Not being content with the state of open source graphics drivers for Linux, a developer working for Texas Instruments has reverse-engineered his competitor's (Qualcomm) driver and written an open-source Snapdragon driver. With being tainted by legal documents at Texas Instruments, the developer who is also involved with Linaro, had no other choice but to work on an open source graphics driver for his competitor in his free time. The open source Qualcomm Snapdragon/Adreno driver is called Freedreno.

"Unfortunately, Cameron's declaration that the 'free flow of information' can sometimes be a problem, then an aberration, seems to have turned into a pillar of the UK government's 2012 agenda. Despite declaring early on in his term that internet freedom should be respected 'in Tahrir Square as much as Trafalgar Square', his government is now considering a series of laws that would dramatically restrict online privacy and freedom of speech." The United Kingdom's crippling nanny state culture reaches the web. A country in deep financial problems, facing pervasise social unrest, censors the web to prevent riots. Sure Cameron, make it so.

When I ask you to name the technology world's most secretive company, you'd most likely respond with 'Apple'. However, there's one other technology company that, while substantially smaller than the Cupertino giant, is quite possibly even more secretive: Valve.

AppleInsider, once one of the better Apple news sites, is rumouring that Apple CEO Tim Cook was spotted at Valve's HQ. Considering all the rumours Valve is working on a console (more fuel for the flames), this could potentially be interesting. As much as AppleInsider's story is being spread across the web - can anybody actually verify AI's story? It cites no sources, and could, for all we know, be completely made up. Anyone...?

Well paint me red etc. etc. girl scout. "Hotfile is determined to outlast Hollywood's ongoing crusade against file locker services. The company is defending itself against an aggressive litigation campaign that movie studios first brought against it over a year ago. Hotfile's case may be bolstered by a recent report which shows that the two most widely-downloaded files distributed through the popular file locker service are open source software applications."

"The United States' global trade representative has strongly criticised a perceived preference on the part of large Australian organisations for hosting their data on-shore in Australia, claiming it created a significant trade barrier for US technology firms and was based on a misinterpretation of the US Patriot Act." It is somewhat entertaining that Australian citizens are apparently more concerned about the crazy Patriot Act (the name alone is hurl-inducing) than US citizens are.

After two months of testing the release candidate, the Syllable project presents Syllable Desktop 0.6.7. The release notes detail many changes and additions, such as the first 3D functionality in Syllable (screenshot - the screenshot shows tearing because the demos are animating at full speed. This is an artifact of the screenshot process, not of the actual display). Other highlights include that REBOL 3 and Boron are now included and that the system is now prepared for the upcoming high-level Red programming language.

"Oracle's case against Google has evolved primarily into a copyright infringement suit over the past several months, and with the full trial scheduled to begin this coming Monday, the court is making an effort to get down to the nuts and bolts of copyright law. The judge issued an order last week requiring that both Google and Oracle provide their respective positions on a fundamental issue in the case: 'Each side shall take a firm yes or no position on whether computer programming languages are copyrightable'." Seems like an easy enough answer to me, especially since Oracle's example doesn't hold up at all - Oracle points to Klingon's custom glyphs to illustrate that a language can fall under copyright, but unlike Klingon, a programming language uses standard glyphs we all use every day. Arguing you can copyright that is borderline psychotic, and opens up a whole can of worms.

"Slashtop has released a $25 remote desktop client that brings the Windows 8 experience to the iPad. Aimed squarely at developers, the Win 8 Metro Testbed app offers support for Windows 8 Metro UI gestures in what appears to be a fast, low latency environment." It supports the Windows 8 gestures and all that, but of course, this is nothing more than remote desktop.

I don't actually have a reason for trying to build a Linux kernel with the CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT patch set. There's no way I can even measure the impact of it. Still, I felt like having a "real-time" Linux box, and set out to make one. Little did I know how difficult it would be to even get started.

"Former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov, who downloaded source code for the investment firm's high-speed trading system from the company's computers, was wrongly charged with theft of property because the code did not qualify as a physical object under a federal theft statute, according to a court opinion published Wednesday." This could be a huge deal, if it ever were to be upheld in higher courts. More specifically, "because Aleynikov did not 'assume physical control' over anything when he took the source code, and because he did not thereby 'deprive of its use', Aleynikov did not violate the ". Well paint me purple with white and red dots and call me a girl scout.

It looks like 2013 is finally going to be the year that we're going to see truly high resolution displays - according to Intel. Retina displays for laptops and desktops for everyone. Considering promises regarding HDPI have been thrown our way for years now, it's high time they became reality. As the article mentions, there's one interesting possible issue: Windows 8's desktop mode. How will it handle HDPI displays?

I would honestly serve at the altar of the person that did this. Keep the debugging information, but for the love of god, make your email client do something pretty and useful with it.

According to Trend Micro, BlackBerry 7 is the most secure enterprise-ready mobile operating system. "When it comes to individual platforms, the experts' analysis clearly points out that some operating systems are more mature than others. BlackBerry OS scores very highly across the board, clearly separated from the group of the three emerging consumer mobile platforms. Corporate-grade security and manageability make this platform the option of choice for the most stringent mobile roles."