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Adobe Pushes DRM for Flash

The Gnash video player site mentions efforts by Adobe to add DRM capabilities to the next version of Flash. "The immense popularity of sites like YouTube has unexpectedly turned Flash Video (FLV) into one of the de facto standards for Internet video. The proliferation of sites using FLV has been a boon for remix culture, as creators made their own versions of posted videos. And thus far there has been no widespread DRM standard for Flash or Flash Video formats; indeed, most sites that use these formats simply serve standalone, unencrypted files via ordinary web servers. Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software."

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Trade Shows and Conferences

KDE Rocks FOSDEM 2008 (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers the KDE presence at this year's FOSDEM conference. "The combined KDE/Amarok booth and developer room at the annual Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brusssels was a great experience (as usual!). Many people showed up from the KDE and Amarok communities, and we had a hard time fitting all our cool hardware and people in the booth. Luckily, the talks drew quite a crowd, and the booth became less busy as the day progressed. Read on for an overview of FOSDEM 2008 from the KDE perspective."

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Companies

Adobe to deliver AIR for Linux (eWeek)

eWeek reports on Adobe's plans to release Adobe Integrated Runtime for Linux. "Adobe Systems hopes to make nice with the open-source community and soon deliver a Linux version of its newly released Adobe Integrated Runtime. Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer at Adobe, said the company is working on a Linux version of AIR, a run-time that lets developers use proven Web technologies to build RIAs (rich Internet applications) that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems."

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Sun Hires Python Experts (eWeek)

eWeek reports that Sun Microsystems is hiring Python developer Ted Leung and Jython lead implementer Frank Wierzbicki. "Leung and Wierzbicki join other technologists, such as Ian Murdock, Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo and Nick Kew, who have recently joined Sun to pursue open-source project development and community activities. Murdock is the founder of the Debian Linux project, Nutter and Enebo are lead developers on the JRuby effort to create an implementation of Ruby on the JVM, and Kew is involved in a variety of ASF technologies and is working on OpenSolaris at Sun."

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Linux at Work

Fedora on the Final Frontier (MadRhetoric)

Fedora developer Jack Aboutboul had the opportunity to visit NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the US). This blog post covers a day at NASA, with lots of photos. "There has been a long standing rumor regarding NASA running Fedora which all of us in the Fedora community have been always intrigued by. Is it true? What are they doing with it there? Why don't they run RHEL. Fortunately enough, a couple of weeks ago, I got to experience NASA behind the scenes, first hand, and hang out with the coolest members of the Fedora community, and find out the answer to these questions and lots more."

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New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations (Digital Life)

Digital Life reports on a cluster based on Linux PlayStation3 platforms. "When the PlayStation3 was released in November 2006, Gaurav Khanna's wife braved long queues so he could be one of the first people in the US to get his hands on the gaming console. But the astrophysicist was not itching to burn some rubber in Gran Turismo or shoot hoops in NBA 07. Instead he wanted to build his own supercomputer. Mr Khanna now owns 16 PS3s, which spend their days simulating the activities of very large black holes in the universe for the physics department at the University of Massachusetts." (Thanks to Mark Tall).

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Legal

Germany's Highest Court Restricts Internet Surveillance (DW-World.de)

DW-World.de covers a ruling by Germany's Constitutional Court that limits police online investigations to the most serious cases. "Intelligence agencies will only be allowed to collect data secretly from suspects' computer hard drives if there is evidence that "legally protected interests," like human lives or state property, are in danger, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe announced." Here is the ruling (in German). (Thanks to Marc Mutz)

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Interviews

Interview with Vint Cerf, by Sean Daly (Groklaw)

Sean Daly interviews Vint Cerf for Groklaw. "Groklaw's Sean Daly had an opportunity to meet Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, at OpenForum Europe last week. Mr. Cerf, known as the Father of the Internet because of being the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and the basic architecture of the Internet, was gracious enough to answer some email questions Sean propounded regarding the future of the Internet, standards in general, and OOXML in particular. Like many others this week, Cerf has been giving the standards process considerable thought, and he concludes in connection with OOXML that "Internet users deserve better handling of global Internet standards.""

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Reviews

Thunderbird 3.0 to begin ascent next month: what to expect (ars technica)

ars technica looks forward to Thunderbird 3.0, which has an alpha release due next month. "Thunderbird 3 will use Gecko 1.9, a new version of the rendering engine that serves as the foundation for the Mozilla platform. Gecko 1.9, which has also been instrumental in the making of Firefox 3, offers a number of very significant improvements, including a new Cairo-based rendering backend and support for JavaScript 2. Improving the Thunderbird user interface is another very high priority for version 3."

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Creating rich Internet applications on Linux with WebKit (ars technica)

Ryan Paul takes a look at WebKit. "The open-source WebKit HTML rendering engine is rapidly gaining ground on the Linux platform where it is increasingly being adopted by conventional desktop applications for content display. Ongoing efforts to facilitate tighter WebKit integration are opening the door for developing rich Internet applications on Linux with the open-source GTK and Qt development toolkits."

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Miscellaneous

OOXML Fails to Get Majority Approval at BRM (Groklaw)

Groklaw reports that OOXML failed to get majority approval at the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) in Geneva. "Now it's the 30-day voting period, but Updegrove asks, if they never could discuss all the issues, which is the purpose of a BRM, what's the basis for a vote? And with the vast majority either voting to abstain or even refusing to vote as a protest, I think one may conclude this proposal didn't belong on the fast track, and it isn't getting the kind of support you would have thought it might, given all the muscle that has gone into the push to get OOXML approved."

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