● 04.11.10

● Links 11/4/2010: Oracle Loses Gosling, Google Funds Ogg

Posted in News Roundup at 1:42 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• All things considered, I still believe that Linux desktop security is superior to that of Windows in a home environment. Here’s why:

• - The default firewall setup offers a very safe configuration off the bat.

• - The software repository model is safer.

• - Viruses are no concern.

• - Social engineering is definitely a threat, but following a few simple guidelines should keep it safe.

• Some have raised a very valid concern about the lack of reactive security in the Linux Desktop. Unlike Windows users, we have nothing to fix or even detect the situation once security is compromised. While I agree with such concerns, in my opinion all that means is that Linux users need to approach security differently to Windows users. Windows users have grown accostumed to a reactive model. They have a wide variety of tools to detect a security threat and kill it. The key to Linux desktop security is to take a proactive approach: Preventing over healing.

• To me, it boils down to this: Linux desktop users are safe as long as they follow a few best practices, which is more than what Windows users can say today, even with the help of an antivirus. In addition, in the event of security being compromised, the severity of damage is generally much more limited.

Kernel Space

• While most Linux users are fine with just using the kernel supplied by their distribution vendor, there are some enthusiasts and professional users who end up tweaking their kernel configuration extensively for their needs, particularly if they are within a corporate environment where the very best performance and reliability is demanded for a particular workload.

Applications

• I like sparse software. I like programs that do one thing. I like applications that don’t try to manage my life or my schedule or my music. I want clean interfaces with straight lines and no rubbish. I don’t want glitz, I don’t want frills, I don’t want glossy album covers fanning out between tunes, all hovering over a mirrored backdrop. And I definitely don’t want one-button clickable interfaces to social networking sites owned my multimedia conglomerates.

Proprietary

Instructionals

Games

• I expect to release another article soon and squeeze in a few more games. You should also expect a review of payware and demo games, like Quake 4 and UT2004 soon. We’ll also have a Best of … article. Furthermore, since most of the games reviewed are in constant development, you should expect re-reviews of individual games periodically, just as I’ve done with Nexuiz and AlienArena.

Distributions

Ubuntu

• Today, we would like to present you a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 inspired wallpaper, brought to you by Opentechblog.com to accompany your morning coffee.

• Its the time to gear up for the next version of Ubuntu. Codenamed Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu 10.04 is slated to hit on 29th April 2010. Let’s have a look at the changes & new features to be incorporated in this new Ubuntu LTS(Long Term Support) release.

• The recent Beta 2-release of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) features a new sleek installer that brings a fresh breeze of professionalism into the installation procedure.

• So how do we, in the Linux press make people outside of the Linux community aware that Linux does not equate to Ubuntu? That is the real challenge we now face if we want Linux to be more widely accepted.

• I was reading an article about how Ubuntu is a bad standards barer for the “Linux” desktop. I’ll leave aside how paradoxical the brand “Linux” is used to mean desktop when it means nothing of the sort and I assume she means FreeDesktop (FDO).

• But I was struck by the problems that she has had and the comments to the entry. When comparing them to my own support roster for the past few months of sudden grub mortality (8 cases) where grub just looses all ability to boot anything with cryptic errors such as “Invalid symbol ‘u’ found” and ‘Error 15′.

• I have been using Ubuntu 10.04 since beta 1 and it has been quite stable until this week.

• Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 2 uses a kernel based on version 2.6.32.9 (2.6.32-16.25). But already now the current stable version is 2.6.33.2 so I would not be surprised if the release would be based on this one (or even a newer one). Check your kernel version with the command uname -r (from your terminal). If you have a new computer with dual core, i5 or i7 processor, then you should consider updating your kernel to a kernel where support for older cpu´s are removed. You can try to use the server version of the kernel instead of the generic one.

• Ubuntu 10.10 will released on October 28, 2010.

• June 03rd, 2010 – Alpha 1 release

• July 1st , 2010 – Alpha 2 release

• August 12th, 2010 – Alpha 3 release

• September 2nd, 2010 – Alpha 4 release

• September 23th , 2010 – Beta release

• October 21st , 2010 – Release Candidate

• October 28th, 2010 – Final release of Ubuntu 10.10

• Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release schedule

Mint

• Linux Mint 6 Felicia will reach end of life on April 30, 2010. This release was based on Ubuntu 8.10 which is planned to reach end-of-life at the same date.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• According to ABI Research, people will download around 6 billion mobile apps in 2010, up from an estimated 2.4 billion downloaded in 2009. The main drivers for the increase: the rise to the rapid adoption of smartphones (which had a 20% sales growth in 2009) and the proliferation of App stores for those platforms. And with two new platforms set to debut later this year (Samsung’s Bada OS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7), the growth will only continue.

Android

• Last year I wrote an article, which explored the nature of the rivalries between the big three: Google, Apple and Microsoft. In that article, I posited that Google’s entry into smartphones, the development of Chrome, and the firm’s titanic efforts in the cloud and with advertising not only obsoleted Microsoft’s presence in these spaces, but elevated Google to Microsoft’s old role as Apple’s arch nemesis.

• While plenty of virtual ink has been spilled over the Google/Apple device battles, could they be approaching a bigger online battle as well? It’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility — and given its control over the devices it sells, perhaps it could get a pretty good starting position with a search engine. Still, it does seem like a bit of a reach for Steve Jobs and company. At this point, it seems more like some analyst just looking for a more interest “Google vs.” prediction than anything serious at this point.

• Verizon supported the Android 2.0 gadget with a $1 million marketing promotion, which helped the company make hundreds and thousands of sales of Droids at the time of holidays.

• GOOGLE’S Android phone operating system is moving into more new handsets as the battle for smartphone supremacy heats up.

• Still, it seems like history could repeat itself, with the rest of the industry closing the innovation gap with Apple fast. With Google subsidizing the mobile OS, other phone manufacturers have an economic advantage as well. Jobs is trying everything he can to hold back the Android advance, including suing HTC, the largest manufacturer of Android phones. He is fighting Google with everything he’s got—undercutting Google’s pending acquisition of AdMob by entering the mobile advertising market and creating fear among Android partners with his patent lawsuit.

• Here’s some good news if you’re in one of the many European DEAD ZONES where Google has yet to launch official access to the Android Market – Vodafone is launching its own app-selling shop front to sell Android apps to its customers.

Sub-notebooks

• Since I expect Android on tablets to be a big thing in 2010, I am experimenting with the closest thing I can get: Android in my eee 701 Surf 4G…

• This article is provided by third party writers who are not affiliated with DailyBreakNews.com. We do not endorse or create these articles. If you have questions, comments or concerns about any of the articles on this site, please contact us.

• The Asus Eee Box has got the Chinese Linux distribution, The Red Flag Linux, which is going to help you to buy it. The coolest thing is the price of this Asus Eee Box. The features for this model are just the way they were supposed to be. The complete features of this Asus Eee Box are not yet know, but we have go few of the features which this model does carry.Spec Details :1) Red Flag Linux2) Atom N270 processor3) 160GB hard drive4) 1GB of RAM5) standard Intel integrated graphics

Free Software/Open Source

• If an open source project turns proprietary then there will be a fork and the open source lives on. The open source culture is all about freedom. Freedom of information. Those who try and limit their information only end up limiting themselves, not those around them. This is why proprietary companies have come and gone yet open source has out lived them all. When those proprietary companies head off to the failed company afterlife. All of their secrets and locked in knowledge, goes with them. When individual open source projects are shut down then nothing is lost. The information is still available for effective usage in other projects.

• If the community-driven Open Source application development is to be considered the new age equivalent of the hippie movement, the coding community goes through a Summer of ’69 almost every year.

• Coding challenges like the Google Summer of Code (SoC), organised between May and August, have, in many ways, altered the landscape of Open Source endeavours.

• UNIX was written by one person in a month, but today the space has been democratised, and an enthusiastic under-grad sending in an important bug fix becomes the new star on an Open Source mailing list.

• Mozilla’s been playing around with interface changes in Firefox 3.7 for a while — there’s the updated default theme and built-in glass support (which made a very brief appearance and has yet to return). In yesterday’s nightly build, another UI option appeared: a simple right-click allows you to move your tabs to the top of the browser window.

Oracle

• This would, perhaps, be the second most shocking/sad news after the resignation of Jonathan (former Sun CEO). I’m sad and upset after hearing the confirmed news that James Gosling will be leaving Sun/Oracle.

• James Gosling, the creator of the Java programming language, has resigned from Oracle, he announced in a blog entry on Friday

• Gosling resigned on April 2 and has not yet taken a job elsewhere, he reported.

• “As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good,” he wrote.

• Gosling was the chief technology officer for Oracle’s client software group and, before that, the chief technology officer of Sun’s developer products group.

Openness

• In 2006, Clive Thompson wrote in a watershed New York Times Magazine article “Billions of dollars’ worth of ultrasecret data networks couldn’t help spies piece together the clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So perhaps, they argue, it’s time to try something radically different. Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?” (Open-Source Spying) At the Gov 2.0 Expo, Clive Thompson will discuss the progress made in the Intelligence Community since that 2006 with Matthew Burton, Chris Rasmussen, and Lewis Shepherd.

Standards/Consortia

• If I told you that Google had helped fund an ARM code optimised version of the Theora video codec, most people’s reaction would be immediately to skip forward to the next blog entry. Audio and video codecs are the classic example of things that no one cares about, until they don’t work.

• Ask most computer users what their preferred video codec is and they’ll look at you as if you asked what sort of motor they’d prefer in their washing machine. “We just want it to work!” they say. In this regard, it’s exactly the same for content creators and publishers. Every visitor to a website that can’t view a video is one set of eyeballs less for a message to get through to. It doesn’t matter how clever the advertising is, how much time is spent honing the message or how many clever viral tricks are deployed to attract surfers to the site, the moment the page opens up with a big blank box where the content should be, all that has been in vain.

• [...]

• Fortunately, there is some good news in the form of HTML 5. This new version of HTML (the basic language used to write webpages) introduces a video element.

• The fact that Apple would make such a hostile and despicable move like this clearly shows the difference between our two companies.

Leftovers

• In junior high school, one of my classmates had a TV addiction — back before it was normal. This boy — we’ll call him Ethan — was an encyclopedia of vacuous content, from The A-Team to Who’s the Boss?

Crime

• In an order (PDF) dated April 2 but entered late Monday, Judge Barbara Major said it was “undisputed” that Qualcomm Inc. improperly withheld tens of thousands of documents from Broadcom Corp.

• Attorney Steven Lippman helped his former boss, jailed Ponzi scammer Scott Rothstein, arrange fraudulent transfers while collecting millions of dollars in bonuses, loans and personal expenses, a bankruptcy lawyer claimed in court Wednesday.

Finance

• Major banks have masked their risk levels in the past five quarters by temporarily lowering their debt just before reporting it to the public, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

• A group of 18 banks—which includes Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc.—understated the debt levels used to fund securities trades by lowering them an average of 42% at the end of each of the past five quarterly periods, the data show. The banks, which publicly release debt data each quarter, then boosted the debt levels in the middle of successive quarters.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The Center for Digital Democracy, U.S. PIRG and World Privacy Forum complain that advertising programs used by the companies are “growing privacy threats.”

• A trio of privacy groups want federal regulators to take a close look at ad networks that track web surfers’ and sell targeted ads.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• The federal appeals court ruling Tuesday in favor of Comcast Corp. at the expense of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission comes as debate over so-called “net neutrality” intensifies, with companies spending heavily to influence Washington, D.C. policy makers on the issue.

• Nokia has launched a version of its Comes With Music download service without digital rights management (DRM) for the Chinese market, the phone manufacturer said on Thursday.

Copyrights

• Up to now, there has been one characteristic of digital recordings that has provided an important counterweight to the fragility of digital media – it’s what Bollacker refers to as “data promiscuity.” Because it’s easy to make copies of digital files, we’ve tended to make a lot of them. The proliferation of perfect digital copies has provided an important safeguard against the loss of data. An MP3 of even a moderately popular song will, for instance, exist on many thousands of computer hard drives as well as on many thousands of iPods, CDs, and other media. The more copies that are made of a recording, and the more widely the copies are dispersed, the more durable that recording becomes.

• The world’s first copyright law was passed by the English Parliament on 10 April 1710 as ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning’. Its 300th anniversary provides a unique opportunity to review copyright’s purposes and principles. If today we were starting from scratch, but with the same aim of encouraging learning‚ what kind of copyright would we want?

Digital Economy Bill

• The controversial Digital Economy Bill may have had a few parts stripped out, it may even be a damp squib. But the remaining, 76-page bill is still a wide-ranging piece of media and technology reform.

• Confused? Read our clause-by-clause guide to the bill as it stands now after being adopted by the House Of Commons and as it awaits Royal Assent …

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