Features
Free software has won: practically all of the biggest and most exciting Web companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter run on it. But it is also in danger of losing, because those same services now represent a huge threat to our freedom as a result of the vast stores of information they hold about us, and the in-depth surveillance that implies
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Criminals use various methods to camouflage the traces of their malicious software on the internet. However, their paths can be retraced using special tools to identify the vulnerability the malware exploited to enter a system
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Mandriva began life as Linux Mandrake in July 1998 in France in Gael Duval's bedroom after he ported a KDE 1.0 desktop onto Red Hat Linux 5.1, uploaded the result onto two FTP servers, went away on holiday, and came back to find that he had a popular and successful Linux distribution on his hands
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Linus Torvalds has released the first RC of Linux 2.6.34 and completed the integration of the next version of the kernel's most important changes. Improvements include graphics drivers for recent Radeon GPUs and for the graphics cores of some Intel processors that are only expected to be released early next year. Another new addition is the LogFS file system
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The H attended this year's CeBIT trade show on the world's largest fairground in Hannover, Germany and met up with a wide variety of people from the open source community, including free and open source software (FOSS) developers, project members and companies
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The development of Linux 2.6.34 has started and is causing heated discussions on the LKML. LWN.net has analysed Linux 2.6.32.9 for security fixes and found almost twenty of them. Linux-Libre removes proprietary files from the kernel, and new graphics drivers for Radeon cards offer numerous improvements
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Glyn Moody takes a look at the state of Android, at the worries that the platform is fragmenting and why it isn't a bad thing
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A promising open source driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware, a replication solution to prevent server down times, "ATA Trim" support and a host of new and improved drivers are some of the most prominent improvements in Linux 2.6.33
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The H Community Calendar presents the coming month's events in the UK's various open source, development, Linux, Unix and other communities, from multi-day conferences to user group get-togethers
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Palm’s directors of developer relations, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith say the mobile Web needs diversity and power - and an open source Facebook application
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In his new regular column for The H, Glyn Moody takes a look at Linux and asks if open source is really too open for its own good
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How can enterprise open source vendors nurture a community around their software? The H goes to the launch of BUG UK and looks at how Actuate is helping create BIRT User Groups
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The latest 4.4 release of the KDE Software Compilation offers far more than just stability and bug fixes: The developers have added a special new desktop for netbooks as well as new and improved desktop tools. They have also made major structural changes
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Is Android at odds with Linux after the removal of Android device drivers from the Linux source code tree or is this business as usual for the Linux community and nothing new? The H looks at the issues.
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FreeBSD is the most accessible and popular of the BSDs, has code at the heart of Darwin and Apple's OS X, and has powered some of the more successful sites on the Web, including Hotmail, Netcraft and Yahoo! In this health check, we look at the past and future of the "unknown giant"
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In the first of a new regular column for The H, Glyn Moody looks at the iPad: Most people seem to agree that the iPad is a slick piece of technology, and quite plausibly represents the next generation of computing devices. But many feel that the very qualities that make it so desirable also make it profoundly problematic, not least for free software
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While the term 'Linux' is often used to refer to a desktop or even a server installation of the kernel combined with a GUI and a range of applets and applications, the Linux Kernel is now being employed in an increasing number of smart devices. The resultant user experience often bears little resemblance to desktop Linux. Is it time to redefine what is and what isn't Linux? The H examines the issue.
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When people click on short URLs from services like bit.ly or tr.im, they don't always know where they'll land until they've actually arrived. The next generation of short URLs even go one step further
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Israeli vendor StartSSL offers free SSL server certificates that are valid for a year. This article explains how to apply for a certificate for a domain and install it on the server
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Microsoft have gone to some lengths to promote Moonlight with its underlying Mono technology as a viable alternative to Abobe Flash for use by the open source community. Despite their reassurances the suspicions that this is a Trojan horse tainted by Microsoft held patents persist.
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A look back at 2009, categorised by what The H thinks was a win, what we thought was a fail and what made us just say "Meh"
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If you yearn for the operating systems or arcade games of the past, and are willing to make the effort to bring them back to life, free and open source software is definitely the way to go. Green screens and might-have beens, operating systems and games, BeOS, Amiga OS or DOS can be relived and replayed through a host of emulators, simulators or rewrites in varying stages of completion
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Despite some downsizing in response to the fragile economic climate Novell have managed to keep up the pace of new development, being at the forefront of support for Moblin 2.0 and moving ahead with Pulse and Mono Tools. The H spoke to openSUSE's Community Manager Joe Brockmeier for his views on the recent changes at Novell and his take on the future of openSUSE
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Android developers gathered in London at droidcon London 2009 and The H went along to listen out for what's hot and what's not in the open source phone operating system
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Fedora 12, Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010 and FreeBSD 8.0 are now with us. Work on spring releases of the major Linux distributions is at full steam. There are interesting developments at search engine giant Google, which is now mixing it in the operating system sector with Chrome OS, and at Ulteo, which, in addition to executing Linux applications, also brings Windows applications to the Linux desktop
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