● 06.02.11

● Links 2/6/2011: Skype Reverse-Engineered, Mandriva 2011 Beta 3

Posted in News Roundup at 12:58 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• If you think there’s only one type of geek, you apparently don’t know many geeks. It could be argued that there are as many kinds of geek as there are geeks in the world. Still, they can be loosely broken down into groups and sub-groups, recognizing that there is overlap and some exceptions. The chart at the bottom of this post is one rather amusing way of looking at the “evolution of the geek.” Personally, I’ve been really surprised to discover a rather striking contrast between Linux geeks and Ruby geeks, having spent time with “members” of both communities over the past couple of years in New York.

Server

• Internet Solutions (IS) has acquired a majority stake in Synaq, the Johannesburg-based managed Linux service provider and messaging company, for an undisclosed sum.

• IS says the deal will help it address the demand from the small and medium enterprise market for managed communications services.

Audiocasts/Shows

• ClearOS is a network and gateway server for small organizations and distributed environments.

• Guest: Michael Proper and David Loper

• Download or subscribe to this show at twit.tv/floss.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• The rolling-release Arch Linux distribution has just enabled floating point textures for Mesa. This was the hotly-debated feature for Mesa that provides OpenGL floating point textures and render targets, but is disabled by default since its protected by patents in the United States and elsewhere. Arch Linux users when building new versions of Mesa will receive this support irrespective of their physical location.

Applications

• Recently, myself and my colleagues at Pelagicore decided to try to ditch Skype for an open replacement. We have been suffering stability issues with Skype for a long time, but our customers rely on it for contact with us and most people know how it works. However, recent events such as Microsoft buying Skype and cancelling support for Asterisk motivated us to try the alternatives.

• What we want to avoid is some sort of lock-in, and at the same time, we want it to be easy to have people join. After some discussions and tests we decided to go for Jabber and libjingle. This is what Google Talk uses, so anyone using GMail is automatically in. This was a big benefit for us, as we run Google Apps on our domain.

• The PiTiVi team is proud to announce the immediate availability of our new 0.14 release, with major new features, bug fixes and usability improvements. We hope you can use and enjoy the improvements in PiTiVi 0.14, and report bugs you may encounter (bugs are a fact of life! Help us hunt them out!).

Proprietary

• This researcher has successfully reverse-engineered many of pieces of the Skype protocol (version 1.4 of the spec) for RC4 and arithmetic compression, etc. He also has a “send message to Skype” open-source code example. Version 1.4 of the protocol is slightly out-of-date right now.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The desktop wars may be finally ending, but not quite the way we may have expected.

• Take the GNOME Shell interface, which reviewers admire for its general direction but have some issues with the actual execution within GNOME 3.

• LightDM, the cross-desktop display manager that provides a clean API for writing multiple user-interfaces and for delivering fast performance, continues to mature. With the Ubuntu 11.10 release in October, Ubuntu is using LightDM instead of the GDM from GNOME as the display / log-in manager. For those concerned that the KDE side may be not getting enough love, it actually is and there’s been progress made on a Qt-powered interface.

• David Edmundson, a KDE developer, has written a Qt library for making simple greeter engines. “I’ve written a Qt library for making greeter engines, as well as a very basic demo greeter which is more for testing than a real demo of what can be done. This library is designed to be very QML-ready, with a strong emphasis on using models rather than simple lists.” LightDM is meant to be extended to handle various interfaces from Qt or GTK to having HTML/CSS-driven interfaces for this promising log-in manager.

GNOME Desktop

• The user interface shell of the open source GNOME desktop environment was completely redesigned for GNOME 3.0, which was released last month. The update brought a multitude of significant changes to the environment’s underlying technical infrastructure and the user-facing desktop experience. Fedora became the first major Linux distribution to ship the new GNOME environment with the official launch last week of Fedora 15.

• The gnome developers are hard at work making the first linux desktop, that do not look like a cheap windows/mac rip off, even better. There are stupid mistakes they made along the way, but still Gnome 3.0 gives the best experience free software can offer by default. Obviously there are more feature need to be included to make it a complete replacement for your good old Gnome 2.x. For the time being you can use these extensions to get some functionalities back.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• 100+ contributors in 10+ teams [...] * 2 × 14.226 binary packages

Red Hat Family

• Some of you may have heard that Robyn, Max, Sebastian, and I will be teaching a workshop on open source community participation to our fellow Red Hatters in Raleigh next week (June 8th, 2011). It’s the first run of such a workshop, and remixes some of the things we’ve done at POSSE for a more general audience – in a sense, we’re removing the discipline-specific (“you’re a college professor!”) parts and seeing how our stuff generalizes to folks already working in (open source) industry.

Fedora

• Here are few things you can do after installing Fedora 15 to make the experience better. You may have to enable sudo to follow some of the tips or you can run the commands in terminal by logging in as root (su). The following are in no particular order. Feel free to skip the ones you do not need.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• If smartphone hardware can run Android, a Linux-based operating system, why can’t it run a full-blown Linux distro? In fact, you can run Ubuntu on many Android-powered phones.

• To get Ubuntu to run on a smartphone, some have started the OS side-by-side with Android, others have used emulators or virtualized hardware. On occasion a developer steps up and creates a bootable, functional Ubuntu image. If you’ve got an HTC Desire HD, you can count yourself as one of the lucky ones!

• Education and learning has always been an important part of the Ubuntu culture. It is important to us because we always want to present an environment in which everyone is welcome to participate, whatever your skills, location, or experience.

• A month has been passed since the eventful release of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. Many loyal Ubuntu users turned hostile with this release and Canonical’s new Unity interface is at the receiving end for what it does and what it doesn’t. I actually liked the new Unity approach to desktop and I believe that it has got a great future, provided that Canonical is able to rectify the bugs and usability issues in time. This post is for those who would like to use Unity. A quick recap of Ubuntu 11.04 tips and tricks that we published during the month.

• Ubuntu announced its 6.06 Server release 5 years ago, on June 1, 2006. For the LTS Server releases, Ubuntu committed to ongoing security and critical fixes for a period of 5 years. The maintenance period has now ended for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server.

• Ubuntu 6.06 LTS was a major milestone for the Ubuntu project, being the first long-term release. Its retirement evokes memories of Ubuntu as a younger project, and reminds us of all that we’ve accomplished together in the five years since we released the “Dapper Drake”.

Flavours and Variants

• Rating: 4/5

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Intel on Tuesday touted “ultrabooks,” tablet and laptop tweeners that would resemble MacBook Airs, and said these lightweight devices will account for 40 percent of the laptop market by the end of 2012.

• Speaking at the Computex show in Taipei, Sean Maloney, Intel’s executive vice president, said these ultrabooks will continue to improve annually. While the ultrabook phrase will generate initial buzz, these devices are evolutionary. What’s initially unclear is how an ultrabook differs from the netbook—a market under fire from tablets. Intel frequently touts next-gen reference designs. Anyone remember the mobile Internet devices (MID)?

• Amid all the brouhaha about the low power–chip tussle between Intel and ARM, another processor architecture has been quietly advancing into the same tablet and smartphone battleground: MIPS Technologies, which has announced a partnership with Beijing’s Ingenic Semiconductor to port Android 3.0, aka Honeycomb, to the Chinese chipmaker’s upcoming ultra–low power system-on-chip.

• According to Nvidia CEO Huang Jen-Hsun, Android is the fastest growing operating system in computing history

Free Software/Open Source

• Matt Asay doesn’t get sharing. The world needs software and FLOSS is a great way to produce it. If someone needs some software and can produce it they should. They also get to use all the software floating around in the community of FLOSS to go along with that. That is the right thing to do. Otherwise that software may not be written and our world in which we are social beings depending on and supporting each other will be poorer. It is a moral imperative of every human being and their organizations to try to make the world a better place. That’s good for everyone, not just the one doing the good work.

• Free whitepaper – Five Tips for Effective Backup and Recovery in Virtual Environments

• Google has open sourced a framework for realtime video and audio inside the browser. Known as WebRTC, the framework is based on technology the company acquired with its $68.2 million purchase of Global IP Solutions (GIPS) last year.

• “We’d like to make the browser the home for innovation in real time communications,” Google said in a blog post. “Until now, real time communications required the use of proprietary signal processing technology that was mostly delivered through plug-ins and client downloads.” The framework lets developers build realtime applications using HTML and JavaScript APIs.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Today we took Spread Firefox offline as I shared earlier. I want to thank everyone that has worked hard on Spread Firefox over the years. When it took off in 2004, it was truly innovative as a social network and organizing ground for our grassroots marketing efforts.

• As Mozilla continues to contend with claimed performance problems with its new Firefox 4 browser (although some reader responses to our post on the matter argue that there are none), it is achieving new milestones. According to data from StatCounter, which specializes in web analytics, the Firefox 4 browser claimed a hefty 14.2 percent of the global browser market in May–higher than the 13.2 percent claimed by the longstanding version 6. Meanwhile, the Firefox 5 beta has arrived, and there is even a new version 6 of the browser in the Aurora channel. Mozilla is moving full steam ahead with its new rapid release cycle for Firefox, competing directly with Google Chrome’s development schedule.

FUD of the Day

CMS

• We know that if you’re not a contributor and don’t follow us on Github, it’s hard to see Diaspora grow and evolve. Now that Diaspora is moving into its second year and a new phase of development, here are some numbers on the progress we’ve made.

Standards/Consortia

• This may not sound like such a big deal until you realize that I am a big advocate of Open Source and Open Standards. In the Enterprise, I believe that these technologies are absolutely essential to building best of breed heterogeneous computing environments. But at home? Eh, not so much.

Leftovers

• The Golden Age of ever-decreasing PC prices is over, at least as far as Intel is concerned.

• Speaking to investors in London last week, the chip giant’s CFO Stacy Smith boasted how the vendor had broken the pricing death spiral that has bedevilled the PC industry for most of its history.

Security

• NATO leaders have been warned that Wikileaks-loving ‘hacktivist’ collective Anonymous could pose a threat to member states’ security, following recent attacks on the US Chamber of Commerce and defence contractor HBGary – and promise to ‘persecute’ its members.

• In a toughly-worded draft report to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, General Rapporteur Lord Jopling claims that the loose-knit, leaderless group is “becoming more and more sophisticated”, and “could potentially hack into sensitive government, military, and corporate files”.

• The Internet has been an amazing force for good in the world—opening up communications, boosting economic growth and promoting free expression. But like all technologies, it can also be used for bad things. Today, despite the efforts of Internet companies and the security community, identity theft, fraud and the hijacking of people’s email accounts are common problems online.

• Bad actors take advantage of the fact that most people aren’t that tech savvy—hijacking accounts by using malware and phishing scams that trick users into sharing their passwords, or by using passwords obtained by hacking other websites. Most account hijackings are not very targeted; they are designed to steal identities, acquire financial data or send spam. But some attacks are targeted at specific individuals.

Reader’s Picks and Comments

Anti-Trust

• Lodsys didn’t expect the kind of letter it got from Apple, and it took it as a clear indication that Apple intended to litigate, if necessary, and Lodsys didn’t want that to happen in California, so it didn’t honor its word to developers that they had 21 days to respond to the cease and desist letters and went ahead and sued in Texas. Natch. However, that doesn’t at all mean that the litigation will happen in Texas, if Apple intervenes

• we cannot unilaterally publish the letter because it refers to information that was obtained with an obligation of confidentiality to Apple and we do not have their permission to do so.

• Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is putting “troublesome” restrictions on makers of processors used to run the coming Windows tablet-computer operating system, Acer Inc. (2353) Chairman and Chief Executive Officer J.T. Wang said. “They’re really controlling the whole thing, the whole process,” Wang said at the Computex trade show in Taipei without identifying the restrictions. Chip suppliers and PC makers “all feel it’s very troublesome,” he said.

• M$ is apparently trying to dictate to the world on what kinds of ARMed systems M$’s “8″ will run. … By trying to freeze the market and dictate hardware compatibility, M$ will only delay its roll-out and restrict itself to a niche. … M$ cannot force all manufacturers to use Qualcomm;s chips and Qualcomm cannot supply the whole market. … No one wants to wait for M$ to get its act together while hundreds of millions of units could be sold.

Hardware

Civil Rights

• “We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” the general said. “None of them were.” … The women were also beaten and given electric shocks

• we’ve seen a number of Fortune 500 companies that have been caught not once, not twice, but sometimes three times violating the trust of the American people, submitting false claims, paying kickbacks to doctors, marketing drugs which have not been tested for safety and efficacy … The behavior of a company starts at the top … The power to ban or “exclude” an individual rests with the inspector general. It’s routinely applied to low-level violators, but rarely to people of Solomon’s rank.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, the previous Minister for Public Service and Administration, recently described software patents as “an issue which poses a considerable threat to the growth of the African software sector”, adding that there had been “recent pressure by certain multinational corporations to file software patents in our national and regional patent offices … all of the current so-called developed countries built up their considerable software industries in the absence of software patents”. She said that for those same countries to insist on software patents now “is simply to place patents as barriers in front of newcomers”

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