Tout (en)

• Introducing Comice OS 4: Mac-Looking Linux (Linux Today)
  Softpedia: "It looks like David Tavares, the developer of Pear OS, prepares these days a revamped version of his Linux operating system, under the name of Comice OS."
• Tizen's Dawati Is Using A Hybrid X-Wayland (Phoronix)
  Besides Kristian Høgsberg's keynote at FOSDEM 2012, where he talked of Wayland 1.0, and his more interesting technical discussion, there was also a talk in Brussels about Wayland compositors. Tizen's Dawati was shown on Wayland using a hybrid X-Wayland compositor, talk of the GNOME Shell on Wayland with Mutter, and much more...

  
  

  
• Sabayon 8 Is Now An "Extreme-Rolling" Release Distro (Phoronix)
  The Gentoo-based Sabayon Linux distribution is out now with version 8 of their operating system. Besides many package updates and other new features, it's morphed into what the lead maintainer is calling the first "extreme-rolling release" distribution...

  
  

  
• X Input 2.2 Multi-Touch Is Feeling Good (Phoronix)
  X.Org Server 1.12, which will be officially released in March, is looking good when it comes to proper multi-touch support as exposed via X Input 2.2...

  
  

  
• Crypto crack makes satellite phones vulnerable to eavesdropping (Ars Technica)

  

  Cryptographers have cracked the encryption schemes used in a variety of satellite phones, a feat that makes it possible for attackers to surreptitiously monitor data received by vulnerable devices.

  The research team, from the University of Ruhr in Bochum, Germany, is among the first to analyze the secret encryption algorithms implemented by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. After reverse engineering phones that use the GMR-1 and GMR-2 standards, the team discovered serious cryptographic weaknesses that allow attackers using a modest PC running open-source software to recover protected communications in less than an hour.

  

  Read the comments on this post

  
  

  

• 7 Best Free Alternative Git Clients (Linux Today)
  LinuxLinks: "Git is one of a number of open source revision control systems available for Linux. Other popular tools in this field include Subversion, Bazaar, Mercurial, Monotone, CVS, and SVN."
• Capitol Records Motion To Enjoin ReDigi Denied (Slashdot)

  
  

  NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The motion by Capitol Records for a preliminary injunction against used digital music marketplace ReDigi has been denied. After hearing almost two hours of oral argument by attorneys for both sides, Judge Richard J. Sullivan ruled from the bench (PDF), holding that plaintiff had failed to show 'irreparable harm.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• Python4Kids New Tutorial: Welcome back, Class Recap (Linux Today)
  Python4Kids: "Towards the end of last year we started working on classes and a GUI toolkit called Tkinter. In this tutorial we will recap classes."
• Controlling Liquor Loss with Linux (Linux Today)
  Open Source Matters: "Few people know that inside this dark little bar, Linux servers and some open source-based scripts are keeping an eye on liquor and its link to the bottom line."
• HDD Price Update: How the Thai Floods Have Affected Prices, 3 Months Later (Slashdot)

  
  

  New submitter jjslash writes "The hard disk drive supply chain was hit hard late last year when a series of floods struck Thailand. The Asian country accounts for about a quarter of the world's hard drive production, but thousands of factories had to close shop for weeks as facilities were under water, in what is considered the world's fourth costliest natural disaster according to World Bank estimates. That's on top of the human cost of over 800 lives. TechSpot has monitored a number of mobile and desktop HDDs to get a better overview of how the situation has developed in the last three months."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

• Open Advice–Project Inspiration (KDE)
  

  Thinking of starting a free and open source project? Looking for inspiration on an existing project? Lydia Pintscher has pulled together useful wisdom from free and open community leaders in a new book—Open Advice.

  read more

• Chrome Web Browser Finally Comes to Android Phones, Tablets (Linux Today)
  WIRED Gadget Lab: "Android is finally getting Chromed out. Google had a reason to take its time: It wanted to do Chrome for Android right."
• Pasadena Police Encrypt, Deny Access To Police Radio (Slashdot)

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "There is media (but not public?) outcry over the Pasadena, CA police switch from analog radio that can be picked up by scanners to encrypted digital radio that cannot. 'On Friday, Pasadena police Lt. Phlunte Riddle said the department was unsure whether it could accommodate the media with digital scanners. Riddle said the greatest concern remains officer safety. "People who do bank robberies use scanners, and Radio Shack sells these things cheap," Riddle said. "We just had a robbery today on Hill Avenue and Washington Boulevard," Riddle said. "The last thing I want to do is to have the helicopter or the officers set up on the street and the criminals have a scanner and know where our officers are." Just prior to the switch over, city staffers said they would look into granting access to police radio chatter, most likely by loaning media outlets a scanner capable of picking up the secure signal.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• Anonymous exposes e-mails of Syrian presidential aides (Ars Technica)
  

  Hackers aligned with Anonymous have exposed hundreds of e-mail messages from the webmail server of Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs, the support ministry for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Among the exposed e-mail messages was a set of talking points for Assad's interview with Barbara Walters in December 2011.

  A translation of the e-mail sent by Sheherazad Jaafari, a press attaché at the Syrian mission to the United Nations, to Assad aide and former Al Jazeera journalist Luna Chebel, provided helpful hints for Assad to manipulate American opinion about what was going on in Syria. The message suggested that "it is hugely important and worth mentioning that 'mistakes' have been done in the begining of the crises because we did not have a well-organized 'police force.' American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear there are 'mistakes' done and now we are 'fixing it.'" 

  Jaafari suggested comparing what was happening in Syria to US law enforcement's response to the Occupy Wall Street protests.

  Along with the release of these e-mails, Anonymous also exposed the passwords of 78 accounts on the Ministry's servers. Of the passwords revealed, 31 were "12345" and a number were minor variations on that. Some of the other passwords in the set included:

  • iloveyou
  • 123vivasyria
  • system
  • honda2011
  • testing

  Read the comments on this post

  
  

  
• Adobe confirms: no Flash for Chrome on Android (Ars Technica)
  

  Google issued a beta release of Chrome for Android earlier today. The browser provides support for modern Web standards and includes a number of compelling features that aren't available in the Android's default browser. One noteworthy Chrome desktop feature that isn't included in the mobile port, however, is the integrated Flash runtime.

  Adobe has issued a statement confirming that Chrome for Android does not support Flash content. The company also indicated that it does not plan to work with Google to add Flash support to the new mobile browser. Adobe will, however, continue supporting Flash in the current default Android browser.

  "Today Google introduced Chrome for Android Beta. As we announced last November, Adobe is no longer developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, and thus Chrome for Android Beta does not support Flash content," wrote Adobe's Flash Platform product manager Bill Howard.

  Adobe struggled for years to make the Flash player plugin viable on mobile devices. Though it was able to make Flash work reasonably well on Android phones, results were mixed on other systems. Due to Apple's unwillingness to allow the Flash plugin on iOS and the difficulty that Adobe faced bringing the Flash player to new devices, the plugin never achieved the same ubiquity on phones that it has historically enjoyed on the desktop.

  These setbacks caused Adobe to abandon its mobile Flash player strategy last year. The company announced that it would phase out development of its mobile Flash player plugin and not support it on new platforms. Adobe instead focused its mobile Flash efforts on developing tools for deploying Flash content as native mobile applications. It also strengthened its commitment to native Web standards and acknowledged HTML5 as the way forward for building rich mobile Web experiences.

  When Google eventually moves to replace the default Android browser with Chrome in future versions of the Android platform, devices that run the operating system will likely no longer be able to play Flash content in the browser.

  Read the comments on this post

  
  

  

• 4G Phones Are Really Fast — At Draining Batteries (Slashdot)

  
  

  Hugh Pickens writes "With Verizon's 4G network covering a good chunk of the country and AT&T gaining ground, more smartphone users have access to the fastest wireless service available. But because 4G coverage isn't truly continuous in many locations, users' batteries are taking a big hit with 4G, as phones spend an lot of battery power trying to hunt down a signal. 'You've got a situation where the phones are sending out their signals searching and searching for a 4G tower, and that eats up your battery,' says Carl Howe, a vice president for research firm Yankee Group. The spottiness of 4G stems at least in part from the measured approach carriers have taken to it, rolling out the service city by city. There are a few tricks 4G users can try to extend battery life such as turning off your 4G connection when you don't need the fastest speeds — when using email, for instance — or using a program such as JuiceDefender to search for apps you may have downloaded that you don't need to run all the time, and erase them."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• Google reportedly developing Android-powered smart glasses (Ars Technica)
  

  Much like flying cars and jet packs, wearable computing is one of those aspirational fields of technology where the current state of the art doesn't deliver the sort of experience that people have imagined for decades. An experimental project that is reportedly under development in Google's labs could raise the bar, however.

  According to a report that was published today in the blog 9to5Google, the search giant is developing a product called Google Glasses that will have a built-in heads-up display. The device, which supposedly resembles a pair of Oakley shades, is said to have an integrated transparent display for one eye and a built-in front-facing camera. The latter could be used for augmented reality applications. The device would use speech and head tilting for text input and control.

  9to5Google suggests that the Google Glasses product could soft-launch with a pilot program later this year, making the product available to a select number of testers. This would follow the model of the Chromebook launch, which was preceded by the Cr-48 test unit.

  Although the reports are still highly speculative, the concept of smart glasses is intriguing. There are some existing products in this space, but they aren't easy to purchase and are definitely not priced for a mainstream audience.

  Read the comments on this post

  
  

  
• Feature: Don't panic? Windows 8 and the "ribbonification" of Explorer (Ars Technica)
  

  When Microsoft first revealed that the Explorer file manager would be outfitted with a ribbon-style toolbar in Windows 8, responses were loud, passionate, and frequently negative.

  The company recently described changes that it has made to Windows 8's Explorer in response to the feedback. These include some small modifications to the ribbon experience along with some other refinements of Explorer's new features. Though the changes themselves have been welcomed, the continued hostility toward Explorer's redesign remains.

  

  Read the comments on this post

  
  

  
• Ask Slashdot: Making JavaScript Tolerable For a Dyed-in-the-Wool C/C++/Java Guy? (Slashdot)

  
  

  DocDyson writes "I'm a dyed-in-the-wool C/C++/Java developer with over 20 years of experience. I'm making a good living and having fun doing back-end Java work right now, but I strongly believe in being a generalist, so I'm finally trying to learn the HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript future of the Web. However, I find JavaScript's weak typing and dynamic nature difficult to adapt to because I'm so used to strongly-typed, compiled languages with lots of compile-time error-checking and help from the IDE. Does anyone out there who has made this transition have any tips in terms of the best tools and libraries to use to make JavaScript more palatable to us old-school developers?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• The Best Cloud Music Options for the Linux Desktop (Linux Today)
  Linux.com: Not that long ago, desktop Linux users were left out of most of the online music services.

• Should Next-Gen Game Consoles Be Upgradeable? (Slashdot)

  
  

  MojoKid writes "Historically, console add-ons that boosted the performance of the primary unit haven't done well. Any attempt to upgrade a system's core performance risks bifurcating the user base and increases work developers must do to ensure that a game runs smoothly on both original and upgraded systems. The other reason is that a number of games rely on very specific hardware characteristics to ensure proper operation. In a PC, swapping a CPU with 256K of L2 for a chip with 512K of L2 is a non-issue assuming proper platform support. Existing software will automatically take advantage of the additional cache. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, allows programmers to lock specific cache blocks and use them for storing data from particular threads. In that case, expanding the amount of L2 cache risks breaking previous games because it changes the range of available cache addresses. The other side of the upgrade argument is that the Xbox 360 has been upgraded more effectively than any previous console; current high-end versions ship with more than 10x the storage of the original, as well as support for HDMI and integrated WiFi. It would also forestall the decline in comparative image quality between console and PC platforms."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• Major ReactOS Release: Themes, Shell, ACPI, WiFi (Phoronix)
  ReactOS, the open-source operating system project that's been aspiring to be Microsoft Windows NT binary compatible for more than a decade, is out with a major release -- the first in nearly one year...

  
  

  
• History Repeats Itself: KDP Select Is Amazon.com's 'Payback For Playback' (Slashdot)

  
  

  New submitter brennanw writes "Anyone who was active on mp3.com during the late 90s/early 2000's will find Amazon.com's KDP Select awfully familiar: authors who make their works exclusive to Amazon compete for a pool of money. Any time someone 'borrows' one of their books, they get a cut of a monthly sum (700K in January, 600K for February) based on how many of their books were checked out vs. how many other author's books were checked out. This is almost identical to the 'Payback for Playback' service MP3.com provided musicians a little over a decade ago. Payback for Playback effectively destroyed the original MP3.com artist community, and I don't think KDP Select is going to be much different for the self-publishing community that is growing on Amazon."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• The Secret to Red Hat's Billion-Dollar Success: Everyone's The Boss (Linux Today)
  BusinessInsider: When Red Hat's new top strategy woman, Jackie Yeaney, joined the company six months ago, she hit culture shock.
• Higgs Signal Gains Strength (Slashdot)

  
  

  ananyo writes "Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers (here here and here) boost the case for December's announcement of a possible Higgs signal. Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2.5 sigma to 3.1 sigma. Taken together with data from the other detector, ATLAS, Higgs' overall signal now unofficially stands at about 4.3 sigma."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

• MIT Crowdsources and Gamifies Brain Analysis (Slashdot)

  
  

  MrSeb writes "There are around 100 billion neurons in a human brain, forming up to 100 trillion synaptic interconnections. Neuroscientists believe that these synapses are the key to almost every one of your unique, identifiable features: Memories, mental disorders, and even your personality are encoded in the wiring of your brain. Understandably, neuroscientists really want to investigate these neurons and synapses to work out how they play such a vital role in our human makeup. Unfortunately, these 100 trillion connections are crammed into a two-pound bag of soggy flesh, making analysis rather hard. Starting small and working its way up, MIT today launched Eyewire, a crowdsourced 'game' that tasks users with wiring up the neurons in a mouse's retina. A future stage of the game will get users to find the synapses, too."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• Lasers plus a crushing magnetic field may make fusion more efficient (Ars Technica)

  

  Ever since I first heard about the idea, I have loved inertial confinement fusion. The basic concept involves blowing stuff up with lasers to get some energy, then doing it again and again as fast as possible. What more could a 38-going-on-5-year-old want? Well, what I might also want is a fusion reaction that generates more energy than you put in to it.

  One thing that lets me down about inertial confinement fusion is that the implosion that gets the fusion reaction going also acts to stop the fusion. One idea for improving the fusion reaction that has been floating around for a while is to use magnetic fields in place of lasers to increase the efficiency of the fusion burn. But until recently, no one could figure out how to make it work properly.

  

  Read the comments on this post

  
  

  
• Researchers boost processor performance by getting CPU and GPU to collaborate (Ars Technica)

  

  Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a technique to take advantage of the "fused architecture" emerging on multicore CPUs that puts central processing units and graphics processing units on the same chip. The technology, called CPU-assisted general purpose computation on graphics processor units (CPU-assisted GPGPU) uses software compiled to leverage the architecture to allow the CPU and GPU to collaborate on computing tasks, boosting processor performance on average by more than 20 percent in simulations.

  

  Read the comments on this post

  
  

  
• The three patents Microsoft is hammering the Nook with—and why they may be invalid (Ars Technica)

  

  Microsoft's complaint against Barnes & Noble's Android-based Nook devices has been narrowed down to just three patents, with the US International Trade Commission having to decide whether Nook devices infringe on several patented methods of interacting with and downloading electronic documents. Barnes & Noble is also asking the ITC to declare the patents invalid because they cover obvious and trivial functionality.

  Microsoft's ITC complaint, which was filed in March 2011 and targets Foxconn and Inventec in addition to Barnes & Noble, cited five patents. One 1994 patent related to "new varieties of child window controls [that] are provided as system resources that application programs may exploit," and a 1997 patent related to how browsers load and display content in portable computers with limited display areas have since been dropped from the case.

  

  Read the comments on this post

  
  

  
• NGINX Adds Support for Open Source Web Server (Linux Today)
  ServerWatch: You too can get full support for NGINX for the low cost of only $70,000