core pieces of work:

• Getting our manual test infrastructure in place. We are going to be piloting Case Conductor as a solution that will fit alongside Jenkins.
• Consolidating our QA community teams. Nick is evaluating our current QA on-ramp and then we will put together a proposal for bringing more efficiencies and consistency to the QA community.
• Building a take-and-bake testing process so Ubuntu Engineering can reach out to Nick to facilitate community testing more effectively.

The former two items will take time to put in place, but the latter item should be in place in the next week. As such, you should see a regular stream of testing campaigns driven by Nick in 12.04. Be sure to keep an eye on his blog.

. . .

Of course, there are lots of other things going on, but these summarize some of the key themes.

2012 január 27, 21:15

Full Circle – the independent magazine for the Ubuntu Linux community are proud to announce the release of our fifty-seventh issue.

This month:
* Command and Conquer.
* How-To : Try Enlightenment, LibreOffice – Part 11, Backup Strategy – Part 5, Encrypted USB Stick, and Varnish Web Cache.
* Linux Lab – Mana World Server.
* Review – OpenArtist: 5th Incarnation
* I Think – SpiderOak Questionnaire.
* Closing Windows – Wireless Networking
plus: more Ubuntu Games, My Desktop (and another extra!), My Opinion, My Story, and much much more!

Google Currents edition: http://www.google.com/producer/editions/CAowvZtX/full_circle_magazine_57_lite

EPUB/MOBI coming soon.

Get it while it’s hot!
http://fullcirclemagazine.org/issue-57/

2012 január 27, 21:04

An anonymous reader writes "The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. and elsewhere, but it is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that has captured increasing attention this week. Several months after the majority of ACTA participants signed the agreement, most European Union countries formally signed the agreement yesterday (notable exclusions include Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia). Michael Geist has a full rundown on what is at stake and what you can do, wherever you live."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 20:51

The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is the most important event in the Ubuntu calendar. It is where we get together to discuss, design, and plan the next version of Ubuntu; in this case the Ubuntu 12.10 release.

The next UDS takes place at The Oakland Marriott City Center, Oakland, California, USA from the 7th – 11th May 2012. You can find out more about why UDS is interesting from the perspective of a member of the community, an upstream contributor, and a vendor. We also welcome everyone to participate remotely if you can’t attend the event in person. More more details on how to get there, see this page.

At the heart of a great UDS is a diverse group of attendees who can bring their experience and expertise to the discussions. You don’t have to be technical, or be a programmer or packager to attend – UDS is open to everyone (including non-Ubuntu folks) and free to attend. We encourage everyone with an interest in Ubuntu to attend.

Sponsorship

For every UDS Canonical sponsors the hotel and accommodation of a set of community members to ensure they are free to contribute and bring value to the discussions. We have a limited budget so we can’t sponsor everyone, but we are always keen to have a capable and diverse group to sponsor:

• We strive to support community members who are actively involved in Ubuntu and who are providing significant and sustained contributions to the Ubuntu project.
• We always welcome Upstream contributors who are bring value to Ubuntu indirectly via active participation in their upstream project, but who are keen to see quality support for that upstream in Ubuntu.
• Contributors are willing to actively participate not only throughout the full Ubuntu Developer Summit week, but also following with active contributions throughout the release cycle.
• We are always keen to welcome members of the community who have never been to UDS before and are keen to participate and experience the event.
• You don’t have to provide technical contributions to apply – if you have participated in the areas of advocacy, documentation, testing, art, design etc, you are encouraged to apply.
• UDS is an event that encourages diversity – we welcome everyone to apply for sponsorship, irrespective of gender, race, impairment, technical expertise, or other factors.

If you are participating in the Ubuntu community, we would love you to apply for sponsorship. This is how it works:

1. You can apply for sponsorship by following these instructions. Apologies for the different forms you need to fill in – we are going to consolidate these forms at the next UDS. The deadline for submissions is Wed 22nd February 2012 so be sure to get yours in!
2. When the deadline is reached we will assess the applications and finalize who we will be able to sponsor.
3. You will then receive an email outlining whether we can sponsor you or not.

Simple! I look forward to seeing your applications, and seeing many of you in Oakland!

Originally posted here by Jono Bacon on Friday, January 27, 2012.

2012 január 27, 20:33

redletterdave writes "Microsoft chairman and philanthropist Bill Gates pledged $750 million to the troubled global AIDS fund on Thursday and urged governments to continue their support to save lives. Since the fund was launched 10 years ago, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given $1.4 billion to the charity, having already contributed $650 million prior to the latest donation. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria accounts for around a quarter of international financing to fight HIV and AIDS, as well as the majority of funds to fight TB and malaria."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 20:29

The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is the most important event in the Ubuntu calendar. It is where we get together to discuss, design, and plan the next version of Ubuntu; in this case the Ubuntu 12.10 release.

The next UDS takes place at The Oakland Marriott City Center, Oakland, California, USA from the 7th – 11th May 2012. You can find out more about why UDS is interesting from the perspective of a member of the community, an upstream contributor, and a vendor. We also welcome everyone to participate remotely if you can’t attend the event in person. More more details on how to get there, see this page.

At the heart of a great UDS is a diverse group of attendees who can bring their experience and expertise to the discussions. You don’t have to be technical, or be a programmer or packager to attend – UDS is open to everyone (including non-Ubuntu folks) and free to attend. We encourage everyone with an interest in Ubuntu to attend.

Sponsorship

For every UDS Canonical sponsors the hotel and accommodation of a set of community members to ensure they are free to contribute and bring value to the discussions. We have a limited budget so we can’t sponsor everyone, but we are always keen to have a capable and diverse group to sponsor:

• We strive to support community members who are actively involved in Ubuntu and who are providing significant and sustained contributions to the Ubuntu project.
• We always welcome Upstream contributors who are bring value to Ubuntu indirectly via active participation in their upstream project, but who are keen to see quality support for that upstream in Ubuntu.
• Contributors are willing to actively participate not only throughout the full Ubuntu Developer Summit week, but also following with active contributions throughout the release cycle.
• We are always keen to welcome members of the community who have never been to UDS before and are keen to participate and experience the event.
• You don’t have to provide technical contributions to apply – if you have participated in the areas of advocacy, documentation, testing, art, design etc, you are encouraged to apply.
• UDS is an event that encourages diversity – we welcome everyone to apply for sponsorship, irrespective of gender, race, impairment, technical expertise, or other factors.

If you are participating in the Ubuntu community, we would love you to apply for sponsorship. This is how it works:

1. You can apply for sponsorship by following these instructions. Apologies for the different forms you need to fill in – we are going to consolidate these forms at the next UDS. The deadline for submissions is Wed 22nd February 2012 so be sure to get yours in!
2. When the deadline is reached we will assess the applications and finalize who we will be able to sponsor.
3. You will then receive an email outlining whether we can sponsor you or not.

Simple! I look forward to seeing your applications, and seeing many of you in Oakland!

2012 január 27, 20:17

Trailrunner7 writes "The FBI is in the early stages of developing an application that would monitor sites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as various news feeds, in order to find information on emerging threats and new events happening at the moment. The tool would give specialists the ability to pull the data into a dashboard that also would include classified information coming in at the same time. One of the key capabilities of the new application, for which the FBI has sent out a solicitation, would be to 'provide an automated search and scrape capability for social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI/SIOC.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 20:08

The juju team has locked down the local events they’re attending in 2012, if you deploy Ubuntu in the cloud then they’d love to see you at the following events:

• https://juju.ubuntu.com/Events

More details about planning juju talks and events available here: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/juju/2012-January/001223.html

Originally posted to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list by Jorge Castro on Fri Jan 27 17:29:27 UTC 2012

2012 január 27, 19:52

Velcroman1 writes "Failed pressure chamber tests have forced Russia to postpone two manned launches to the International Space Station — echoing a 2011 situation that left the country's space transport vehicles grounded and led to speculation that scientists may be forced to abandon the orbiting space base. Six astronauts are currently aboard the ISS including two Americans: Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineer Don Pettit. 'There is plenty of margin for the current space station crew to stay onboard longer, if necessary, and plenty of margin in our manifest for upcoming launches,' a NASA spokeswoman said. But Soyuz issues are scary nonetheless. 'This re-entry capsule now cannot be used for manned spaceflight,' an unnamed source told Interfax."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 19:24

New submitter el borak writes "Never mind all the talk about the revival of the American auto industry. What may be the greatest car the U.S. has ever built is currently a tidy 78 million miles (125m km) away from this world — resting on the edge of Endeavour crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars. It was on January 25, 2004 that the rover Opportunity bounced down on Mars for a mission designed to last a minimum of three months and a maximum of just a year or two."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 19:01

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "ReDigi has fired back, opposing Capitol Records's motion for a preliminary injunction. In his opposition declaration, ReDigi's CTO Larry Rudolph explains in detail (PDF) how the technology employed by ReDigi's used digital music marketplace effects transfer of a music file without copying, but by modifying the record locator in an 'atomic transaction,' and how it verifies that only a single instance of a unique file can enter the ReDigi cloud system. ReDigi's opposition papers also point out plaintiff's own admissions that mp3 files are not 'material objects' or 'phonorecords' under the Copyright Act, and therefore not subject to the Copyright Act's distribution right, and defend ReDigi's used digital music marketplace and cloud storage system (PDF) on a number of grounds, including the First Sale exception to the distribution right applicable to a 'particular' copy, the Essential Step exception to the distribution right applicable to a copy essential to the running of a computer program, and Fair Use space shifting."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 18:41

chrb writes "Asim Kauser, a 25-year-old British man, has been jailed for two years and three months for downloading recipes on how to make bombs and the toxin ricin. Police discovered the materials on a USB stick Asim's father gave to them following a burglary at the Kauser family home. Asim pled guilty and claimed that he only downloaded the materials because he was curious. A North West Counter-Terrorism Unit spokesman said, 'I also want to stress that this case is not about policing people's freedom to browse the Internet. The materials that were downloaded were not stumbled upon by chance — these had to be searched for and contained very dangerous information that could have led to an explosive device being built.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 18:00

An anonymous reader writes "In the quarterly earnings call following the defeat of his attempted acquisition of T-Mobile, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson was quick to lash out at the FCC, claiming that because his company was unable to acquire more spectrum to handle the explosion of mobile data users, AT&T would be forced to raise prices and take additional action against the highest data users. PCMag looked into the other side of the story, finding that 'The FCC spokesman ... pointed out that the FCC has approved more than 150 commercial mobile transaction applications in the past year and more than 300 in the past two years, "facts [that] were completely ignored in the [AT&T] conference call," he said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 17:18

New submitter tcjr2006 writes "Obama's State of the Union focused on the return of manufacturing jobs to America. This New Yorker story makes the case that the manufacturing jobs aren't going to come back, and he should be focusing on software. Quoting: 'Yes, there are industries where manufacturing jobs can be brought back to America through proper tax incentives and training programs. But maybe he should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research. But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether); increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum. That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here. And it would certainly help develop "an economy that’s built to last."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 16:35

Next week, the European free and open source software developers will converge to Brussels for FOSDEM. We took this opportunity to apply for an OpenStack developers gathering in the Virtualization and Cloud devroom.

At 6pm on Saturday (last session of the day), in the Chavanne room, we will have a one-hour town hall meeting. If you’re an existing OpenStack contributor, a developer considering to join us, an upstream project developer, a downstream distribution packager, or just curious about OpenStack, you’re welcome to join us ! I’ll be there, Stefano Maffulli (our community manager) will be there, and several OpenStack core developers will be there.

We’ll openly discuss issues and solutions about integration with upstream projects, packaging, governance, development processes, community or release cycles. In particular, we’ll have a distribution panel where every OpenStack distribution will be able to explain how they support OpenStack and discuss what we can improve to make things better for them.

And at the end of the session we can informally continue the discussion around fine Belgian beers or their famous Carbonade !

2012 január 27, 15:54

New submitter DeanCubed writes "In a Nintendo investor meeting, CEO Satoru Iwata confirmed a new Nintendo Network for the company's 3DS and upcoming Wii U game systems. This includes multiple user accounts per console (not tied to hardware, a first for Nintendo) and digitally distributed retail software releases for their online store. Iwata also noted that the Wii U's tablet controller will feature NFC (Near Field Communication) functionality, allowing the ability to use figurines and cards to input visual data to the console. They are hoping to use this to make micro-transactions for paid DLC easier."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 15:52

An anonymous reader writes with news that asteroid 2012 BX34, 11 meters wide, is in the process of passing within 60,000km of Earth — about a fifth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. At that size, the asteroid would pose no danger even if it hit the Earth's atmosphere.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 15:38

Dr Max writes "Not only is graphene the strongest, thinnest and best conducting material known to man, it is now shown to have superpermeability with respect to water as well. This allows a membrane made with graphene to pass water right through it (PDF), while another atom or molecule (even helium) gets blocked. 'The properties are so unusual that it is hard to imagine that they cannot find some use in the design of filtration, separation or barrier membranes and for selective removal of water,' said one of the researchers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 15:12

We’re back with a new edition of the featured apps in the Ubuntu Software Centre. The theme this month is going to be gaming, and for this we’ve carefully hand-picked and brought you 3 of the coolest, slickest games now available in Ubuntu. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

Core Breach

CoreBreach is an anti-gravity racing game with combat-based gameplay. Its unique graphic style, with a cell-shaded look, sets up a very futuristic atmosphere with a wide range of choices for ships, race tracks and powerful weapons.

Its intuitive controls support common types of steering wheels and game pads to enjoy the full driving experience directly from your computer.

And Yet it Moves

And Yet It Moves is an award-winning physics-based platform game in which players rotate the game world at will to solve challenging puzzles. Tilting the world turns walls into floors, slides into platforms, and stacks of rocks into dangerous hazards.

Players navigate through a paper collage world created with colorful pieces of cardboard and set to distinctive music. With four different environments and unlockable modes, And Yet It Moves is a platformer that will provide gamers with endless challenges.

Oil Rush

Oil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control. It combines the strategic challenge of a classical RTS with the sheer fun of Tower Defence.

Fight the naval war between furious armies across the boundless waters of the post-apocalyptic world. Pump the ever-so-precious black gold by oil rigs, capture platforms and destroy the enemy in the sea and in the air. Be ingenious to unlock super technologies and quick to send your squads straight into the heat of the battle!

Want your app to be featured next?

So are you a developer and would like your app to be featured in the Ubuntu Software Centre and available to millions of Ubuntu users? Well, nothing easier than that, then: head up to the Ubuntu App Developer site and get your app published in 6 easy steps ›.

We’re confident these cool games will keep you busy until the next featured apps post!

Follow Ubuntu App Development on:

 

 

Original source: the Ubuntu App Developer Site

Social Media Icons by Paul Robert Lloyd

2012 január 27, 14:41

Now that KDE 4.8 has been released, it’s time to recap all changes you will find in Gwenview.

The main change is the addition of animations when viewing images: crossfading between images and nicer-to-use comparisons. You can learn more from this previous blog article.

This change was not nice for users of some graphic cards whose OpenGL drivers do not support what Gwenview tries to do. I decided to play it safe for now: animations in Gwenview now use software rendering by default. For better performance, you can enable OpenGL rendering in the configuration dialog.

This new version of Gwenview also comes with a lot of smaller changes, some of them caused by the limitations which were introduced by the new animation system.

Scrolling and Zooming

• No more scrollbars: A bird-eye view lets you scroll the image.
• Nicer zoom cursor. I realized Qt now supports truecolor cursors, so I drew a nicer magnifying glass cursor instead of the black+white+1bit-alpha-channel version. Holding down Ctrl to zoom won’t bring you back to the 90s anymore!
• Pressing ‘F’ toggles zoom-to-fit on and off.
• More consistent behavior: SVG images can now be scrolled using the same shortcuts as scrolling raster images.

Global User interface changes

• The “sidebar collapser”, the little arrow on the left of the view which let you hide the sidebar is gone. It has been replaced by a button in the statusbar.
• Labels for some of the toolbar buttons have been removed, reducing its width. It should now be more usable on small netbook-like screens.

Tools

• The red-eye reduction and crop tools no longer show floating widgets over the image, a thin bar slides from the bottom of the window instead.

Behavior

• Compared images follow thumbnail view order: previously when one selected two or more images to compare them, they would not necessarily appear in the same order as in the thumbnail bar.
• Arrow-key navigation in zoom-to-fit mode. This one has been requested by quite a few people. When an image is in zoom-to-fit mode, you can go to the previous and next image with the arrow keys. When you zoom in, arrow keys are used to scroll the image. This is very similar to the behavior provided by phones or digital cameras.

Video support

• The on-screen-display is now transparent.
• One can use the left and right arrow keys to seek
• A late addition: an undocumented shortcut (P) to toggle playback
• Note that video support is a bit fishy right now: it seems Phonon does not always play well with its video widget being embedded in a QGraphicsView, known symptoms are wrong colors or wrong aspect ratio. Hopefully this will improve in the next releases.

4.8.1 should bring you its usual series of bug fixes, among them is generating thumbnails for all images of the current folder, not only the currently visible ones. This fix is a bit bigger than your usual .1 fixes, so if you are willing to test it, you are welcome. The code is available on Gwenview git repository, in the “gen-all-thumbnails” branch.

I hope you enjoy this new Gwenview!

2012 január 27, 14:33

theodp writes "Testifying before Congress in 2007, Google's HR chief stated: 'We make great efforts to uncover the most talented employees we can find.' But according to the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Google actually went to some lengths to avoid uncovering some of tech's most talented employees, striking up agreements with Apple, Intel, and other corporations to avoid recruiting each other's employees. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh ruled that Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Disney, Pixar, Intuit and Lucasfilm must face a lawsuit claiming they violated antitrust laws by entering into no-poaching agreements with each other. 'I don't want to see any obstruction on discovery,' Koh told lawyers during a hearing. According to the head attorney representing the plaintiffs, the total damages could exceed $150 million if just 10,000 entry-level engineers were affected."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 14:30

An anonymous reader writes "The academic publisher Elsevier has attracted controversy for its high prices, the practice of bundling journals for sale to libraries and its support for legislation such as SOPA and the Research Works Act. Fields medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers decided to go public with a blog post describing how he'll no longer have anything to do with Elsevier journals, and suggesting that a public website where mathematicians and scientists could register their support for an Elsevier boycott would further the cause. Such a website now exists, with hundreds of academics signing-up so far. John Baez has a nice write-up of the problem and possible solutions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 13:47

MrSeb writes "In a world where warfare is fast becoming fielded by remote controlled and autonomous robots, innovation is the key to victory. The most technologically advanced superpower can see more, plan better, and attack from further away than its inferior adversaries. What better way to revolutionize the drone and robotics industry than use the brilliant minds of our children? That's what DARPA and the Defense Department's research and development arm thinks, anyway. The Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach Initiative, part of the Adaptive Vehicle Make project, is slated to reach a thousand schools in and out of the country, roping in the brightest minds to develop robotics and advance technology in new and interesting ways. Funded by the Department of Defense, the program comes with a steep cost: The DoD wants unlimited rights to everything the students build. It sounds almost like something Orson Scott Card would dream up."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 13:05

If you’ve ever had to create Ubuntu or Canonical related design materials, chances are you had a look at the Brand Guidelines, which, until now, have only existed in the form of bulky PDFs. Those days are over, as we happily introduce the brand new Ubuntu Brand Guidelines site, where you can read the guidelines and download the assets necessary to create your projects.

Ubuntu Brand Guidelines homepage

You can learn more about the Ubuntu brand values and the brand assets, such as our logos, colour palette and pictograms, and how to use them. You can also consult some of our Web-specific guidelines, look at examples of design work that has been done, and download assets like the logos and pictograms.

Brand assets section on the Brand Guidelines site

This is the first iteration of the site: lots of content is being prepared and will be added later on, and we will also work on some refinements to the asset download process, as well as adding many more useful downloads, such as templates and photography.

Among the more frequently requested assets are HTML and CSS snippets and templates that can simply be copied and pasted on internal and external projects, so the designer or developer can be certain everything looks as it should. This is in the works, but it’s something that takes a little bit more time to get just right, so please bear with us.

For now, we’d be delighted to get your feedback on this first version: have you found anything particularly useful on the site? What would you like to see there that you think it’s missing? How do you think it can be improved?

We hope we enjoy the online Ubuntu Brand Guidelines!

2012 január 27, 10:35

Qa32 writes "I am getting married in a few months and being a hardcore techie I wanted to come up with some novel way of making my wedding invite that will truly have even my mom say, 'wow, that was cool.' Has anyone out there done anything similar, or have you thought of something similar you'd like to share? I already have a few: have QR codes, have some basic embedded circuit/plate with wire leads that maybe plays a song when you connect a battery, have a way to turn up a display LCD, etc."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 10:21

A reader (Thanks Jim!) mentioned earlier today that his SSHlogs were showing access attempts u ...(more)...

2012 január 27, 10:08

Mint az ismert, a Symantec egyes termékeinek forráskódja publikus lett. Na nem azért, mert a cég azt nyílt forrásúvá tette, hanem azért, mert ahhoz illetéktelenek fértek hozzá. Ezt a cég a Facebookon elismerte. De nem csak hozzáfértek a kódokhoz, hanem azok egy részét publikálták is az interneten. A vállalat szerint nem a saját hálózatára törtek be, hanem egy 3rd party-tól szerezték meg illetéktelenek a forráskódokat. Eleinte a Symantec igyekezett nyugtatni az ügyfeleit, állítva, hogy régi - több éves - kódokról van szó és ráadásul az egyik érintett termék már nyugdíjazásra került. Viszont most arról ír a ComputerWorld, hogy a cég azt javasolja ügyfeleinek, hogy a álljanak le a pcAnywhere szoftver használatával addig, amíg ahhoz frissítés nem érkezik. A Metasploit mögött álló H.D. Moore, meglepődött azon, hogy egy Symantec kaliberű cég ilyesmire kéri ügyfeleit.

A részletek itt olvashatók.

2012 január 27, 10:00

In case you missed it there is a vulnerability in the CISCOIronport telnet service. Details ca ...(more)...

2012 január 27, 09:52

Josselin Mouette is one the leaders of the pkg-gnome team, he takes sound technical decisions and doesn’t fear writing code to work-around upstream issues. He deserves kudos for the work he has put into packaging GNOME over the years. He can also be very sarcastic (sometimes he even enjoys participating to flamewars on debian lists), and there are quite a few topics where we have long agreed to disagree. But this kind of diversity is also what makes Debian a so interesting place…

Read on to learn more about the pkg-gnome team, its plans for Wheezy, Josselin’s opinion on the GNOME 3 switch, and much more.

Raphael: Who are you?

Josselin: I am a 31 years old Linux systems engineer. I started in life with physics, which I studied at the ENS Lyon. I started a thesis on experimental and numerical models for optoelectronics, but when it became clear that research was not for me, I abandoned it and accepted a job at the CEA, which holds the largest computing center in Europe. Working on these machines has been the most awesome job ever (except for it being near Paris). After that I worked a bit on system monitoring technologies.

I am married, currently living in Lyon, and working for EDF (the French historical electricity company) on scientific workstations using Debian. EDF is using Debian on more than a thousand workstations and holds the fastest Debian supercomputer in the world (200 Tflops), which makes it another obvious place for Debian developers.

Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?

Josselin: I discovered Debian in 1999 while studying at the ENS, which is one of the biggest nests of Debian developers – while being a small place, it is producing almost one Debian developer per year on average. After wondering for a while what it could be useful for, hacking on a slink snapshot made me think that it was for, well, everything except for gaming. Later, in 2002, when I was working on optoelectronics computing codes, I started to package them for Debian in order to make them easier to install, for us as well as other labs over the world. I started the NM process, and it was going smoothly but also going to take time. However, at that moment, the frozen-bubble game went out and made quite some buzz. Since I knew a guy who knew the game’s developer, he asked me to package it. The package found 3 sponsors in a very short time and was fast-tracked into the archive at a speed that was unseen before. After which the NM process was completed very quickly.

At that time, I was a heavy WindowMaker user, but I didn’t like the direction the project was taking (actually, I wonder if there was one). GNOME was starting to become attractive, but its packaging in Debian was very ineffective, with many inconsistent packages maintained by people who didn’t ever talk to each other – some of them didn’t speak English, and some of them didn’t talk at all. Together with awesome people, among which Jordi Mallach, Gustavo Noronha Silva, JHM Dassen, Ross Burton and Sébastien Bacher, we started the GNOME team in 2003, introducing consistent packaging practices, and initiating synchronized uploads. Releasing a completely integrated GNOME 2.8 in sarge was a considerable achievement; proving (together with the Perl team) that a team was the best way to maintain large package sets changed the way people work on Debian.

“Proving […] that a team was the best way to maintain large package sets changed the way people work on Debian.”

Raphael: You’re one of the most active contributors of the team which is packaging GNOME for Debian. What would you suggest to a new contributor who would like to help the team?

Josselin: There are several ways to contact the team, but the recommended one has always been IRC. We hang on #debian-gnome on the OFTC network, so just come around and ask for us.¹ The real question is what you want to do in the team. Of course, most new volunteers want to help packaging the latest and greatest version of GNOME into unstable as soon as possible, but unless they already have Debian background, this is not the easiest task. Since there are already people working on this, the “big” packages are usually waiting on dependencies.

I used to direct newcomers towards bug triage, but it is a tedious task and I’m now convinced that our huge bug backlog will never be dealt with. The most useful thing to do for newcomers now is probably to find a GNOME or GNOME-related package that needs improvement or is lagging behind, and simply try to work on it. You can also come and fix the bugs you find annoying. Find a patch on the GNOME bugzilla, or cook it yourself, propose it, and if it’s worthy enough you’ll soon get commit access.

“Our huge bug backlog will never be dealt with.”

¹ At this point I feel worth mentioning that if no one answers in 10 minutes, it doesn’t mean that no one will answer in 2 hours, so please stay on the channel after asking.

Raphael: There’s been some controversy about GNOME 3 and the direction that the project is taking. What’s your personal stance on GNOME 3? And what’s the position of the pkg-gnome team?

Josselin: The controversy is not new to GNOME 3, but the large-scale changes made with it have put it more prominently. The criticism usually boils down to a few categories:

1. General lack of configurability
2. Strange design decisions
3. Red Hat centric development
4. Hardware requirements
5. Change resistance

The lack of configuration options has been an ongoing criticism since GNOME 2.0 has decided to rip off most of them. Of course, when the control center was redesigned again for 3.0, there was a surge of horrified exclamations from people who missed their favorite buttons. On this topic, I fully concur with GNOME developers. The configuration option that is useful for you is not necessarily useful for someone else. Of course, sometimes developers go a bit too far, but the general direction is right. At work, we found that only a minority of users actually configure anything on their desktops: they just want something that works to launch their applications. Apple and Google have sold millions of devices by making them the simplest possible and without any configuration.

Design decisions are, on the contrary, individual decisions, and each of them, while having reasons behind it, can be questioned. I remember seeing a lot of complaints when the OK and Cancel buttons were reversed in dialog boxes, something that nobody questions anymore. GNOME Shell is full of such changes; some are easy to get accustomed with, some others just make eyebrows raise. The most obvious example is the user menu in GNOME 3.2, which contains an entry to configure your Google account, but no entry to shutdown the computer. Both decisions were taken independently, each of them with (good or bad) reasons, but the result is simply ridiculous. The default configuration in Debian will contain an extension to make it a bit better, but on the whole we don’t intend to diverge from the upstream design, on which a lot of good work has been done.

“On the whole we don’t intend to diverge from the upstream design, on which a lot of good work has been done.”

Point 3 is more complex. Red Hat being the company spending the most on GNOME, it is obvious that their employees work on making things work for their distribution. An example is the recurring discussions about relying on system services that are currently only implemented by systemd. Since there is a lot of (mostly unjustified) resistance against systemd in Debian, and since it won’t work on kFreeBSD anyway, someone needs to develop an alternative implementation of these services for upstart and sysvinit. Everything is in place for someone else to do the job but it has to be done, and this can be frustrating. Especially since it can also be hard to integrate changes needed for other distributions¹.

Hardware requirements are mostly a consequence of the previous criticism: there’s hardware that most distributions just don’t want to bother supporting. We’ve seen it in squeeze with the introduction of a hard dependency on PulseAudio. The Debian GNOME team (together with the Gentoo maintainers) made this dependency optional, carrying heavy patches, in order to cover the cases where it does not work. Now that it has gained more maturity, making this effort obsolete, the new tendency is to require 3D acceleration. For various reasons, it is not available to everyone². On this matter, the position of the Debian GNOME team has always been to support as much different configurations as possible with reasonable effort. Thanks to efforts from the incredible Vincent Untz, upstream supports a so-called “fallback mode”, which is the GNOME panel from 2.x with a lot of its bugs fixed. We intend to support this mode for as long as reasonably possible in Debian, possibly even after upstream ends up dropping it. However, other applications are going to require 3D because GStreamer is moving to clutter too, affecting video playback performance on non-accelerated systems³. For epiphany this is not a problem; only embedded video will be affected. But for totem, this is a major issue; because of that we will probably keep totem 3.0 in wheezy.

Finally, there is a natural human tendency to dislike change (I have it too), and it applies a lot to desktop users’ habits. Needless to say a change of such a scale as introducing GNOME Shell can trigger reactions. However, I don’t think it is reasonable, because of this resistance, to keep gnome-panel 2.x in Debian. This would be a lot of work on obsolete technology, and would prevent the upcoming removal of a lot of deprecated libraries. This time is much better spent improving gnome-panel 3.x in Debian and keeping the “fallback mode” great. One of the change that was made in Debian was to make it easier to find, being available as “GNOME Classic” directly from the login manager, instead of having to find it in an obscure configuration panel. In all cases, I would recommend to actually try GNOME Shell for a few hours before ditching it. I had never been accustomed to a new environment as quickly ever before.

“In all cases, I would recommend to actually try GNOME Shell for a few hours before ditching it.”

¹ Having seen several of my GDM patches reverted without a warning, I know we are not finished with carrying patches in Debian packages.
² Scientific workstations are a non-trivial example, since there is a measurable effect of using 3D in the window manager on heavy 3D applications.
³ On the other hand, on accelerated systems, this feature should end up improving performance a lot.

Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy?

Josselin: The first goal of the GNOME team is, of course, to provide again a great desktop environment to work on. For wheezy it will probably be based on GNOME 3.4. There also needs to be some work on package management interfaces. Upstream bases everything on PackageKit, but it is not as featureful as the aptdaemon Ubuntu technology. If I have time, I would also like to improve HTTP proxy support, since currently it is based on a stack of terrible hacks.

Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on?

Josselin: Obviously I would like to make GNOME in Debian even better. That would imply working on underneath dependencies (what we now like to call plumbing) to make sure everything is working great. This would also imply working more as GNOME upstream to make it more suitable for our needs.

I would also work on large-scale improvements on the distribution, like conditional recommends which I’d love to see implemented¹, or automatic build-dependency generation. I would also work on the installer to make it better for desktops machines.

¹ The idea is to automatically install language packs, or glues between two packages when both packages are installed.

Raphael: What’s the biggest problem of Debian?

Josselin: The obvious answer is the same as the one most people you interviewed before gave: not enough members in core teams. A lot of developers join Debian to work on a small number of pet packages, and don’t necessarily want to be involved with existing teams. It is probably still not obvious enough that the primary way to start contributing to Debian is to join an existing team.

But if there is one thing that is preventing Debian from gaining more momentum now, it is a completely different one: the too short support timeframe. 3 years is really not enough for corporate users. One year to migrate from one version to another is too short, and it is not possible to skip a release. It is definitely possible to change that with reasonable effort: the long-term support after 3 years doesn’t have to cover the same perimeter as the short-term one. For example, we could upgrade the kernel to the version in the current stable release, and stop fixing all non-remote security holes. The important thing is to cover the most basic needs: companies are ready to take the risk of having less support if it allows skipping a version, but not the risk of having no support at all. And even more important is to say that you do something. Red Hat says they support a release for 10 years, but of course after 5 years the supported perimeter is extremely small.

“3 years [of support] is really not enough for corporate users.”

Long-term support will not magically fix all problems in Debian, but it will bring more corporate users into the picture. And with corporate users come paid Debian developers, who can work on critical pieces of the system. Debian was built on the synergy between individuals and companies, and in recent years – perhaps as a reaction against what happened with Ubuntu – we’ve kind of forgot the latter. A lot of individuals have joined the project, and they are actively working, for example, on shortening the release cycle, which goes against the interest of professionals. We should embrace again such users and developers, and that means adapting to the current needs of larger entities.

Raphael: You’re the maintainer of python-support, a packaging helper that was competing with python-central. Both helpers are now deprecated in favor of dh_python2. Does this mean that the situation of Python in Debian is now sane? Or are there remaining problems?

Josselin: dh_python2 (and the Python3 version, dh_python3) has a sane enough design. It fixes a lot of issues in python-central and also python-support, at the expense of somehow reduced functionality for developers. However, just like the previous tools, it merely works around design mistakes in the Python interpreter. For example it is not possible to split binary modules, pure-Python modules and byte-compiled modules in different directory trees, like Perl does – although PEP 3147 introduces a way to do so. There is still no sane and standardized way to deal with module versions. There is no difference made between the module (which is a part of language semantics) and the file containing it (an information which depends on the implementation). Developers heavily rely on introspection features and make assumptions based on the implementation, that make it impossible to work around problems with module files.

Such problems are not restricted to Python. Those who fought against Ruby gems could tell even worse stories. While introducing GObject introspection packages in Debian (they can be used in JavaScript and Python to provide modules based on GObject libraries), I was pleased to see a clear distinction between file and module, but I was again struck by the fact you are not forced to declare API versions in your Python/JS code. In all cases, there is no reliable way to detect runtime dependencies in a given Python or JavaScript file, which leaves the maintainer to declare them by hand, and of course, often be wrong about them. Add to that the fact that most errors cannot be detected before runtime. For all these reasons, and while still being fond of Python for scripts and prototyping, I’ve become really skeptical of using purely interpreted languages to write real applications. Some GNOME developers are moving away from Python and JavaScript, mostly towards Vala; I can only approve of that move and hope the same happens to other projects.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?

Of course there is the never-sleeping, never-stopping, Michael Biebl who can upload a whole GNOME release in a single week-end. But there are a lot of awesome people who make Debian something that simply works. I could talk about Cyril Brulebois from the X strike force, Julien Cristau from the release team, Sjoerd Simons for his sound advice and work on plumbing, Luca Falavigna who is so fast at processing NEW, to quote only a few of those I work with frequently. And of course, Jordi and Sam for their humor.

---

Thank you to Josselin for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that you can find older interviews on http://wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook

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One comment | Liked this article? Click here. | My blog is Flattr-enabled.

2012 január 27, 09:00

Zothecula writes "Facial recognition might be all the rage in giving computer systems the ability to ascertain the identity of individuals — what with most people having different facial features and all. But a team from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, has taken a different approach to identify users of touch-based tabletop computers like Microsoft's Surface. Instead of focusing on the face, the team has looked in the opposite direction to develop a system known as Bootstrapper, which distinguishes between users based on their footwear ."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 08:59

Bill Gates a World Economic Forum rendezvényen tegnap bejelentette, hogy a feleségével működtetett Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 750 millió amerikai dollárt adományoz az AIDS, malária és tuberkulózis elleni harcra. Részletek itt.

2012 január 27, 08:45

bs0d3 writes "The EU ACTA chief has resigned, saying, 'This agreement might have major consequences on citizens' lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.' 22 EU members signed the controversial ACTA treaty Thursday in Tokyo."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 07:55

Good news for people with an Intel GMA500 (Poulsbo) graphics card, support is now in the mainline Linux kernel.

In the Linux 3.3-rc1 (mainline) kernel the driver has moved out of staging and re-named.

It is now located under

Device Drivers ->
Graphics support ->
DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) ->
Intel GMA5/600 KMS Framebuffer

and is now called “gma500_gfx”.

Once the kernel team with your distribution of choice makes the adjustment, the GMA500 should work “out of the box” on any Linux Distribution using kernel 3.3 or higher.

2012 január 27, 05:58

alphadogg writes "Lucky residents of Wilmington, N.C., will be the first in the nation to have access to a 'Super Wi-Fi' network. Officials from New Hanover County, N.C., announced Thursday that they had become the first in the United States to deploy a mobile data network on so-called 'white spaces' spectrum that the FCC first authorized for unlicensed use in 2008."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 05:45

...(more)...

2012 január 27, 04:15

Overview Need to attribute information to ISC? Want to provide users with an avenue to visit the I ...(more)...

2012 január 27, 03:32

itwbennett writes "In a blog post on Thursday, Twitter announced that it can now block individual Tweets in specific countries, while leaving them visible in other countries. 'We try to keep content up whenever and wherever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can't,' the blog said. Twitter will publish requests it receives to block content through its partnership with Chilling Effects."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 03:22

Ubuntu-BR-SC Local Community Team is proud to announce the release of your most recent project, the Ubuntu-BR-SC LoCo Team Blog. The project, that was created by Tiago Hillebrandt (the LoCo Team Leader) and Julian Fernandes (an Ubuntu-BR-SC member), intends to promote Ubuntu and opensource to Brazilian Users and Developers.

Currently, the Ubuntu-BR-SC LoCo Team Blog contains twelve members who write news, tips, and tutorials in Brazilian Portuguese to support Ubuntu Brazilian Community.

Visit the blog and leave your comments!

2012 január 27, 03:14

En estos dias precisamente me llego un email anunciando la proximidad de mi finalización como Ubuntu Member… y antes de renovar me puse a pensar si era lo que queria, ya que en ese momento me asaltaron preguntas como: ¿Si estaré haciendo las cosas bien? ¿Soy verdaderamente un miembro activo? ¿Ayudo a mi comunidad? ¿Quiero tener planes para la comunidad en el futuro?

En ese momento miré el presente y visualice que en un año como Ubuntu Member habia hecho cosas muy buenas y otras podria mejorar, se puede aprender mas de la comunidad y los canales de retroalimentación estan presentes para el crecimiento, no solo personal sino de mi Comunidad Local y todas las que directa o indirectamente alcanzo a influenciar.

Así que decidi renovar, continuar con Ubuntu-Colombia, hacer el mejor trabajo en el LoCo Council… y lo que salga en el camino.

 

 

 

2012 január 27, 02:59

New submitter newmission33 writes "Government researchers have created the fastest, purest X-ray laser pulses ever achieved, and have fulfilled a 1967 prediction that an atomic scale X-ray laser could be made in the same manner as visible-light lasers, according to a statement released Wednesday. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used the Linac Coherent Light Source to aim a powerful X-ray source beam, a billion times brighter than any previous source, at a capsule of neon gas and triggered an 'avalanche' of X-ray emissions to become the world's first 'atomic X-ray laser.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 01:00

Kubuntu has packages for 4.8 bringing updates to Plasma workspaces and a load of KDE Applications.

To quote a nice user posting on kde-devel

"I upgraded to Ubuntu's Precise Alpha 1 a few days ago. After the upgrade completed, I tried out KDE 4.8 RC 2. It worked great until the final release of KDE 4.8 Final. KDE 4.8 Final is even better than the RC!"

or later in the same thread

"KDE 4.8 is rocking for me too.Using the Kubuntu PPA's on Sandy Bridge system and it's just lightning fast to do anything. "

2012 január 27, 00:16

Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Reporters Without Borders released its 2011-2012 global Press Freedom Index. The indicators for press freedom in the U.S. are dramatic, with a downward movement from 27th to 47th in the global ranking, from the previous year. Much of this is correlated directly to the arrest and incarceration of American journalists covering the 'Occupy' protest movements in New York and across the country. 'This is especially troubling as we head into an election year which is sure to spark new conflicts between police and press covering rallies, protests and political events.' Only Chile, who dropped from 33 to 80, joined the U.S. in falling over 100% of their previous ranking. Similarly, Chile was downgraded for 'freedom of information violations committed by the security forces during student protests.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 27, 00:15

MrSeb writes "An Italian researcher with a penchant for retro games — or perhaps just looking for an excuse to play games in the name of science! — has used computational complexity theory to decide, once and for all, just how hard video games are. In a truly epic undertaking, Giovanni Viglietta of the University of Pisa has worked out the theoretical difficulty of 13 old games, including Pac-Man, Doom, Lemmings, Prince of Persia, and Boulder Dash. Pac-Man, with its traversal of space, is NP-hard. Doom, on the other hand, is PSPACE-hard."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 26, 23:33

astroengine writes "The number of known multi-planetary star systems has just tripled. What's more, the Kepler space telescope science team has just announced that they have doubled the number of confirmed exoplanetary sightings made by the observatory. Some of the newly discovered worlds are only 1.5 times the size of Earth, while others are bigger than Jupiter. Fifteen exoplanets are between Earth and Neptune in size, but further observations will be needed to determine if any have a rocky surface like Earth, or a gaseous consistency like Neptune."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 26, 22:50

McGruber writes "Wired reports that the American Association of Railroads is refuting the U.S. Transportation Security Administration memorandum that said hackers had disrupted railroad signals. In fact, 'There was no targeted computer-based attack on a railroad,' said AAR spokesman Holly Arthur. 'The memo on which the story was based has numerous inaccuracies.' The TSA memo was subject of an earlier Slashdot story in which Slashdot user currently_awake accurately commented on the true nature of the incident."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 26, 22:09

The title may sound like a contradiction, but I assure you that it is not. You can now use private teams in social contexts in Launchpad. Private teams can collaborate with public projects and other teams if they choose to reveal the existence of the private team.

1. Private teams can me members of other teams.
2. Other teams can be members of private teams.
3. Private teams can subscribe to bugs, blueprints, branches, and merge proposals
4. Private teams  can be in public project roles,  such as maintainers, drivers, and bug supervisors.
5. You can change the branch owner to be a private team.
6. Private team personal branches (+junk) are always private.

When a member places the private team in a social situation, a the member is asked to confirm that it is okay to reveal the team’s identifying information. This information is the team’s Launchpad Id used in URLs, the displayname, icon, and logo. A user can visit the private team’s Launchpad page and will only see that information. The rest of the page is not shared. Anonymous users cannot see a private team’s page because that user is not being social; logged in users can see the private team’s page

Launchpad did not permit these interactions previously because it was not clear who should know about the team. Someone has to know. If Launchpad permitted private teams to subscribe to bugs or be members of teams without anyone knowing of them, they would be unaccountable. Private teams could spy on organisation, or learn about security vulnerabilities to exploit. Launchpad will not ever permit such asocial behaviour. The resolution for social interactions was to permit other parties to know enough of the private team to make an informed decision. For example, when I choose to make a bug private, I want to know who was already seen the bug through a subscription. I may choose to unsubscribe the private team if I do not trust them.

Private teams may invite exclusive teams to be members. Exclusive teams (moderated or restricted teams) review all members so they are accountable. If a team admin trusts the admins of another team, and that team is accountable, Launchpad permits the other team to be a member. This is actually a rule that applied to all exclusive teams. private teams are always exclusive (restricted membership policy). The only nuance with private teams is when it is a member of another team; the super team may know the members of the private sub team because the super team has the right to audit all its members so that it too can be accountable.

2012 január 26, 21:31

Diggester writes "Back in July 2010, the United States government approved a few exemptions in a federal law which made jailbreaking/rooting of electronic devices (iPhones and Android devices) legal. The court ruling stated that every three years, the exemptions have to be renewed considering they don't infringe any copyrighted material. The three-year period is due to expire and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is looking to get the exemptions renewed. In order to do so, they have filed a petition which aims at government to declare jailbreaking legal once again. In addition to that, EFF is also asking for a change in the original ruling to include tablet devices." Here's the EFF's own page on the issue.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2012 január 26, 21:25