Announcements
Brief items
FSFE welcomes German Government's White Paper on "Secure Boot"
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"."
Mozilla Foundation 2011 annual report
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."
Articles of interest
Linux Foundation Monthly Newsletter: November
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.Bottomley: Adventures in Microsoft UEFI Signing
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."
Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times)
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."
Portuguese Government Adopts ODF (The Standards Blog)
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."
New Books
Python for Kids--New from No Starch Press
No Starch Press has released "Python for Kids" by Jason R. Briggs.
Calls for Presentations
Apache OpenOffice at FOSDEM 2013
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.
Upcoming Events
Chumby Co-Inventor to Keynote at LCA
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."
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 December 1 |
FOSS.IN/2012 | Bangalore, India |
| November 29 November 30 |
Lua Workshop 2012 | Reston, VA, USA |
| 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 December 7 |
Open Source Developers Conference Sydney 2012 | Sydney, Australia |
| December 5 December 7 |
Qt Developers Days 2012 North America | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| December 5 | 4th UK Manycore Computing Conference | Bristol, UK |
| 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 30 |
29th Chaos Communication Congress | Hamburg, Germany |
| December 27 December 29 |
SciPy India 2012 | IIT Bombay, India |
| December 28 December 30 |
Exceptionally Hard & Soft Meeting 2012 | Berlin, Germany |
| January 18 January 20 |
FUDCon:Lawrence 2013 | Lawrence, Kansas, USA |
| January 18 January 19 |
Columbus Python Workshop | Columbus, OH, 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