Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Free tools in the EP
On Wednesday, November 7th I gave a presentation at a small event inside the European Parliament, organized by the European Parliament Free Software User Group (EPFSUG) which I’m a proud member of.
Here’s the event announcement, here’s the presentation, and here are the videos from the event.
Here’s an article about it on JoinUp and here’s Jonas Smedegaard’s blog post about it.
Let’s hope that something concrete and constructive will come out of this!
Apple patents infringed by Samsung
Apple brought three utility and four design patents to bear against Samsung. Patent number 7,469,381 is for the bounce back that occurs when you scroll beyond the edge of a webpage or document in iOS. Patent number 7,844,915 is for single-finger scrolling and two-finger zooming, while number 7,864,163 claims tap-to-zoom technology. As for the design patents, D618,677 claims the iPhone’s edge-to-edge glass, speaker slot and display border, while D593,087 claims its rounded corners and home button, and D604,305 claims the grid-style icon layout in iOS. The last design patent, D504,889 is for the iPad’s edge-to-edge glass, rounded corners, and thin bezel.
Source: http://m.engadget.com/2012/08/25/breaking-down-apples-1-billion-courtroom-victory-over-samsung/
Google’s 2-step verification
Google 2-step verification is a great step forward for security! It can be a little daunting at first, but once you have everything setup I think the increased security is well worth the effort spent.
What it does is basically to break the well-established paradigm of “one-account-one-password”. Instead, one account has multiple passwords, which are called “application-specific passwords“. The idea is that, e.g. if you setup to read your Gmail on your smartphone and then you lose it, you can revoke that password without having to change the password you use to read Gmail on your browser! These passwords are 16 characters long.
In addition to the application-specific passwords, you also have one-time passwords (called “verification codes“) that are used (in addition to your normal password) for signing into your account using a browser. These codes are 6 digits long. You can have them sent to you by SMS, or you can install the “Google Authenticator” app on your smartphone to have the verification codes generated by your phone each time.
Google 2-step verification:
http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/static.py?hl=en&topic=1056284&guide=1056283&page=guide.cs
Google Authenticator, the app that turns your smartphone into a token:
http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1066447
Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop 700
I bought the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop 700 and connected it to the Asus EeePC 701 that lives behind my TV and is connected to it for watching movies, youtube, etc. The Eee is running Ubuntu 10.10.
The Wireless Desktop worked out of the box, without any need for configuration (including all the “special” keys). It works at 27MHz. The advertised typical range is 3-3.5 meters, but in my case it’s more like 2 meters…
42
Here’s the scene from the Hitchhicker’s Guide:
And here’s the announcement of Ubuntu 10.10, which came out on 10.10.10 and is a perfect ten!
Some time ago a group of hyper-intelligent pan dimensional beings
decided to finally answer the great question of Life, The Universe and
Everything. To this end, a small band of these Debians built an
incredibly powerful distribution, Ubuntu. After this great computer
programme had run (a very quick 3 million minutes…or 6 years) the
answer was announced. The Ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and
Everything is…42, and in its’ purest form 101010. Which suggests that
what you really need to know is ‘What was the Question?’. The great
distribution kindly pointed out that what the problem really was that
no-one knew the question. Accordingly, the distribution designed a set
of successors, marked by a circle of friends…to ultimately bring Unity
to all things living…Ubuntu 10.10, to find the question to the
ultimate answer.And with that, the Ubuntu team is pleased to announce Ubuntu 10.10.
Codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”, 10.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition
of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a
high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.
screenlets abandoned
I was trying out screenlets (screenlets.org) and found a bug in the code that puts your IP in the “sysmonitor” applet. I was planning to submit a patch, when I realised the project is ABANDONED!!! The last release was 2 years ago, in June 2008. It seems there was some arguing, too.
Instead, it seems the code was adopted (read: forked) and the new name is Universal Applets. That code seems pretty stale, too.
Firefox PPAs
Apart from the updates coming to Firefox in the official Ubuntu repositories (updates, security, proposed, backports), there are also 3 PPA, sorted here in increasing order of risk:
canonical-census
FOSS in Piedmont
http://softwarelibero.it/Corte_Costituzionale_favorisce_softwarelibero_en
The region decided, the central government contested, the constitutional court confirmed!
Azitech 