kthreadd - Slashdot User

Submission + - Pushing back against licensing and the permission culture (tieguy.org)

Submitted by kthreadd on Wednesday January 30, 2013 @11:44AM

kthreadd writes: Luis Villa has an interesting discussion on the topic of not licensing at all, what he calls POSS or Post Open Source Software. With a flood of new hackers flocking to places like GitHub which doesn't impose any particular requirements for hosted projects, the future of Open Source may very well be diminishing. Skip licensing, just commit to GitHub. What legal ramifications will this have on the free and open source community going forward?

Submission + - CentOS 5.9 Released (centos.org)

Submitted by kthreadd on Thursday January 17, 2013 @11:40AM

kthreadd writes: The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 derivitive CentOS version 5.9 has been released just 10 days after its upstream provider. According to the release notes a number of changes have been made. New packages available in CentOS 5.9 includes for example OpenJDK 7 and Rsyslog 5. Several drivers have also been updated in the kernel which has been updated to version 2.6.18-348, including support for Microsoft's virtualization environment Hyper-V.

Submission + - Yet another Java zero-day exploit (pastebin.com)

Submitted by kthreadd on Thursday January 10, 2013 @05:50PM

kthreadd writes: Looks like there's yet another exploit for Java available on Pastebin. It affects the latest version of Java 7, whch is Java 7 update 10. An example exists that launches calc.exe on the victim's computer. Disable applets in your browser if you have Java installed.

Submission + - GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes (wordpress.com)

Submitted by kthreadd on Sunday November 11, 2012 @05:44PM

kthreadd writes: In a relative long blog post IgnorantGuru describes how projects like GNOME, GTK+, Unity and KDE have stopped focusing on the user and what repercussion that has on the Linux desktop.
I have never gotten into the KDE vs GNOME debates, so this is not GNOME bashing, nor, as you’ll soon see, are these systemic development problems limited to GNOME. Yet what I’m hearing is that with GNOME v3 the goal is to promote their “brand” and make it dominant, in part by greatly limiting what users can change on their own systems, and partly by breaking or simply removing whatever support they’re no longer promoting as ‘The Way’. The reach of this selfish and narrow-sighted development goes beyond GNOME and affects GTK apps in general.
The Linux desktop has for long been composed of several interchangeable and combinable components. This means that every Linux desktop does not necessarily look and feel exactly the same, giving the user the choice to optimize the desktop to his or her preference.
Getting in deeper, not only are GNOME devs content to break their own desktop, but they want features removed from apps simply because GNOME no longer supports them!

It can be argued that Linux is not about choice and that backwards compatibility can not always be preserved. Hackers are free to use their time to do what they want to do, but when some of the most important projects prioritize their brand higher than the user it is time to think about what we are loosing as a community.

Submission + - Apple Fires VP of iOS Software After Mapgate (apple.com)

Submitted by kthreadd on Monday October 29, 2012 @06:35PM

kthreadd writes: Scott Forstall, the senior vice president of iOS software is leaving Apple due to the the massive problems with the Maps app in iOS 6. Forstall has been a key figure at Apple since the iPhone first appeared in 2007, known for his eager personality and resemblance to Steve Jobs. However the recent debacle around the iOS 6 Maps app was one misstep too much. This is a good opportunity for Microsoft and Google, both likely to hire the man with the insight into the future of iOS.

Submission + - GNOME 3.6 released (gnome.org)

Submitted by kthreadd on Wednesday September 26, 2012 @02:54PM

kthreadd writes: Mostly bug fixes and improved translations. New applications include Clocks and Boxes. Clocks is a world time clock, which allows you to keep an eye on what the local time is around the world. Boxes allows you to connect to other machines, either virtual or remote. For developers there's the new GtkLevelBar widget in GTK+, and GtkEntry can now use Pango attributes.

Submission + - Man moves to US and is told to repurchase all apps (wordpress.com)

Submitted by kthreadd on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @01:54AM

kthreadd writes: Andreas Fredriksson describes the downside of app stores when moving between countries:

I recently moved from Sweden to the US. Now that my bank is here in the US, I switched my Apple account over to the US region.

Doing so made everything under “Purchases” and “Updates” disappear in the Mac App Store. After a long frustrating email exchange I was told by the App Store support that apps are tied to a region, so if you have downloaded an app in one region it’s forever tied to that region. Their message was: You have to keep your account in the Swedish region to receive updates. Note that this applies even to free stuff like Twitter!

Submission + - Minecraft creator sued for patent infringement (twitter.com)

Submitted by kthreadd on Saturday July 21, 2012 @09:19AM

kthreadd writes: Minecraft creator Mojang has been sued by patent troll Uniloc. Game over?

Submission + - Google acquires Sparrow (sparrowmailapp.com)

Submitted by

kthreadd

on Friday July 20, 2012 @02:43PM

kthreadd writes: "The makers of the popular Mac and iOS email client Sparrow just announced that they have been acquired by Google. This will likely mean that better email handling will go into Android."

Submission + - GRUB 1.99 released with support for ZFS and BtrFS (gnu.org) 1

Submitted by kthreadd on Monday May 16, 2011 @02:44AM

kthreadd writes: GNU GRUB has been updated to version 1.99. Among the many improvements are support for two new filesystems, BtrFS and ZFS. For Linux users this means that it's now possible to move to BtrFS entirely and not use it only for non-bootable volumes.

Submission + - LLVM Debugger Subproject Sees Light of Day (llvm.org)

Submitted by kthreadd on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @04:38PM

kthreadd writes: The LLVM project is now working on a debugger called LLDB which is already faster than GDB and could be a possible alternative in the future for C, C++ and Objective-C developers. With the ongoing success of Clang and other LLVM subprojects is the days of GNU as the mainstream free and open development toolchain passé?

Submission + - Security hole in Linux kernel by null pointer (h-online.com)

Submitted by kthreadd on Wednesday November 04, 2009 @09:18AM

kthreadd writes: A null pointer dereference in the Linux kernel can lead to a root exploit when releasing a mutex to early, but only if mmap_min_addr is set to zero.
However, like previous null pointer dereference issues in the Linux kernel, the vulnerability can only be exploited if the kernel's mmap_min_addr system variable is set to 0. mmap_min_addr describes the lowest virtual address a process can use for mapping. If it is greater than 0, exploits that involve a null-valued pointer to this address won't work. However, as this will also cause certain open source applications like Wine and DOSEMU to malfunction, distributors such as Red Hat and Debian set the respective value to 0 by default. Red Hat has already released updated packages to close the hole. Debian offers instructions on how to change the variable. In Ubuntu, mmap_min_addr is set to 65535, which renders exploits ineffective.

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