Brief items
The Free Software Foundation Europe looks at a white paper from the German
Ministry of the Interior about "Trusted Computing" and "Secure Boot".
"
The white paper says that "device owners must be in complete control
of (able to manage and monitor) all the trusted computing security systems
of their devices." This has been one of FSFE's key demands from the
beginning. The document continues that "delegating this control to third
parties requires conscious and informed consent by the device owner"."
Full Story (comments: 2)
The Mozilla Foundation has released it's
2011
annual report in a "collection of boxes" format that reminds one of
a recent proprietary operating system release. "
In June 2012 we
released an update to Firefox for Android that we believe is the best
browser for Android available. We completely rebuilt and redesigned the
product in native UI, resulting in a snappy and dynamic upgrade to mobile
browsing that is significantly faster than the Android stock
browser."
Comments (1 posted)
Articles of interest
The November edition of the Linux Foundation Monthly Newsletter covers the
Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup, HP's platinum membership, open clouds,
and several other topics.
Full Story (comments: none)
James Bottomley's
UEFI
bootloader signing experience is worth a read...still a few glitches in
the system. "
Once the account is created, you still can’t upload
UEFI binaries for signature without first signing a paper contract. The
agreements are pretty onerous, include a ton of excluded licences
(including all GPL ones for drivers, but not bootloaders). The most
onerous part is that the agreements seem to reach beyond the actual UEFI
objects you sign. The Linux Foundation lawyers concluded it is mostly
harmless to the LF because we don’t ship any products, but it could be
nasty for other companies."
Comments (41 posted)
The New York Times describes the latest innovation from Apple: a page turning animation for e-readers. Not only is it astonishingly brilliant, it's
patented. "
Apple argued that its patented page turn was unique in that it had a special type of animation other page-turn applications had been unable to create.
[ ... ]
The patent comes with three illustrations to explain how the page-turn algorithm works. In Figure 1, the corner of a page can be seen folding over. In Figure 2, the page is turned a little more. I’ll let you guess what Figure 3 shows."
Comments (55 posted)
Andy Updegrove
covers
a press release from the Portuguese Open Source Business Association on
the government adoption of standard formats for documents. "
[T]he Portuguese government has opted for ODF, the OpenDocument Format, as well as PDF and a number of other formats and protocols, including XML, XMPP, IMAP, SMTP, CALDAV and LDAP. The announcement is in furtherance of a law passed by the Portuguese Parliament on June 21 of last year requiring compliance with open standards (as defined in the same legislation) in the procurement of government information systems and when exchanging documents at citizen-facing government Web sites."
Comments (1 posted)
New Books
No Starch Press has released "Python for Kids" by Jason R. Briggs.
Full Story (comments: none)
Calls for Presentations
There will be an Apache OpenOffice devroom at FOSDEM 2013, to be held
February 2. The call for talks is open until December 23. FOSDEM (Free
and Open Source software Developers' European Meeting) will take place
February 2-3, 2013 in Brussels, Belgium.
Full Story (comments: none)
Upcoming Events
linux.conf.au (LCA) has announced the first of four keynote speakers for
the 2013 conference. "
Andrew "bunnie" Huang is best known as the lead hardware developer of open-source gadget "Chumby"*, a device designed from the ground up as an open source gadget, complete with open source hardware, and whose designers encourage hackers to get into the device and make it their own. He is also the author of "Hacking the Xbox"^, a book about reverse engineering consumer products and the social and practical issues around doing so."
Full Story (comments: none)
Events: November 29, 2012 to January 28, 2013
The following event listing is taken from the
LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
November 29 November 30 |
Lua Workshop 2012 |
Reston, VA, USA |
November 29 December 1 |
FOSS.IN/2012 |
Bangalore, India |
November 30 December 2 |
Open Hard- and Software Workshop 2012 |
Garching bei München, Germany |
November 30 December 2 |
CloudStack Collaboration Conference |
Las Vegas, NV, USA |
December 1 December 2 |
Konferensi BlankOn #4 |
Bogor, Indonesia |
| December 2 |
Foswiki Association General Assembly |
online and Dublin, Ireland |
| December 5 |
4th UK Manycore Computing Conference |
Bristol, UK |
December 5 December 7 |
Qt Developers Days 2012 North America |
Santa Clara, CA, USA |
December 5 December 7 |
Open Source Developers Conference Sydney 2012 |
Sydney, Australia |
December 7 December 9 |
CISSE 12 |
Everywhere, Internet |
December 9 December 14 |
26th Large Installation System Administration Conference |
San Diego, CA, USA |
December 27 December 29 |
SciPy India 2012 |
IIT Bombay, India |
December 27 December 30 |
29th Chaos Communication Congress |
Hamburg, Germany |
December 28 December 30 |
Exceptionally Hard & Soft Meeting 2012 |
Berlin, Germany |
January 18 January 19 |
Columbus Python Workshop |
Columbus, OH, USA |
January 18 January 20 |
FUDCon:Lawrence 2013 |
Lawrence, Kansas, USA |
| January 20 |
Berlin Open Source Meetup |
Berlin, Germany |
If your event does not appear here, please
tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol