The BBC has just done an article on Firefox which is great but, as always has bought up the Google-Mozilla link. Google has a search engine plugin which, when some uses it, generates money by search advertising.
Mozilla also have search deals with Yahoo! as well which I see no mention of. However, they did cover Netscape, Microsoft’s little tiff with the United States DoJ about anti-competitive behavior.
Still they do include a video of Mozilla Europe President Tristan Nitot which is worth the read alone.
OpenOffice.org the free and open source office suite equivalent of Microsoft Office has just released their beta preview release which adds support for and interesting features such as:
The most immediately visible change to OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the new
“Start Centre”, new fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the
status bar. A closer look shows that 3.0 has a myriad of new features.
Notable Calc improvements include a new solver component; support for
spreadsheet collaboration through workbook sharing; and an increase to
1024 columns per sheet. Writer has an improved notes feature and
displays of multiple pages while editing. There are numerous Chart
enhancements, and an improved crop feature in Draw and Impress.
Behind the scenes, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming
OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files
created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx,
.xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for
the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).
There is a full release list available with the announcement below.
Mozilla’s mobile platform developer DougT has added a patch to a bug which would add an attribute to the MouseEvent property which would expose the amount of pressure applied to the touchscreen of an Internet enabled device, in this case, the Nokia N810.
As you can see in the video below, the screen reacts and displays pressure from both the stylus and finger pressure. The applications for this can be used for scrolling or on a display device etc…..
Adobe the famous owners of PDF, Macromedia suite, Flash and basically everything web design has now dropped their licensing fee’s in a bid to open up Flash to the mobile computing platform. One would assume this means both cellphones and Internet tablets etc…
The Open Screen Initiative AKA the Open Screen Project already has some high level backers including Nokia, Motorola, ARM, Samsung and LG along with Intel and Cisco systems. Also included is content partners such as the BBC, MTV and NBC. Flash by Adobe’s estimates has a install base of 98%, something even that Microsoft would be envious of given it’s 90% install base of all net connected PC’s.
There is also a broader aim with a view to expanding on Adobe’s AIR platform which faces competition from Microsoft’s Silverlight.
However the problem with both these platforms like Flash is that they are proprietary systems with vendor lock-in possibilities.
Back in 2006, Adobe gave the Mozilla Project access to its ActionScript JIT runtime engine (part of the Flash player and consequently part of Firefox 4.0) on the Tamarin Project contributing over 135,000 lines of code to the project itself.
But the only real viable options to keep the platform itself open is both the Gnash and the Prism projects (along with the Mobile project) which would allow for porting of the ActionScript engine itself to the Linux platform along with other open source implementations for local viewing of video files on the Internet on the mobile platform. This would allow for an open platform and would avoid the problem with vendor lock-in with open standards being employed and allowing for a richer user experience without the problem of not being to view the web itself without having some sort of Adobe product installed. Already we have seen open Operating Systems (GNU/Linux), open hardware architectures (the PC) and now we are seeing open mobile platforms (Maemo).
Microsoft in their infinite wisdom supplied free USB sticks to Law Enforcement agencies for use in forensics worldwide. Nothing wrong with that you might say till you read (via the Seattle Times):
The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence
Extractor, is a USB “thumb drive” that was quietly
distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June.
Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350
law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time
it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important
in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords
and analyze a computer’s Internet activity, as well as data
stored in the computer.It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which
typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power
and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for
evidence on site.More than 2,000 officers in 15 countries, including Poland, the
Philippines, Germany, New Zealand and the United States, are using the
device, which Microsoft provides free.
As All Billings (of Mozilla fame) points out:
“I find it extremely creepy that an operating system manufacturer (with a monopoly or near-monopoly, effectively, as an operating system)is in bed with cops and developing tools internally for them. It isn’t like these could be abused by someone, right?“
This happened in the United States, Poland, Germany and other countries. Microsoft silently gave the cops the means to instantly (beyond all reasonable doubt I have to wonder) invade your system, sweep it and then extract it.
And we all know what will happen when encrypted files are found. Instant assumption of guilt by reason of stupidity. You can see it now in the media. Person arrested for encrypted files followed by swift U-turn by Johnny Law when they receive all the bad press through it and find out they’ve been a complete and total horses ass about the piss-poor handling of it.
Still it’ll be fun to watch when they try plugging it into a Linux system.
The news doing the rounds at the moment seems to suggest that Nokia may be porting the popular Linux distro over to the Nokia N800/N810 platforms with the release of ‘Hardy Heron’ earlier this week.
Nokia itself is no stranger to the open source world, the N800/N810 internet tablets themselves run a custom version of Maemo Linux.
Good news to Ubuntu Linux users - 8.04 has now been released! The release is in conjunction with other flavours of the popular Linux distro including those who favour KDE over Gnome (like me ) with Kubuntu
It would seem that the popular BitTorrent client µTorrent is gaining ground on the Java-based client Azureus with a 6% lead compared to Azureus/Vuze’s 2% install base. TorrenFreak (disclaimer: I read this) had the results with the following breakdown:
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Posted by Howard
