RIM Shows Android Apps on PlayBook, Partners with Microsoft

Wireless 23 Comments
Research In Motion is holding its big event right now, BlackBerry World 2011, and some interesting things have already come out. First, RIM is entering into a rather pervasive partnership with Microsoft to make Bing the default through all levels of the BlackBerry operating system (includig the QNX-based one). Second, the first piece of videographic evidence of Android applications running on the PlayBook.
Read More

Sony Suffers Another Major Security Breach

Privacy, Security 41 Comments
"Nikkei.com on Monday reported that an online Sony gaming network has once again fallen victim to a cyberattack. This time, the attack may have exposed the credit card numbers of thousands of Sony customers from around the world. According to the report, over 12,700 customer credit card numbers were stolen during a breach of Sony’s online gaming network, Sony Online Entertainment. According to Nikkei.com, Sony discovered the possible attack on Sunday."
Read More

Jeff Johnson About to Fork rpm – Again

Linux 54 Comments
Like Britney Spears, Jeff Johnson did it again and decided to fork rpm once more. Following a week long outage of the main website, he announced on the Mandriva development mailing list the launch of rpm6.org, without giving much explanation. Without more information, some people speculate this was caused by an intrusive merge by a Mandriva coder without discussing beforehand, while some others speak of the heavy criticism due to the migration, which still causing issues after several months.
Read More

OpenBSD 4.9 Released

OpenBSD 9 Comments
OpenBSD 4.9 release is ready, now with enabled NTFS by default (read-only), SMP kernels can now boot on machines with up to 64 cores, maximum allocation size for i386 bumped to 2G, added support for AES-NI instructions found in recent Intel processors, further improvements in suspend and resume and much more.
Read More

Review: Qubes OS Beta 1

Linux 17 Comments
"Qubes OS comes from an elegant concept: if you can isolate functional components within disposable containers, and you can separate those components that can be tainted through their interaction with the outside world from the core subsystems, you stand a good chance to preserve the integrity and security of the base Operating System at the possible expense of needing to jump through some hoops to move data around the system. All in all it sounds like a good proposition if it can be demonstrated to be practical." Read the full review.
Read More

Attachmate Talks SUSE, Novell, openSUSE

  Submitted by sjvn SuSE, openSUSE 55 Comments
Attachmate now owns Novell and therefore, by extension, also owns SUSE and openSUSE. With Oracle currently doing everything in its power to thoroughly destroy what's left of Sun's open source commitments, scepticism abound about the future of SUSE, and more specifically of openSUSE. Attachmate's CEO has answered some questions about the future of SUSE and openSUSE, and as far as words go, it's looking good.
Read More

Amar Bose Donates Majority of Bose Stock to MIT

In the News 37 Comments
Between all this bickering over who's peniphone is the largest best, it's always nice to be able to post a positive story, a story which shows that for every abusive company, there's one that shows the world just how it's done. This time, it's Bose. Founder and primary stockholder of Bose, Amar G. Bose, has donated a large number of non-voting shares of the company to MIT, where he spent his university career. Dividends over these shares will be paid each year to MIT, which will use it for research and educational purposes.
Read More

Google Cuts Back Free Google Apps User Limit

Google 23 Comments
In a move touted as one to "make Apps easier to adopt and manage", Google has announced that it will reduce the number of free users from 50 down to just 10 before businesses have to sign up for its paid service. This follows a previous reduction from 100 to 50. Google claims that existing users won't be affected, but we'll just have to wait and see how long that lasts. And if you don't want your whole life tracked and sold off to the highest bidder by Google's "free" and "open" technologies but would like access to actual free or low cost services there is a decent article here that shines some light on your options.
Read More

Dutch Lower House Opposes Carriers Blocking Services

Internet 17 Comments
Well, this is a pleasant surprise. This weekend, we ran a story about the carrier situation in the The Netherlands. The largest carrier in The Netherlands has announced it's going to charge for services like IM and Skype, while the other two carriers were thinking about following suit. I stated I expected little from our politicians - but boy, turns out I was wrong. Basically the entire lower house - left to right, progressive to conservative - is not happy with the carriers' moves, and are now exploring options to prohibit them from implementing their plans - including the option to embed net neutrality in our telecommunications act. Go go... Politicians?!
Read More

Apple Responds to Location Issue

Apple 22 Comments
Apple has responded to the location data thing, and as it turns out, most of us moderate folk were completely right. Apple claims the data isn't sent to Apple, and that the storing of the information is a bug Apple will fix in the coming weeks. Still a very nasty and potentially dangerous bug, but not the massive privacy issue many made it out to be. Also, a new colour iPhone is out, which, if you were to believe the gadget and Apple sites, is yet another Apple revolution.
Read More

DragonflyBSD 2.10 Released

  Submitted by foldingstock BSD & Darwin 10 Comments
This release supports a much larger variety of hardware and multiprocessor systems than previous releases, thanks to updates of ACPI and APIC and ACPI interrupt routing support. Hammer volumes can now deduplicate volumes overnight in a batch process and during live operation. The 'hammer dedup-simulate' command can be used to estimate space savings for existing data. DragonFly now uses gcc 4.4 as the default system compiler, and is the first BSD to take that step. DragonFly now offers significant performance gains over previous releases, especially for machines using AHCI or implementing swapcache(8).
Read More