Open Source Pixels

Proprietary vendors are using "anti-features", features that no user would ever want, to protect intellectual property, Benjamin “Mako” Hill, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the linux.conf.au open source conference last month. But IP protection is only one of several reasons vendors introduce such features into their products.

The problem itself appear to be in the kernel from version 6.06, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10. 7.xx versions are not affected . This is a serious problem because it could allow full system access among others.

I received quite a few comments this past week following the publishing of California IT Policy Letter 10-01 which formally establishes "the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in California state government as an acceptable practice." While many of my security colleagues offered words of caution following the announcement (and even a couple of "are you crazy" comments), most were pretty enthusiastic with remarks like, "Finally, enlightenment" and "It’s about time government joined the 21st century." As a security guy, I’ve been on both sides of the OSS fence at different times but I’ve come to the conclusion that anyone who doesn’t think OSS has a place in today’s business or government simply hasn’t been paying attention.

Monday, February 08, 2010 When Linux Nerds Choose Mates from the Windows Herd. Look…let’s face this together. Dating can suck. Now when you are young, it’s an adventure. One has relatively little "baggage", the emotional scars are few and the dating world is your oyster…so to speak. And you haven’t even begun to think about their therapeutic value yet. Ah, youth… But then you find yourself at midlife, choosing from a large pool of potential crisis’. So many to choose from. Maybe there is a divorce or two under your belt, some strong political or religious beliefs that are deeply ingrained, and oh yeah, there’s that messy incident with the hacking conviction… Those tend to narrow down the potential list of candidates for life-long bliss. Throw your use/obsession of Linux into the mix and what do you get? More than likely a room at your mom’s house and a NASA-level computer bank in her basement.

Sun used to boast that it was one of the largest contributors to open source. That’s being demonstrated now that Oracle has acquired the company. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, and subsequent layoffs, are having ripple effects on the open source community. The cuts are also hitting the GNOME accessibility (a11y) team and leading the project to think about the future of a11y efforts in GNOME.

Marave is a distraction-free editor with a full screen interface. Most of the time, you will see no interface at all, except your text. It supports live spell-checking, background music, keyboard feedback, and more.

Changes: Better theming, more feedback, and several bugfixes.

Release Tags: Major feature enhancements

Tags: Editor

Licenses: GPLv2

Ra is a testing utility that provides numerous abilities for testers such as report generation (in different formats), statistics gathering, flexible running of test scripts, and others.

Changes: If the ‘workspace’ directory does not exist, it will now be created. Documentation was updated.

Tags: testing framework, Unit test, Testing, Test Management

Licenses: BSD Revised, LGPL

nitro++ is a cross-platform, lightweight, and extremely fast C++ framework.

Changes: An error in the ‘thread_abstraction’ component was fixed. Two errors in the ‘xml’ component were fixed. Documentation was updated. Compilation scripts were updated. A ‘timer’ component was added. Compilation scripts for Cygwin and Unix platforms were fixed. One unit test was added. There were minor bugfixes and improvements.

Tags: C++, framework

Licenses: BSD Revised, LGPL

Ultimix is a framework for developing Web-based applications (CMS, portals, ERPs, etc.) It includes multi-language support, permits management, an MVC mini framework, package structure, a template engine, a Javascript library, a simple GUI library, a caching system, and CAPTCHA.

Changes: A security error was fixed in the ’security’ package. A small refactoring was undertaken and improvements made. The documentation was updated.

Tags: Web Framework, php framework, framework, frameworks

Licenses: BSD Revised, LGPL

Goggles Music Manager is a music collection
manager and player that automatically categorizes
Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, MP4, ASF, and Musepack
files based on genre, artist, album, and song. It
supports gapless playback, features easy tag
editing, and allows scrobbling tracks to last-fm.

Changes: The program is now more flexible about the HTTP return code in the last.fm scrobbler. A crash when pressing delete on "All Arists/Genres/Albums" was fixed. Minor cleanups were made.

Release Tags: Minor bugfixes

Tags: multimedia, Sound/Audio, Players, MP3

Licenses: GPLv3, GPL