Slashdot Mirror
Domain: digitizor.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to digitizor.com.
Stories · 62
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Facebook Says That Google+ Has No Users
dkd903 noticed another amusing shot in the battle between G+ and Facebook. CNN is running a story where Facebook's director of game partnership Sean Ryan basically says Google+ has no users. The article is mostly about casual gaming on social platforms, which I am really sick of individually blocking. -
Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME 3 For Xfce
kai_hiwatari writes "In Google+, Torvalds criticized the direction that GNOME has taken with GNOME 3. He called GNOME 3 an 'unholy mess' and said that the user experience is unacceptable, adding that because of GNOME 3, he has ditched GNOME for Xfce. He said that Xfce is a step down from GNOME 2 — but a huge step up from GNOME 3." -
Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME 3 For Xfce
kai_hiwatari writes "In Google+, Torvalds criticized the direction that GNOME has taken with GNOME 3. He called GNOME 3 an 'unholy mess' and said that the user experience is unacceptable, adding that because of GNOME 3, he has ditched GNOME for Xfce. He said that Xfce is a step down from GNOME 2 — but a huge step up from GNOME 3." -
Ubuntu One Hits the Million Users Mark
dkd903 writes "Roberta Nilerud of Canonical has announced that their cloud storage service – Ubuntu One – has hit the one million users mark. Ubuntu One is a cloud storage service from Canonical that is very tightly integrated into Ubuntu. Although Ubuntu One is installed by default in Ubuntu, it is also available on Windows and Android." -
Ubuntu One Hits the Million Users Mark
dkd903 writes "Roberta Nilerud of Canonical has announced that their cloud storage service – Ubuntu One – has hit the one million users mark. Ubuntu One is a cloud storage service from Canonical that is very tightly integrated into Ubuntu. Although Ubuntu One is installed by default in Ubuntu, it is also available on Windows and Android." -
Debian Wheezy To Have Multi-Architecture Support
dkd903 writes "Debian has announced they are introducing support for multiarch in Debian Wheezy. Multiarch support means a Debian system will be able to install and run applications built for a different target system." -
Boot To Gecko – Mozilla's Web-Based OS
kai_hiwatari writes "Mozilla has launched a new project called 'Boot to Gecko.' The aim of this project is to develop a complete operating system for the open web. Unlike Google's version of a web-based OS — the Chrome OS — Mozilla's version is not aimed at netbooks. With Boot to Gecko, Mozilla is aiming for smartphones – and Android forms a part of their plan." -
Boot To Gecko – Mozilla's Web-Based OS
kai_hiwatari writes "Mozilla has launched a new project called 'Boot to Gecko.' The aim of this project is to develop a complete operating system for the open web. Unlike Google's version of a web-based OS — the Chrome OS — Mozilla's version is not aimed at netbooks. With Boot to Gecko, Mozilla is aiming for smartphones – and Android forms a part of their plan." -
8% of Android Apps Are Leaking Private Information
kai_hiwatari writes "Neil Daswani, who is also the CTO of security firm Dasient, says that they have studied around 10,000 Android apps and have found that 800 of them are leaking private information of the user to an unauthorized server. Neil Daswani is scheduled to present the full findings at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas which starts on July 30th. The Dasient researchers also found out that 11 of the apps they have examined are sending unwanted SMS messages." -
8% of Android Apps Are Leaking Private Information
kai_hiwatari writes "Neil Daswani, who is also the CTO of security firm Dasient, says that they have studied around 10,000 Android apps and have found that 800 of them are leaking private information of the user to an unauthorized server. Neil Daswani is scheduled to present the full findings at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas which starts on July 30th. The Dasient researchers also found out that 11 of the apps they have examined are sending unwanted SMS messages." -
Google To Discontinue Google Labs
kai_hiwatari writes "Today, Google has announced that they are closing down Google Labs. They say this will help them prioritize their product effort. Google says closing Google Labs means ending many of their experiments. However, not every experiment will be gone. Google will be incorporating the Labs experiments they have decided to continue in other product areas. Android apps such as Google Goggles, Google Listen etc. will continue to be available in the Android Market." -
Google To Discontinue Google Labs
kai_hiwatari writes "Today, Google has announced that they are closing down Google Labs. They say this will help them prioritize their product effort. Google says closing Google Labs means ending many of their experiments. However, not every experiment will be gone. Google will be incorporating the Labs experiments they have decided to continue in other product areas. Android apps such as Google Goggles, Google Listen etc. will continue to be available in the Android Market." -
Adobe Released 64-bit Flash For Linux
kai_hiwatari writes "Adobe has been taking quite a bashing from Linux supporters of late. First, there was the issue of them dropping AIR for Linux and then came the bashing because of the lack of updates on the experimental 64-bit Flash for Linux. Well, guess what! They have just released Flash 11 and it includes native 64-bit support for Linux as well. When they discontinued their experimental 64-bit Flash earlier this year, Adobe promised to release a 64-bit version of Flash for Linux when they release the next major version. They have kept that promise." -
Google+ Runs Out of Disk Space, Swamps Users With Notifications
dkd903 writes "Yesterday, many users of Google+ noticed Google spamming their inbox with multiple email notifications in very quick succession. Earlier today, Vic Gundotra, Head of Social at Google, explained what was causing it – Google ran out of disk space on the server that keeps track of notifications." -
Google To Rebrand Blogger & Picasa For Google+ Integration
dkd903 writes "Google plans to rebrand its photo-sharing platform Picasa and the blogging platform Blogger and will re-introduce them as Google Photos and Google Blogs. All this forms part of a massive feature addition to Google's new social network, Google+." -
Facebook Blocks Google+ App, Google Removes Twitter From Real Time Search
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook has blocked access to Friend Exporter, a Google Chrome application that helps users import their Facebook contacts into Google's new social network — Google Plus. " Meanwhile, reader dkd903 points out that Google has been busy removing Twitter from real time search, due to a contract expiry with Twitter." -
Ubuntu 11.10 & 11.04 To Support Apple AirPrint
kai_hiwatari writes "According to an email in the Ubuntu-Devel mailing list, AirPrint support is now available for Ubuntu 11.10 'Oneiric Ocelot' and Ubutnu 11.04 'Natty Narwhal' as well — although it is in the testing phase for now. Developer Till Kamppeter sent an email to the mailing list inviting testers to test out his patch that enables AirPrint in Ubuntu." -
US Congress To Use Skype For Video Teleconference
dkd903 writes "The US House of Representatives Committee on Administration has announced that Skype will be made available to the Members of Congress and their staff to improve efficiency and cut down on time spent traveling." -
KDE 4.7 RC Is Here: GRUB2 Integration, KWin Mobile
dkd903 writes "KDE 4.7 is almost here and brings along with it a number of features and performance improvements such as a better Dolphin with a faster file search, ability of KWin to run on Mobile devices, Grub2 integration in KDM and offline search support in the KDE virtual globe, Marble." Here's KDE's own announcement of the release candidate; the final release is planned for July 27. Reader jrepin quotes the KDE announcement: "With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing last-minute showstopper bugs and finishing translation and documentation that comes along with the releases." -
Google Chrome To Have Real-Time Communications
kai_hiwatari writes "Last month, Google released an open-source project called WebRTC which aims to enables Real-Time Communications capabilities in the web browsers through simple JavaScript APIs. Now, they have taken the first step towards having WebRTC built into Chrome. With WebRTC, developers will be able to build voice and video applications using nothing more than HTML and JavaScript. This is a powerful technology which can challenge services like Skype." -
Google Launches Search By Image
kai_hiwatari writes "At the Inside Search event being held at San Francisco, Google has announced a new addition to its search features — Search by Image. The Search by Image feature is something like Google's image search application for mobile devices — Google Goggles — but for the desktop." -
Mac OS X Lion Has a Browser-Only Mode
dkd903 writes "It turns out that there is a feature in OS X Lion which no one expected and was never announced at WWDC. The feature we are talking about is 'Restart to Safari.' As you might have guessed from the name, this feature makes it possible to restart the Mac into just the Safari browser and nothing else." -
Fedora 16 To Use Btrfs Filesystem By Default
dkd903 writes "According to proposals for Fedora 16, Btrfs will be the default filesystem used in that release. The proposal has been approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. In Fedora 16, the switch from EXT4 to Btrfs will be a 'simple switch' — it means that major Btrfs features such as RAID and LVM capabilities will not be forced onto users." -
Mozilla Labs Introduces the Webian Shell
kai_hiwatari writes "Mozilla Labs has introduced its concept of a desktop replacement called Webian Shell. The Webian Shell basically consists of a browser which will replace the traditional desktop, and web applications are given more importance than the native applications. Right now, the prototype of the Webian Shell is nothing more than a full screen browser with a dock which holds the tabs and the clock." The project's blog offers more about the ideas and underpinnings; there's even more on the home page of developer Ben Francis. -
World IPv6 Day On June 8
dkd903 writes "On June 8, 2011, around 300 websites will test the IPv6 readiness of the internet. The participating websites includes Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Bing. In preparation for the day, Google is notifying users to test if they are ready." -
Ubuntu 11.10 To Switch From GDM To LightDM
dkd903 writes "Earlier, during the Natty development cycle we reported that LightDM is being considered as a replacement for GDM. That did not happen for Ubuntu 11.04, but today it has been confirmed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Budapest that LightDM is finally replacing GDM in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric." -
Ubuntu Aims For 200 Million Users In Four Years
dkd903 writes "Delivering the keynote at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Budapest, Hungary, Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Canonical's goal is to have 200 million Ubuntu users in four years. Canonical has not officially provided any data on how many Ubuntu users there currently are — in fact, the number is quite difficult to track. However, according to Prakash Advani, a partner manager for Central Asia at Canonical, there are an estimated 12 million Ubuntu users." -
Firefox On Linux Gets Faster Builds — To Be Fast As Windows
dkd903 writes "Mozilla's Mike Hommey has announced on his blog that his team at Mozilla has finally managed to get the Linux builds of Firefox to use GCC 4.5 with aggressive optimization and profile guided optimization enabled. All this simply means that we can now expect a faster and less sluggish Firefox browser on Linux (both 32 bit and 64 bit systems)." -
Ubuntu 11.04, Slackware 13.37
Approximately one billion Slashdot readers wrote in to tell us today that one of two distributions had releases: the new Ubuntu sports the Unity interface, marking a 'radical departure' from its UI of old. Now the more ancient and bearded amongst you might be interested in Patrick announcing the latest Slackware release which clearly has the most 1337 version number to date. -
5 Out of 11 Crashed Unity In Canonical's Study
dkd903 writes "Today the results of the Default Desktop User Testing for Ubuntu 11.04 was published by Canonical's Rick Spencer. The test was done using 11 participants from different backgrounds to test the new Unity interface that Ubuntu 11.04 will have." Though the Unity interface in the upcoming Ubuntu is a moving target, the bad news from this test is that about half of the testers managed to crash it. -
5 Out of 11 Crashed Unity In Canonical's Study
dkd903 writes "Today the results of the Default Desktop User Testing for Ubuntu 11.04 was published by Canonical's Rick Spencer. The test was done using 11 participants from different backgrounds to test the new Unity interface that Ubuntu 11.04 will have." Though the Unity interface in the upcoming Ubuntu is a moving target, the bad news from this test is that about half of the testers managed to crash it. -
Firefox 4, A Day Later
Yesterday we noted that Firefox 4 is out in the wild. Since then, the popular browser has been downloaded 6 million times, double the numbers reported for MSIE9. Now the development team is talking about a new development process and what to expect for FF 5 and 6. And unsurprisingly, naysayers proclaim that IE will survive, while Firefox will die. -
Facebook Launches Social Login and HTTPS
dkd903 writes "Facebook has introduced two new features. First is a really innovative way to verify real users rather than using CAPTCHAS. Using the Social Login feature (or Social Authentication as Facebook calls it), users will be shown a few pictures of their friends and then they will be asked to name the person in those photos. They've also launched HTTPS. The company says: 'Starting today we’ll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS. You should consider enabling this option if you frequently use Facebook from public Internet access points found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools.'" -
Fedora 15 Changes Network Device Naming Scheme
dkd903 writes "Fedora developer Matt Domsch has announced that Fedora 15 is breaking the conventional ethX naming scheme used for Ethernet devices by adopting a new scheme called Consistent Network Device Naming. The ethX naming scheme works fine as long as the system has only one Ethernet port. However if there are more than one Ethernet ports, the actual problem starts." -
Trend Micro Chairman Says Open Source Is a Security Risk
dkd903 writes "Steve Chang, the Chairman of Trend Micro, has kicked up a controversy by claiming that open source software is inherently less secure than closed source. When talking about the security of smartphones, Chang claimed that the iPhone is more secure than Android because being an open-source platform lets attackers know more about the underlying architecture." This comes a week after Trend Micro released a mobile security app for Android. -
VLC For Android May Arrive In Early 2011
dkd903 writes "The development of an Android client for VLC has been going on for months now, but it has been slowed down by the fact that Android's multimedia output libraries are in Java. VLC itself is based on C and so translating them to Java is difficult and takes time. With the newer Android NDK, however, using native codes for Android apps has been becoming easier. So, the VLC developers have developed two basic modules for audio and video output based on the new NDK and most of the VLC libraries have been ported to Android." -
Debian 6.0 To Feature a Completely Free Kernel
dkd903 writes "The Debian Project has announced that the upcoming release — Debian 6.0 'Squeeze' — will have a completely free Linux kernel. This means that the Linux kernel which ships with Debian 6.0 will not have any non-free firmware. The Debian Project has been working on removing the non-free parts since the last two releases. With Squeeze, they are finally realizing that goal." -
OpenSUSE To Offer a Rolling Release Repository
dkd903 writes "While the rumors of Ubuntu moving to a rolling release have been brought to a halt, another major Linux distribution is looking to provide a rolling release. In a message to the opensuse-project mailing list, openSUSE developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a new project – openSUSE Tumbleweed. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed will provide a rolling release for those openSUSE users who wishes to have a rolling release. It will essentially be a repo containing the latest stable versions of the applications." -
The Pirate Bay Co-Founder Starting P2P-DNS
An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Bay Co-Founder, Peter Sunde, has started a new project which will provide a decentralized p2p based DNS system. This is a direct result of the increasing control which the US government has over ICANN. The project is called P2P-DNS and according to the project's wiki, this is how the project is described: 'P2P-DNS is a community project that will free internet users from imperial control of DNS by ICANN. In order to prevent unjust prosecution or denial of service, P2P-DNS will operate as a distributed and less centralized service hosted by the users of DNS. Temporary substitutes, (as Alpha and Beta developments), are being made ready for deployment. A network with no centralized points of failure, (per the original design of the internet), remains our goal. P2P-DNS is developing rapidly.'" -
Mozilla Plans Mobile App Store
dkd903 writes "Mozilla wants to make it big in the Mobile world and has revealed its plans for a unique mobile app store in its annual report — 'The State of Mozilla,' which was released recently. Mozilla has already brought the desktop Firefox experience to mobile devices as the Fennec browser, which was initially launched for the Maemo platform on Nokia N900. Mozilla has designed a prototype of a mobile app store and plans to call it a 'Open Web App ecosystem.' The aim is to create an open app store platform that would consist of apps that can run on all mobile devices: — A 'Mobile Device Independent' App Store." -
Microsoft Says Kinect Left Open By Design
kai_hiwatari writes "Around two week ago when Adafruit announced a bounty for developing an open-source driver for the Kinect, Microsoft made it clear that they didn't condone it. Now Microsoft seems to have realized the potential of their device and has made a U-turn. Alex Kipman, Xbox Director of Incubation, now says that they left the Kinect open by design. Kipman said, 'What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect, by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor.'" -
Internet Explorer 9 Caught Cheating In SunSpider
dkd903 writes "A Mozilla engineer has uncovered something embarrassing for Microsoft – Internet Explorer is cheating in the SunSpider Benchmark. The SunSpider, although developed by Apple, has nowadays become a very popular choice of benchmark for the JavaScript engines of browsers." -
Google Asks Users To Complain Against Facebook
dkd903 writes "A kind of war has been going on recently between Facebook and Google over a contact export issue. First, Google blocked Facebook access to the Gmail contacts API. To this, Facebook responded back with a new method to get Gmail contacts of a user (the download contacts option). And now Google has slapped back again at Facebook and asks users indirectly to file a data protectionism complaint against Facebook. When a Facebook user clicks on the Download Your Contacts button on the 'Facebook import contact via Gmail' page, the user is then redirected to a new page on Google's server, which looks something like this..." Can I just say that watching this is absolutely hysterical? -
33 Developers Leave OpenOffice.org
dkd903 writes "We all knew it would come to this, and it has finally happened — 33 developers have left OpenOffice.org to join The Document Foundation, with more expected to leave in the next few days. After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org fell into the hands of Oracle, as did a lot of other products. So, last month a few very prominent members of the OpenOffice.org community decided to form The Document Foundation and fork OpenOffice.org as LibreOffice, possibly fearing that it could go the OpenSolaris way." -
Windows 8 To Be Released In October 2012
dkd903 writes "Microsoft has been very secretive about the next version of its Windows operating system. After the success of Windows 7, everyone is very interested in the next iteration – Windows 8. A few leaks have been the only source of news about Windows 8 till now. However, a slip up from Microsoft Netherlands has put the release date in October 2012." -
Opera Embraces Extensions For v.11
dkd903 writes "Opera is one of the most solid browsers around. It is very fast, extremely customizable, and has a lot of functionality that others do not have. Opera is also a very strong supporter of Web standards; it was one of the first browsers to pass the ACID 3 test. However, Opera has always been confined to a relatively small user-base because of one critical thing — lack of extensions. Well, that is about to change — at least the extensions part. Today, it has been announced that Opera 11 will support extensions." -
Steam Not Coming To Linux
dkd903 writes "A rumor has been going around for about four months that Valve was working on a Linux version of Steam and this had a lot of people in the Linux community very excited. But, Valve has now officially killed the rumor. And it is not what people wants to hear – there is no Linux version of Steam in development. Doug Lombardi, the Marketing VP of Valve Corporation, in an interview, has put an end to all the rumors by saying that they are not working on Steam for Linux right now." -
Gmail Video Chat Now Available On Linux
borfast writes "If you use Gmail on Linux, you may have wondered when you would be able to use the voice and video chat that Windows and Mac users have enjoyed for quite some time. The wait is finally over; Google yesterday announced video support for Linux browsers. Now if only Pidgin could provide solid video chat functionality in their client..." According to the brief announcement on the Google blog, "Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon." -
Happy 17th Birthday, Debian!
An anonymous reader writes "Debian turns 17 today. Yes it has really come a long way from being Murdock's pet project back in 1993 to being the distribution on which the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu, is now based." -
WebKit Gives Konqueror a Speed Boost (Past Firefox)
An anonymous reader writes "We always knew that WebKit is going to make Konqueror fast; but how much faster? Today we test that by putting Konqueror with KHTML through the SunSpider JavaScript Test and the then do the same with WebKit. To get an idea of how fast they are compared to other browsers, we also decided to put Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 through the tests."