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NewsVac: News from around the Web
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FCC Chair pushes for Comcast censure
6 days, 19 hours ago
"Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin recommended today that the agency take action against Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, for "arbitrarily blocking" Internet traffic over its network and failing to inform subscribers of its policies." -
Missing Code Challenge
6 days, 21 hours ago
"Online identity management and single sign-on still doesn't work. Not well enough, anyway. OpenID is a good step forward. So are a bunch of other less familiar approaches. But we still haven't arrived .... " -
Yahoo statement rejecting Icahn-Microsoft search buyout proposal
6 days, 23 hours ago
Yahoo issues a statement rejecting joint-proposal by Microsoft and Carl Icahn to buy the Yahoo's search business. -
A proprietary Web? Blame the W3C
1 week ago
" ... Using a term like “free and open” is such utopian propaganda. After all how could you be against “free and open” right? A brief look at the web standards groups might illustrate the real root of the problem though." -
Antitrust hearing to draw Yahoo, Microsoft, Google legal eagles
1 week ago
Top legal counsel will testify before Congressional antitrust hearing next week, as lawmakers consider potential anticompetitive effects of a Yahoo-Google search ad deal. -
Do Flickr's APIs protect its users enough?
1 week ago
"When picking Flickr or any other photo site, it's important to understand not just its pricing scheme, reliability, and how well their user interface works but, as importantly, the underlying priorities that drive all sorts of design choices .... " -
Bank of America may finally embrace Firefox
1 week, 3 days ago
The largest bank in the United States has officially ignored the second most popular Web browser--until recently. -
Is the Web still the Web?
1 week, 5 days ago
For developers of RIAs (rich Internet applications), Adobe's announcement that Google and Yahoo will soon be able to index text within Flash movies should come as welcome news. Until now, Flash files have been black boxes; with these binary files, search indexers could no more extract textual information from them than from JPEGs or PNGs. -
XChat 2.8.6 Review - A Great Graphical IRC Client
2 weeks, 3 days ago
Complete review of the last release for Linux of the popular client for IRC XChat. -
Firefox 3 Averages 2 Million Downloads Per Day
2 weeks, 4 days ago
Firefox 3's success was not limited to just the first day. In fact, in the first two weeks, Firefox 3 has averaged around 2 million downloads per day! -
ICANN sites owned by Turkish criminal hackers
2 weeks, 5 days ago
On the eve of opening up the hierarchical naming system for the Internet, ICANN sites were hijacked with a warning from criminal hackers. -
Group votes to relax Web naming rules
3 weeks, 2 days ago
A group charged with overseeing the development of the Internet voted Thursday to relax the rules on Web site naming conventions -- potentially triggering a virtual domain name gold rush to rival the dotcom boom of the late 1990s. -
Google Want to be TeleAtlas
3 weeks, 3 days ago
Google have launched MapMaker, a kind of faux OpenStreetMap where they own all the data and you’re only allowed to map in certain Freedom Of Speech Zones. -
Enable the XML ecosystem with pipelines
3 weeks, 3 days ago
Discover XProc, a markup language that describes processing pipelines composed of discrete steps that apply operations on XML documents. Also, learn what XProc is today and its future, get the back story on some of the more contentious issues, and even run through a few examples. -
New group makes broadband a national priority
3 weeks, 4 days ago
Federal Communications Commission commissioner Jonathan Adelstein joined tech policy pundits, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists Tuesday to launch a new initiative aimed at making broadband a priority in the U.S. - More News
Linux.com : Internet & WWW
OpenDomain.org owner: Selfless FOSS helper or domain squatter?
OpenDomain.org is an organization that offers to provide free use of certain domain names to worthwhile open source projects. Ric Johnson, the leader of OpenDomain.org and the owner of dozens of domain names, says he has spent thousands of dollars registering those domains in order to prevent "squatters and phishers" from snapping them up. He's keeping them safe so you can have a chance to use them. However, to some people, based on Johnson's past practices, it's not clear how OpenDomain.org differs from other organizations that buy up domain names in the hopes of future gains.
Web apps: the next battleground for FOSS?
Concerned about the increasing popularity of Web applications, Marco Barulli of the Clipperz project has written one of the first detailed suggestions about how free and open source software (FOSS) should respond to the trend. Although neither Barulli nor Clipperz is well-known, his ideas are being listened to by such figures as Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and Fabrizio Capobianco, the CEO of Funambol and a long-time advocate of FOSS in Web applications.
Manage and play your audio files over the Web with Ampache
Ampache is a LAMP application that gives you a Web interface to your music collection, allowing you to search, rate, and play your music over the network. It even offers transcoding support to allow clients to play back lossless-encoded FLAC files from the server and stream them to clients as MP3 audio files.
Patches coming today for DNS vulnerability
Whether you're running Linux, Windows, Cisco, Sun, or other DNS servers, you are at risk from a newly discovered vulnerability. So says Dan Kaminsky, head of penetration testing research at IO Active, who accidently discovered the DNS "design flaw" earlier this year.
Protecting against evil code fragments with HTML Purifier
HTML Purifier is a project that helps you ensure that HTML is valid and does not contain cross-site scripting attempts or other nasty attacks. With HTML Purifier you can allow users to post HTML content without letting them insert nasty code that will run in the browser of anyone viewing that HTML. An assortment of plugins let you use HTML Purifier with CodeIgniter, Drupal, MODx, Phorum, Joomla!, and WordPress. To get an idea of the cleanups that HTML Purifier can perform, head over to the demo page.
Mozilla officially scores a world record
They did it -- Mozilla now holds the world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours, according to Jamie Panas, press and marketing assistant at Guinness World Records.
Open source social networking app thrives in China
The popular social networking site Facebook just announced a Chinese version, but similar Chinese-based Web sites such as Xiaonei and Hainei have been struggling there. However, since April, UCenter Home, an open source social network service based on PHP and MySQL, is pushing open social networking in China.
Three reasons why GNU/Linux is better for Web servers than OS X
Apple's OS X, which has been an official certified Unix system for some time now, is often installed onto Internet-exposed or intranet-only Web servers for serving up dynamic content. I've worked with such configurations for a couple of years, and with GNU/Linux alternatives for even longer. There are at least three reasons why GNU/Linux systems do the job better.
Three image extensions for WordPress
Images are an important part of an attractive, eye-catching blog. Well-chosen images can highlight and capture the essence of your communication, helping your audience to better appreciate your message. Here are three WordPress extensions that help you gain more control over the photos and graphics you want to display on your blog.
DokuWiki: An elegant and lightweight wiki engine
Created as a simple solution for managing documentation, DokuWiki has evolved into a powerful and flexible wiki suitable for most tasks involving collaborative editing. DokuWiki doesn't use a database back end (all pages are stored as plain text files), which makes it easy to install and maintain. Its access control list feature offers a user-friendly and flexible mechanism for restricting access to certain pages and namespaces. You can also extend DokuWiki's default functionality using plugins, and there are hundreds of plugins to choose from.
Gizmo5 - a more open VoIP solution
With Gizmo5, not only can you use your PC to make or get phone calls on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh PCs. But unlike similar programs, such as Skype, Gizmo5 uses open standards like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Jabber, which makes it interoperable with a variety of clients.
Opera 9.5 gives Firefox 3 a run for its money
Two of the most popular Linux browsers were unveiled this month after years of development -- the open source Firefox 3 and the proprietary Opera 9.5. Opera's launch a week before Firefox was like any other launch, unlike Firefox's much publicized world record attempt. But Opera 9.5 is no less revolutionary than Firefox, matching its open source rival feature for feature, from security-related enhancements to improved multilingual text rendering.
Streamlined Firefox 3 makes browsing safer, more productive
Desktop users, developers, and reviewers all had their download managers aimed at the Firefox Web site Monday to grab Firefox 3 as soon as it launched and also help Mozilla set a world record. World record or not, the latest Firefox release is a world-class Web browser. It looks impressive, renders text and images better than its predecessor, and helps you browse safely. But while it delivers pages faster by cutting down crucial milliseconds, its memory footprint (in unscientific tests) is still as big as a yeti.
gPodder's no plodder when it comes to podcasts
Catch all of your podcasts in style with gPodder, a Python application designed to retrieve and organize your podcasts for easy playback.
Syncing multiple users' bookmarks with SiteBar
SiteBar is a Web browser bookmark synchronization solution. One feature that sets SiteBar apart from many others is the ability to set up your own bookmark server, which keeps the whole system under your control. You can also use SiteBar through a third-party server that offers membership levels ranging from a free, ad-supported "basic" level up to an "admin" level that costs 9.99 Euros (about $15.50) per month. While SiteBar is useful for individuals, it is even more useful for corporate or other groups because it allows you to have many trees of bookmarks and have a project group collectively modify bookmarks for their project. (NOTE: Other bookmark synchronization solutions have been covered recently on linux.com.)
Firefox extensions to bring back the dead
Don't you find it irritating when a Web page you bookmarked or favorited returns a 404 error on a subsequent visit? Or when a Web site is temporarily down? Firefox extensions Resurrect Pages and 404: Page is Not Found? Now it will be! can help in such scenarios. While Resurrect Pages relies on several popular page cache sites, 404: Page is Not Found uses the Wayback Machine at Internet Archive to serve the dead pages.
Dimdim Open Source is a bright-bright solution for Web conferencing
Dimdim Web conferencing software, which competes with services like WebEx and GoToMeeting, provides almost all the important features you need for conducting a conference over the Web. It's available in three flavors -- a feature-limited but usable Web-based free version, a no-holds-barred fee-based Enterprise version, and an almost Enterprise clone Open Source Community Edition that you can host in your network. I tested the Open Source edition, using it to host conferences on an intranet and over the Internet, and it works fairly well for a beta release.
SELF-made site for courseware
Where on the Web do you go for free education and training materials? A project called Science, Education and Learning in Freedom (SELF) has created a site where educators and students can upload and download courseware without charge, or create courseware collaboratively. It maintains free-as-in-freedom content, and is intended for courses on free/libre software.
Headless torrent downloads with rTorrent and Screen
I have a constantly running server that would be a perfect on which to run torrent downloads. The only catch is that the server is headless -- it has no monitor or keyboard. To overcome this obstacle, I use rTorrent as my torrent client, and GNU Screen so that I can disconnect my terminal session and leave rTorrent running.
Open source journalism system Campsite releases version 3.0
Campsite is an open source content management system (CMS) tuned for professional journalists. Like its broadcast radio sibling Campcaster (which we covered last year), Campsite targets independent media operating in emerging democracies and countries in transition. The CMS's latest release, 3.0, is a major update designed to be simpler to install and maintain.
