Category: Computers, Science & Technology

People like personal choice and freedom. Every time a big company, or government, any large entity, pushes something on folks… they get up in arms and take on ‘da man!’

Well, that is certainly happening with Google’s forced integration of YouTube and Goggle +!

Forced Google Plus integration on YouTube backfires, petition hits 112,000

ZDNet – “Google’s war on anonymity during its involvement in NSA controversy has imploded as its move to force YouTube commenters to use Google Plus – and its unwanted ‘real name’ policy – has backfired.

On November 6, Google changed its YouTube property to only allow comments from Google Plus accounts, thus de-anonymizing commenters, as the principal element of its site-wide comments overhaul.

Google’s move to force Plus onto YouTube has outraged the YouTube community – and beyond.

YouTube user fury is fueling this anti-Plus petition with over 112,000 signatures, increasing by the minute. (Update November 17, 10:12am PST: over 167,000 signatures.)

Why am I unable to comment? I have been a YouTuber for 3 years and this is the kind of treatment we ‘originals’ [Before any of the G+ crap came in] receive for refusing to show our name publicly?

We want privacy. I do not want my full name on YouTube. I do not care for Google Plus either so stop shoving it in my face. [Nathan S, UK]”

(Cross-posted from VirtZine) Watch out Google! When you shut off projects like Google Reader, that folks depend on, you run the risk of them developing their own, private Google for home! (Somehow, I don’t think Google is losing sleep, but hey!)

This 23-year-old’s open-source project, a server running on Raspberry Pi

VentureBeat – “For most of us, Google shutting down Reader was annoying. For Jacob Cook, it was a call to arms.

He’s now building an operating system that anyone can use to replace all of the services that Google provides — or any other cloud company, for that matter. Email, chat, file sharing, web hosting: With Cook’s arkOS, you’ll be able to run all of those essential services on a secure, private server in your own home that’s about the size of a credit card.

‘Google, while it is a great service that has done wonderful things for the Web, is showing some troubling signs,’ Cook told me. ‘Their shutdown of Google Reader earlier this year means that none of the services [we] rely upon are sacrosanct if they are not profitable enough for them.’

ArkOS is a Linux-based server operating system that’s designed to run on the popular, diminutive Raspberry Pi hardware. (Eventually it will be able to run on other platforms, such as the BeagleBoard, or even full-size PCs.) Running on top of arkOS is Cook’s open-source Genesis application, which provides a web-based interface for controlling the different services running on your server. Genesis is open source, and all the files are available on GitHub, and you can also download the arkOS files and install them yourself. However, the project is still at an early, ‘alpha’ stage of development, so Cook advises against using it for any serious work just yet.

Cook, who is a 23-year-old university student, has started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money so that he can focus on arkOS full time. He’s hoping to raise $45,000 in the next 24 days, and has already collected $5,645 in pledges from over 100 backers. He has also created a legal entity, the CitizenWeb Project, to be the organization responsible for the project.

In addition to the long-term unreliability of Google’s services — the fact that they could shut anything down at any time if it no longer aligns with their business interests — the recent revelations that the NSA can access so much online data gave Cook’s project an additional impetus. If the NSA is able to extract data from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Twitter, and who knows what other services, who can you trust with your data?

‘The idea that the NSA and its global counterparts can have nearly free reign in the networks of these large companies makes users a target,’ Cook said. ‘Moving users out into self-hosted nodes makes sense from this perspective: It makes wholesale data collection many times more difficult. And when coupled with proper cryptography and secure setups by design, it makes NSA-style snooping practically impossible.’

The arkOS project, when it’s complete, will provide users with a small device they could plug into an Ethernet port at home in order to host their own cloud services. There are commercial alternatives, like PogoPlug, but PogoPlug only lets you host your own files — it doesn’t provide a comprehensive suite of Internet services, like website hosting, chat, email, and so forth. ArkOS will provide those services, with customizable levels of security so you can control who gets to access each one.

Other secure open-source operating systems exist as well, most notably Tails, which gives you a secure desktop environment to do your business. (It, too, is based on a version of Linux, and is pre-configured to use a range of secure applications, and relies on the Tor network for secure browsing.) But Tails is a desktop operating system, while arkOS is for servers.

‘If you host your data with arkOS then access it on your other computers with Tails, it’s a winning combination,’ Cook said.

Another potential limitation: Most home Internet service providers optimize their services for download speeds, not upload speeds — so you can stream video to your TV just fine, but hosting a big media library on an arkOS server might result in very slow performance if you’re trying to access it from outside your house. To address that, Cook said he’s working on ways of hosting arkOS remotely, through providers like DigitalOcean, so you could run an arkOS server in a data center but still have total control over it yourself and manage it through the same web interface.

Cook hopes to have the framework stable enough to use by March, 2014, and will continue adding features for the next year.

The project is based on his own experience as a Linux hacker and IT administrator as well as his academic interest in computer security. He admits that he doesn’t have deep cryptographic knowledge, but as he’s not building a new crypto system, that’s probably not a big problem. He’s also attracted a few people to contribute to the open-source system, but for now he seems to be the primary driver of it.

He may be just one young coder, but then Linus Torvalds was just a lone coder once, too.”

One Million PS4’s Sold Within 24 Hours!

Apparrently, they have a winner! Who said the game console is dead?

Sony sells over 1 million PlayStation 4s

“Sony’s PlayStation 4 is off to a hot start. Consumers in North America bought more than 1 million PS4s within the first 24 hours of the new $399 home video game console going on sale Friday. That’s the fastest start for a PlayStation system so far.

Shuhei Yoshida, president of Worldwide studios for Sony Computer Entertainment, posted the news on Twitter Sunday.

As often happens when a mass release of a high-tech product occurs, a few consumers get a lemon. Some PS4 owners reported that their new console would not output video and had a flashing light, entertainment news site IGN.com reported.

‘A handful of people have reported issues with their PlayStation 4 systems,’ Sony said in a statement to IGN. ‘This is within our expectations for a new product introduction, and the vast majority of PS4 feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We are closely monitoring for additional reports, but we think these are isolated incidents and are on track for a great launch.’

And the highly publicized release of PS4 attracted the attention of some thieves. Two men were arrested in Bakersfield, Calif., after robbing a customer of a PS4 outside a store, Yahoo News reported. And in Hutchinson, Kan., thieves broke into a home and took a PS4 in the early morning hours Saturday.”

Yes, you read that right! The premiere new gaming console runs FreeBSD under the hood. Win!

Sony’s new PlayStation 4 and open source FreeBSD: The TRUTH

The Register – “Sony has confirmed that its newgasmic game console the PlayStation 4 – on sale today in the US – uses a modified version of the open-source FreeBSD operating system.

In a license page on Sony’s Japanese site the company lists the software used by the PEW-PEW-PEW machine, and Unix-derivative FreeBSD features prominently. The PS4’s Orbis OS is based on the tech.

Speculation had surged in June that Sony had loaded a modified version of FreeBSD 9 onto its console after images leaked online of the console’s development environment. Sony’s no stranger to the open-source world: it’s PlayStation 2 programming kits were Red Hat Linux machines, although it’s infamous for dropping Linux support for the PS3.

The confirmation is arguably another win for the open-source world, and lines up with game vendor Valve’s plan to bring a console into people’s living rooms running a Linux-powered SteamOS.

Besides the daemon-logo’d FreeBSD kernel and related components, other open-source software used by Sony’s entertainment box includes OpenSSL, Protocol Buffers, Webkit, jQuery, and Lua. The FreeBSD software license allows the OS’s source code to be used freely by anyone provided acknowledge of the project’s copyright is noted in the product’s documentation along with the distribution terms and conditions.

Nintendo also uses open-source software in its Wii U games console alongside its proprietary Internal Operating System. Microsoft, on the other hand, appears to prefer purely its own home-grown code – namely the Xbox OS that was written from scratch for the original Xbox and the Xbox 360. The upcoming Xbox One will use the Windows kernel, Microsoft said.”

I was listening to the radio this morning, and the DJ mentioned that it had just turned: 08:09:10 11/12/13 How cool is that! An alignment of time! Dewd! Now if the planets were aligned at the same time, that would be the Day of the Doctor (Dr. Who 50th Anniversary Special!)

Thought exercise: “What if web browsers were guns?”

This is just so cool!

Note the venerable, old Netscape browser logo! That sure brings back memories!

And, of course, whatever you do, you sure don’t want to use Internet Explorer! ‘Nuff said!

Will expensive dSLR cameras go the way of buggy-whips?

Smartphones Destroying High-End Camera Sales

Information Week – “Smartphone makers such as HTC, Nokia and Samsung have made it a point to build powerful cameras into their mobile devices. Many of today’s leading smartphones offer not only high megapixel counts, but astounding software that lets them shoot in a wide variety of different modes. The appeal of camera-equipped smartphones has led to a decline in point-and-shoot camera sales for some time. Now it appears that these uber-devices are impacting sales of high-end, professional cameras, too.

Research firm IDC predicts that shipments of what it calls ‘interchangeable-lens cameras’ (or dSLRs) will drop 9.1% from 19.1 million last year to 17.4 million this year. At the same time, Canon and Nikon, the leading dSLR makers, have been forced to lower forecasts for the year. Further, Tamron, a third-party maker of lenses, saw shipments slump by as much as 22% during the first three quarters, according to The Wall Street Journal.

‘We are seeing tough figures at the moment, but I don’t think this will last forever,” said Nikon Chief Financial Officer Junichi Itoh. ‘There still is potential demand, and I think China is the key.’

Tamron knows it is in trouble. ‘Smartphones pose a threat not just to compact cameras but entry-level dSLRs as well,’ said general manager Tsugio Tsuchiya. Nikon and counterpart Canon blamed the slower shipments on a weak global economy, but that’s not the only factor at play.

In July, Nokia announced the Lumia 1020, a smartphone that boasts a 41-megapixel PureView camera. The camera features lossless zoom and controls that often match those of dSLRs when it comes to adjusting the behavior of the camera. Nokia has made no secret of the fact that it wants its powerful smartphone cameras to set Lumia-branded smartphones apart from the competition.

Last month, Apple introduced the iPhone 5s with an 8-megapixel camera. Apple took pains to improve the camera with a wider aperture and more sensitive sensor. The same is true of the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4, LG G2 and other top smartphones. Many of these device manufacturers pitch their phones as replacements for stand-alone cameras.

The phone makers aren’t alone. The app economy has risen to support smartphone-based imaging. Consider Yahoo’s Flickr. It has revised both its Android and iOS apps in the past 12 months and offers customers 1 TB of online storage for free. Then there are apps such as Instagram that make editing and sharing picture fun and social. Social networking sites, including Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, all place a premium on posts that include images. All three have worked hard to make it easy to share images online from smartphones. Combine good cameras with appealing software and the easy portability of smartphones, and you have a recipe for disaster as far as dSLR makers are concerned.”

Adobe had a HUGE password leak recently. How do you know if YOUR password was compromised? Well, you now have an email address checker that can tell you, it is at: https://adobe.cynic.al

Find out if you have been owned!

Did your Adobe password leak? Now you and 150m others can check

The Guardian – “Nearly 150 million people have been affected by a loss of customer data by Adobe, over 20 times more than the company admitted in its initial statement last week.

Owing to the proliferation of Adobe products in use throughout the world, from the Flash browser plugin, to the Acrobat software used to create PDFs, to the AIR framework used to make software like Tweetdeck and the BBC iPlayer desktop application, many users have Adobe accounts which they have since forgotten about (including 50% of the Guardian technology desk).

Using https://adobe.cynic.al, a tool created by programmer @Hilare_Belloc, users can check if their email address was included in the 10GB database leaked last week. If it isn’t, then they are safe, but if it is, then they need to seriously check whether they reused the password anywhere else – because it is as good as revealed.

Encryption error

As well as allowing the data to be stolen in the first place, Adobe made two other serious errors when storing the data. Firstly, it encrypted all the passwords with the same key; secondly, the encryption used a method which renders the encrypted data insecure.

The method, called ECB mode, means that every identical password also looks identical when encrypted. So if the database shows 1.9 million people whose password, when encrypted, reads ‘EQ7fIpT7i/Q’, then researchers know that they all have the same password. From there, they can look at the password hints, which Adobe didn’t encrypt at all, to try and guess what the password might be.

In this example, the hints include ‘numbers’, ’12’, ‘654321’ and ‘123456’. That last one is most likely the password itself; and so the 1.9m who used 123456 as their password have had it compromised.

There is no simple way to reverse the encryption, but “brute force” attacks can sometimes figure out what the key used to encrypt them is. That would mean that attackers would have a colossal store of emails and passwords which they could test on other sites around the web.

So even if a user’s password is unique, and the hint means something only to them, they should still consider their data at risk.

‘Clearly those users who chose longer, more complex passwords will be less at risk than those who chose common dictionary words or the most commonly chosen passwords,’ says Graham Cluley, a security consultant. ‘[But] let’s not forget that the hackers gained access to Adobe’s systems and stole product source code as well as the database. It’s quite possible that they also stole the keys that Adobe was using on its database – and so could have already unlocked the information.’

‘If your Adobe password is compromised, that possibly won’t have a huge impact on your online life. But if that same password is being used elsewhere on the net (and sadly, we know that many people use the same password for multiple websites) then the consequences could be significant.’

Ultimately, the leak is just the latest reminder of the risks of re-using passwords. ‘I think it would be best for people [affected] to change their passwords – and, if they were re-using them, to learn the lesson never to re-use passwords again.

‘You should never use the same password on multiple websites.'”

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Fedora is cool, hard to believe it is 10 years old! Time flies!

Fedora, Red Hat’s community Linux, turns 10

ZDNet – Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols – “Today, Fedora is one of the most beloved Linux distributions. Top Linux kernel programmers, including Linus Torvalds himself, use Fedora for developing the next generation of Linux. For Red Hat, Fedora’s parent company, Fedora is its road-map for its market-leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It didn’t start that way. When Fedora first launched, it was hated.

Why? Because in 2003 Red Hat had just decided to drop its low-end Linux desktop distribution, Red Hat Linux, in favor of its business distribution, RHEL. The users were not happy. Comments I heard at the time included, ‘Red Hat has betrayed Linux’ and ‘Red Hat wants to be the next Microsoft.’ One mid-major Linux company of the day, Progeny offered paid support for angry Red Hat Linux 9 users.

Red Hat made this move because it found itself on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, its most loyal fans wanted Red Hat to continue to be a fast-paced hacker Linux company, always turning out the latest stuff like all the other Linux firms of its day. Red Hat’s paying customers, however, wanted a rock-stable business distribution.

As Greg DeKoenigsberg, today the VP of Community for Eucalyptus Systems, an open-source cloud company, and an early Fedora project leader, said, ‘We had a product in Red Hat Linux that was trying to perform two duties at the same time: It was trying to be enterprise software and it was trying to be cutting edge, ‘release early, release often’ software. Once the business realized that these were two conflicting goals they made the move to splitting the two.’

Fun or money? Which would you choose?

Red Hat made its decision to go for the gold. They were right to do so. In 2012, Red Hat became the first billion dollar Linux company. With the exception of SUSE, the other major Linux companies of the early 21st century, Caldera, MandrakeSoft (later Mandriva), Lindows, etc. have either disappeared or are a shadow of their former selves.

At the same time, Red Hat did not want to lose its strong developer community. So, with the help of its community, noteably Warren Togami who first created Fedora as a community Red Hat software-package repository, and Bill Nottingham, the first Fedora leader, Fedora Core was born. It would become the first successful commercially-sponsored community Linux distribution. This combination of a business distribution and a pure open-source one would become a popular open-source business model. In 2007, Red Hat merged Core with another community Linux project, Extra, to form the Fedora you know in 2013.

Today, ten years after Red Hat decided to have both a business Linux and a community Linux, Fedora is the most popular technical Linux of them all. Its cutting-edge code leads the way for many Linux developers.

Red Hat states on its site that ‘For 10 years, the Fedora Project has beaten the drum for the open-source world, delivering the latest features and technologies approximately every six months, thanks to the dedication of a diverse global community of contributors. Advancing technologies like virtualization, cloud computing, and software-defined everything, Fedora releases from Yarrow to Heisenbug have continuously pushed open source to new heights and addressed the most complex challenges of next-generation computing.’

As Michael Tiemann, Red Hat’s VP of Open Source Affairs, said, ‘We could not make the kind of big bets that we make with major updates of RHEL without … Fedora.’ Looking ahead, current Fedora leader, Robyn Bergeron, said in an interview, ‘For us in Fedora, I think it’s important for us to continue to evolve ways for people to find the OS a fruitful place for them to contribute.”

Happy birthday Fedora! And, here’s to another ten-years of Fedora, long may it innovate!”