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Submission + - Mark Shuttleworth launches diatribe on FOSS Tea Party (markshuttleworth.com)

Submitted by slack_justyb
slack_justyb writes: Mark Shuttleworth sends his congrats to the Ubuntu developers and before going on a rambling about 14.04's name, takes aim at what he calls "The Open Source Tea Party".

Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what THEIR agenda is.

Citing that many other distros doing finger pointing at Mir have too also NIH (Not Invented Here) the heck out of standard stacks and even calls out Lennart Poettering's systemd, who is the past has pointed out Canonical's tendency to favor projects they control.. However, not all has earned Mark's scorn. Even going so far to show love for Linux Mint

So yes, I am very proud to be, as the Register puts it, the Ubuntu Daddy. My affection for this community in its broadest sense – from Mint to our cloud developer audience, and all the teams at Canonical and in each of our derivatives, is very tangible today.

While I can say that it is great that Ubuntu 13.10 has hit the download, it is doubtful that blindly ""not"" pointing fingers and calling them one of the more radical groups in America will win many supporters.

Submission + - Is Wikipedia for Sale? (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Insiders have encountered something altogether more worrying: a concerted attack on the very fabric of Wikipedia by PR companies that have subverted the online encyclopedia’s editing hierarchy to alter articles on a massive scale—perhaps tens of thousands of them. Wikipedia is the world’s most popular source of cultural, historical, and scientific knowledge—if their fears are correct, its all-important credibility could be on the line... Adam Masonbrink, a founder and Vice-President of Sales at Wiki-PR, boasts of new clients including Priceline and Viacom. Viacom didn’t respond to my requests for comment, but Priceline—a NASDAQ listed firm with over 5,000 employees and William Shatner as their official spokesman—did. Sadly, Priceline didn't choose to respond to us via Captain Kirk; instead Leslie Cafferty, vice president of corporate communications and public relations, admitted, “We are using them to help us get all of our brands a presence because I don’t have the resources internally to otherwise manage.”

Submission + - Wikileaks Film "The Fifth Estate": Julian Assange Letter To Benedict Cumberbatch (theguardian.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: In a letter published by The Guardian, Julian Assange asked British actor Benedict Cumberbatch (of Sherlock Holmes/Star Trek Into Darkness fame) NOT to play him in the upcoming Dreamworks-produced Wikileaks biopic "The Fifth Estate". Assange made his case as follows: "I believe you are a good person, but I do not believe that this film is a good film. I do not believe it is going to be positive for me or the people I care about. I believe that it is going to be overwhelmingly negative for me and the people I care about. It is based on a deceitful book by someone who has a vendetta against me and my organisation. In other circumstances this vendetta may have gone away, but our conflict with the United States government and the establishment press has created a patronage and commissioning market – powerful, if unpopular – for works and comments that are harmful to us. There are dozens of positive books about WikiLeaks, but Dreamworks decided to base its script only on the most toxic. So toxic is the first book selected by Dreamworks, that it is distributed to US military bases as a mechanism to discourage military personnel from communicating with us. Its author is publicly known to be involved in the Dreamworks production in an ongoing capacity. Dreamworks' second rights purchase is the next most toxic, biased book. Published and written by people we have had a bitter contractual dispute with for years, whose hostility is well known. Neither of these two books were the first to be published and there are many independent authors who have written positive or neutral books, all of whom Dreamworks ignored."

Submission + - Guardian Ignores MI5 Warnings, Vows To 'Publish More Snowden Leaks' (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Summary from BBC article: Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger says he plans to publish more revelations from Edward Snowden despite MI5 warning that such disclosures cause enormous damage. Mr Rusbridger insisted the paper was right to publish files leaked by the US intelligence analyst and had helped to prompt a necessary and overdue debate. Mr Rusbridger said more stories would be published in the future as the leaked documents were "slowly and responsibly" worked through. His comments come after criticism from the new head of MI5, Andrew Parker. Making public the "reach and limits" of intelligence-gathering techniques gave terrorists the advantage, he said. He warned that terrorists now had tens of thousands of means of communication "through e-mail, IP telephony, in-game communication, social networking, chat rooms, anonymising services and a myriad of mobile apps". Mr Parker said it was vital for MI5 to retain the capability to access such information if it was to protect the country. Mr Rusbridger said those on the security side of the argument wanted to keep everything secret and did not want a debate. "You don't want the press or anyone else writing about it. But MI5 cannot be the only voice in the debate," he told BBC Radio 4's World at One. He added that his newspaper had revealed the "extent to which entire populations are now being potentially put under surveillance". "I just spent a week in America where everybody is talking about this, from the president down." Asked about Mr Parker's suggestion that publishing the documents was helping terrorists, Mr Rusbridger said: "They will always say that. You read histories of intelligence and you go back to the 1990s and the security people were saying the same."

Submission + - NSA Data Center Suffers Meltdowns, Is Delayed By A Year (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: A massive data center being built by the National Security Agency in Utah, and which is expected to be the NSA's main facility for storing, decrypting and analyzing the vast amounts of data it collects through its surveillance programs, has been plagued by 'chronic electrical surges' that have destroyed equipment and delayed its opening for a year, according to a report Monday. The facility has suffered 10 such 'meltdowns' in the past 13 months that destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of machinery.

Submission + - Blackhole Exploit Author Arrested In Russia (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: Reports that the author of the Blackhole exploit kit has been arrested in Russia have been confirmed. The creator, called Paunch,has been nabbed, according to Troels Oerting, head of the European Cybercrime Centre. Blackhole was being updated daily until four days ago, which is more evidence of the arrest — although security researchers warn there are still functioning versions out there.

Submission + - AMD Radeon R7 260X, Radeon R9 270X, and Radeon R9 280X Launched, Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD is officially launching their Radeon R7 and R9 series graphics cards today, with three new midrange to high end boards that are optimized for performance, cost and power. The Radeon R9 280X is built around AMD’s Tahiti GPU, which also powers the Radeon HD 7970. The R9 270X features the same GPU core as the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition and the Radeon R7 260X is powered by AMD’s Bonaire GPU, which first arrived on the Radeon HD 7790. These new cards, however, have been tweaked and enhanced in a number of ways. The Radeon R7 260X sports higher engine and memory clocks than the HD 7790 and 260X’s default memory configuration is 2GB as well. The R9 270X’s clocks have been goosed up as well with a GPU clock that peaks at 1.05GHz and its memory clock has been increased to an effective 5.6Gbps. The Radeon R9 270X offers slightly higher compute performance but much more memory bandwidth--179.2GB/s vs. 153.6GB/s to be exact. Finally, the Radeon R9 280X isn’t clocked higher than AMD’s current flagship Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. In fact, the R9 280X has a slightly lower peak engine clock, though memory bandwidth is similar. All told, AMD's new Radeons offer competitive performance to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost, GeForce GTX 760 and GeForce GTX 770 cards but at significantly better price points.

Submission + - New Snowden Revelation: Canadian Spies Targeted Brazil (enquirerherald.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Enquirer Herald reports, "A Brazilian television report that aired Sunday night said Canadian spies targeted Brazil's Mines and Energy Ministry. The report on Globo television was based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and was the latest showing that Latin America's biggest nation has been a target for U.S., British and now Canadian spy agencies. The report said the "metadata" of phone calls and emails from and to the Brazilian ministry were targeted by Canada's Communications Security Establishment to map the ministry's communications, using a software program called Olympia. It didn't indicate if emails were read or phone calls listened to. Brazilian Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao told Globo that "Canada has interests in Brazil, above all in the mining sector. I can't say if the spying served corporate interests or other groups." " — More at the CBC.

Submission + - Microsoft Launches Open Source Tool For Testing JavaScript Across Browsers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today launched BrowserSwarm, an open source tool to help Web developers automate testing of their JavaScript frameworks and libraries across devices and browsers. To take advantage, all you have to do is sign up for free here. Microsoft’s pitch is simple: quality frameworks are the foundation for the modern Web, but framework developers often don’t have the resources to test across browsers. As such, BrowserSwarm aims to save them time and server resources by letting the cloud take care of the heavy lifting: no need to set up multiple-browser and device testing environments.

Submission + - GMail Chat/GTalk sending chats to wrong recipients

Submitted by mystikkman
mystikkman writes: In what is a serious bug, GMail Chat/GTalk/Google Hangouts is sending messages to unintended recipients. ZDNet has confirmed first-hand that the glitch is present within Google Apps for Business accounts, including those that have not yet switched over to Google's new Hangouts platform. Messages appear to be visible on the mobile version of Hangouts. There are multiple reports of this issue.

Submission + - Should Android Worry About CyanogenMod's Deal With Oppo? (gizmobeast.com)

Submitted by jarold
jarold writes: In barely a week of being incorporated, it appears that CyanogenMod has found a partner. It is beginning in its quest to become the third largest operating system in the world, after Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Steve Kondik, founder of CyanogenMod appeared in an Oppo N1 trailer, stating that he is attending the smartphone’s launch in Beijing on September 23, 2013 and hints of “exciting news ahead”.

After becoming a company, when it secured $7 million funding from Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures, it laid out a plan to become an official operating system and not just a custom Android software developer.The free and open source software has, reportedly, been installed on about eight million Android devices.
If the deal between Cyanogen Inc. and Oppo, it will boost the latter’s efforts in making it’s smartphone segment known to a wider audience. The major product lines of Oppo Electronics Corp include MP3 players, portable Media players, LCD-TVs, eBooks, DVD/Blu-ray Disc players. It entered the mobile phone venture with its flagship Find 5. A new smartphone called N1 is expected to unveil today.

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