Tag: open source

Finally, Hi-Def Streaming Video of the ISS’s View of Earth

An anonymous reader writes with a snippet from ExtremeTech: “After being continuously inhabited for more than 13 years, it is finally possible to log into Ustream and watch the Earth spinning on its axis in glorious HD. This video feed [embedded at ExtremeTech] comes from from four high-definition cameras, delivered by last month’s SpaceX CRS-3 resupply mission, that are attached to the outside of the International Space Station. You can open up the Ustream page at any time, and as long as it isn’t night time aboard the ISS, you’ll be treated to a beautiful view of the Earth from around 250 miles (400 km) up.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Finally, Hi-Def Streaming Video of the ISS’s View of Earth

Some Users Find Swype Keyboard App Makes 4000+ Location Requests Per Day

New submitter postglock (917809) writes “Swype is a popular third-party keyboard for Android phones (and also available for Windows phones and other platforms). It’s currently the second-most-popular paid keyboard in Google Play (behind SwiftKey), and the 17th highest of all paid apps. Recently, users have discovered that it’s been accessing location data extremely frequently, making almost 4000 requests per day, or 2.5 requests per minute. The developers claim that this is to facilitate implementation of ‘regional dialects, ‘ but cannot explain why such frequent polling is required, or why this still occurs if the regional function is disabled. Some custom ROMs such as Cyanogenmod can block this tracking, but most users would be unaware that such tracking is even occurring.” Readers in the linked thread don’t all seem to see the same thing; if you are a Swype user, do you see thousands of location requests, none, or something in between? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Some Users Find Swype Keyboard App Makes 4000+ Location Requests Per Day

Apple Fixes Major SSL Bug In OS X, iOS

Trailrunner7 writes: “Apple has fixed a serious security flaw present in many versions of both iOS and OS X and could allow an attacker to intercept data on SSL connections. The bug is one of many the company fixed Tuesday in its two main operating systems, and several of the other vulnerabilities have serious consequences as well, including the ability to bypass memory protections and run arbitrary code. The most severe of the vulnerabilities patched in iOS 7.1.1 and OSX Mountain Lion and Mavericks is an issue with the secure transport component of the operating systems. If an attacker was in a man-in-the-middle position on a user’s network, he might be able to intercept supposedly secure traffic or change the connection’s properties.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Fixes Major SSL Bug In OS X, iOS

Intentional Backdoor In Consumer Routers Found

New submitter janoc (699997) writes about a backdoor that was fixed only not “Eloi Vanderbeken from Synacktiv has identified an intentional backdoor in a module by Sercomm used by major router manufacturers (Cisco, Linksys, Netgear, etc.). The backdoor was ostensibly fixed — by obfuscating it and making it harder to access. The original report (PDF). And yeah, there is an exploit available …” Rather than actually closing the backdoor, they just altered it so that the service was not enabled until you knocked the portal with a specially crafted Ethernet packet. Quoting Ars Technica: “The nature of the change, which leverages the same code as was used in the old firmware to provide administrative access over the concealed port, suggests that the backdoor is an intentional feature of the firmware … Because of the format of the packets—raw Ethernet packets, not Internet Protocol packets—they would need to be sent from within the local wireless LAN, or from the Internet service provider’s equipment. But they could be sent out from an ISP as a broadcast, essentially re-opening the backdoor on any customer’s router that had been patched.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intentional Backdoor In Consumer Routers Found

OpenSSL Cleanup: Hundreds of Commits In a Week

New submitter CrAlt (3208) writes with this news snipped from BSD news stalwart undeadly.org: “After the news of heartbleed broke early last week, the OpenBSD team dove in and started axing it up into shape. Leading this effort are Ted Unangst (tedu@) and Miod Vallat (miod@), who are head-to-head on a pure commit count basis with both having around 50 commits in this part of the tree in the week since Ted’s first commit in this area. They are followed closely by Joel Sing (jsing@) who is systematically going through every nook and cranny and applying some basic KNF. Next in line are Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) and Bob Beck (beck@) who’ve been both doing a lot of cleanup, ripping out weird layers of abstraction for standard system or library calls. … All combined, there’ve been over 250 commits cleaning up OpenSSL. In one week.'” You can check out the stats, in progress. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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OpenSSL Cleanup: Hundreds of Commits In a Week

Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr Released

An anonymous reader writes with this announcement: “Ubuntu Linux version 14.04 LTS (code named “Trusty Tahr”) has been released and available for download. This updated version includes the Linux kernel v3.13.0-24.46, Python 3.4, Xen 4.4, Libreoffice 4.2.3, MySQL 5.6/MariaDB 5.5, Apache 2.4, PHP 5.5, improvements to AppArmor allow more fine-grained control over application, and more. The latest release of Ubuntu Server is heavily focused on supporting cloud and scale-out computing platforms such as OpenStack, Docker, and more. As part of the wider Ubuntu 14.04 release efforts the Ubuntu Touch team is proud to make the latest and greatest touch experience available to our enthusiast users and developers. You can install Ubuntu on Nexus 4 Phone (mako), Nexus 7 (2013) Tablet (flo), and Nexus 10 Tablet (manta) by following these instructions. On a hardware front, ARM multiplatform support has been added, enabling you to build a single ARM kernel image that can boot across multiple hardware platforms. Additionally, the ARM64 and Power architectures are now fully supported. See detailed release note for more information here and a quick upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu is possible over the network.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr Released

MediaPortal 1.7.0 FINAL released

MediaPortal 1.7.0 Final We are very happy to present you the final version of MediaPortal 1.7.0 today. This release includes a number of new features and bug fixes. Please report any problems in the bug reporting sections of the forum.  Highlights of this release Many of the changes in this release are things that you might not notice at first, but they are designed to improve the stability of MediaPortal moving forwards for the next few releases. Using SkinSettings/Expressions Skin Settings and Expressions are really powerful. Skin designers are going to be doing some amazing things with them in the near future. We have already been testing a home screen editor entirely within the MediaPortal GUI. Look for this in Area 51 very soon. Separate the WindowsPlugins to individual files This is one for the developers. Since MediaPortal started, the core plugins (My Videos, My Music, My Pictures, etc.) have been stored in a single file called WindowsPlugins.dll. This means that a lot of code has been loaded that isn’t always needed. Also, making a change to one plugin often resulted in another plugin developing a new bug. We can’t carry on like that, so the plugins are now in their own self-contained files. This will make things more stable and easier to fix/improve in future. Attention:  This change made us ‘bump’ the plugin subsystems, so there is a chance you need an updated plugin to be compatible with the 1.7.0 Release. 1.7 Pre Release compatible plugins will still work fine with this release. Enhancements to the TV and Video OSDs TV recording thumbs and comskip markers were not properly shown in the TV and Video Info OSDs. This is fixed. Improvements to the Installer You probably have the LAV Filters package installed to get the best quality playback of most video files, and TitanExtended installed to provide skin files for your plugins. The installer correctly detects the installed version, and only offers to install these if a newer version is available. Wake On LAN MediaPortal can now wake your server if it is in sleep mode and you want to access your files. Add MediaInfo For Files in the Background We use a code library called MediaInfo to obtain certain information about video files when you play them. This information can be displayed by MediaPortal. Up to now, it has only been possible to obtain this information when you actually play a file. With this release, we have added a setting to allow all files to be scanned in the background. This is turned off by default, so check out the documentation for changes to see where this setting is and how to enable it. We also updated the library to v0.7.67.  Full list of changes You can review the complete change log for MP 1.7.0 by using the link below: Changelog: MediaPortal Documentation of new features can be found at the following link: What’s new for MediaPortal 1.7.0 Compiled Plugin related changes Community Plugin Developers should have a look at the following page to find out about the changes which will effect their extensions. Some of these changes are mandatory to become 1.7.0 compatible: changes which affect plugins Additional Information:  TVE3 Code freeze At the moment we are working hard on releasing a new version of our TVEngine – which is called TVE3.5. Development is still in early stage and some features are missing. To make a release of this happen in the future we have to put our current TVEngine (TVE3) on code freeze. This means only critical issues will get fixed. Everything else will have to wait for a TVE3.5 release. When we think it is ready for public testing you will find a testbuild in our Area51 forum part. Since we have limited resources we are not able to give you a specific release date. It is ready when it is ready! We’ll hope you understand that. Thanks! Installation, Upgrade, Download and Feedback Installation With MediaPortal 1.6.0 we switched to .NET4 so you need to make sure you have .NET4 installed on your computer (not needed if you are on Windows 8 because it comes with .NET4, but you NEED the .NET 3.5 features enabled!). Otherwise you are not able to install MediaPortal and the installer just quits. Download-Link: Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (Standalone Installer) Aside from that when doing a clean installation of 1.7.0 there is nothing else special to worry about. Upgrade Upgrading from 1.2.x, 1.3.0 Alpha/Beta/RC/Final, 1.4.0, 1.5.0, 1.6.0 and 1.7 Pre Release to 1.7.0 All MediaPortal 1.2.x, 1.3.0 Alpha/Beta/RC/Final, 1.4.0, 1.5.0, 1.6.0 and 1.7 Pre Release installations can be upgraded to 1.7.0, without losing your settings. Plugins: If you are running MediaPortal 1.6.0 or earlier , then it is possible that some of your previously installed plugins will be shown as incompatible after the upgrade to 1.7.0 ! Whether or not a plugin is incompatible depends on the MediaPortal subsystems the plugin uses. Skins: Warning ! Due to the new features and changes introduced in 1.4.0 , none of the 1.3.x skins are compatible with 1.7.0 ! Please contact the author of the skin you use for further information and updates. Upgrading Extensions: The easiest way to upgrade your extensions is by launching the MediaPortal Extension Installer , and let it check for updated versions. However this only works for extensions that use our MPEI system. If the author of the extension releases it as a stand alone installer, you must contact them for an updated version. Upgrading from 1.2.0 Alpha or earlier to 1.7.0 All MediaPortal installations starting with 1.1.0 RC1 can be upgraded to 1.7.0, without losing your settings. If you are running MediaPortal 1.2.0 Alpha or earlier, then none of your extensions (plugins and skins) will work after the upgrade to 1.7.0! You must update your extensions after the upgrade!  So, please make sure that 1.7.0 compatible versions of your extensions are available before you start the upgrade! General note about Upgrades Manually stop TV-Service! On some systems our installer is not able to update the TV-Server installation because its files are locked or the service can not be stopped. For upgrades to 1.7.0 we recommend that you manually stop the TV-Service and make sure, via Windows Task Manager (enable the “all users” option), that the TvService.exe process is really gone before starting to upgrade. Custom TV-Service properties If you manually changed the properties of the TV-Service (like restart on error options) , then you must redo these changes after the upgrade. The installer is not able to save and restore your custom service properties when it installs the new version of the TV-Service.  Feedback Bugs If you think you found a bug then please post a detailed report in our Bug Reports Forum . Make sure your report includes all the required information . Incomplete reports will be removed to keep the forum clean.  Download Finally – the download. We hope that you took the time to read this release news entirely because it includes vital information about the major changes.   If you would like to support MediaPortal, we would be happy to receive a small donation ! The Team wishes you a lot of fun with this new release! .::. Download – MediaPortal 1.7.0 Final .::.   :: Post a Comment ::

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MediaPortal 1.7.0 FINAL released

Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What?

We’re thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word, and that’s in large part thanks to the success of the OpenOffice family of word processors. “Family, ” because the OpenOffice name has been attached to several branches of a codebase that’s gone through some serious evolution over the years, starting from its roots in closed-source StarOffice, acquired and open-sourced by Sun to become OpenOffice.org. The same software has led (via some hamfisted moves by Oracle after its acquisition of Sun) to the also-excellent LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org’s direct descendant is Apache OpenOffice, and an anonymous reader writes with this excellent news from that project: “The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded 100 million times. Over 100 million downloads, over 750 extensions, over 2, 800 templates. But what does the community at Apache need to do to get the next 100 million?” If you want to play along, you can get the latest version of OpenOffice from SourceForge (Slashdot’s corporate cousin). I wonder how many government offices — the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft’s biggest customer — couldn’t get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they’re stuck with for now. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What?

Seagate Releases 6TB Hard Drive Sans Helium

Lucas123 (935744) writes “Seagate has released what it said is the industry’s fastest hard drive with up to a 6TB capacity, matching one released by WD last year. WD’s 6TB Ultrastar He6 was hermetically sealed with helium inside, something the company said was critical to reducing friction for additional platters, while also increasing power savings and reliability. Seagate, however, said it doesn’t yet need to rely on Helium to achieve the 50% increase in capacity over it’s last 4TB drive. The company used the same perpendicular magnetic recording technology that it has on previous models, but it was able to increase areal density from 831 bits per square inch to 1, 000. The new drive also comes in 2TB, 4TB and 5TB capacities and with either 12Gbps SAS or 6Gbps SATA connectivity. The six-platter, enterprise-class drive is rated to sustain about 550TB of writes per year — 10X that of a typical desk top drive.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Seagate Releases 6TB Hard Drive Sans Helium

Cisco Plans $1B Investment In Cloud

itwbennett (1594911) writes “Cisco Systems said Monday it plans to invest over $1 billion to expand its cloud business over the next two years, including building a global, OpenStack-based ‘network of clouds’ that it has dubbed the ‘intercloud’. The Intercloud will support any workload, on any hypervisor and interoperate with any cloud, both private and public, according to Cisco.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cisco Plans $1B Investment In Cloud