A joint resolution on Transparency and State of Play of ACTA negotiations from virtually all party groups in the European Parliament was tabled earlier today. It will debated tonight and faces a vote on Wednesday. If approved, the resolution marks a major development in the fight over ACTA transparency. It calls for public access to negotiation texts and rules out further confidential negotiations. Moreover, the EP wants a ban on imposing a three-strikes model, assurances that ACTA will not result in personal searchers at the border, and an ACTA impact assessment on fundamental rights and data protection.

Julien Lavergne has released the next Alpha 3 of lubuntu. lubuntu is a faster, more lightweight and energy saving variant of Ubuntu using LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. The lubuntu team aims to earn official endorsement from Canonical. Lubuntu 10.04 Alpha 3 Screenshots at My SEO Company

Ask any knowledgeable mobile user, and she will tell you that the best way to securely access the Internet in public places is through a VPN (virtual private network) connection.

Case studies of open source success are always useful - especially when, like this one, they show how a UK government project that cost £100 million ($150 million) using traditional approaches but still didn't work properly, was fixed for just £35,000 ($53,000) using free software.

However, Frankenberg, who oversaw the sale to Santa Cruz as CEO from 1994-96, said the copyright part of the agreement was a mistake and that Novell wanted only to protect its Netware and other products but not Unix.

"I should have read it more carefully and we wouldn't be here today," he said.

[PJ: Reeeeally? He wants us to believe a CEO didn't read a contract allegedly involving millions, and didn't even notice until a year or so later?] - Tom Harvey, SLT

The outcome of this lawsuit will determine whether SCO can pursue a suit it filed earlier against IBM, which it says placed Unix code into the Linux operating system. That would open the door to charging Linux users a licensing fee, something the open-source community strongly opposes.

[PJ: Actually, not so much. There are several issues to resolve at the end of this trial, even if SCO were to prevail, issues separated from the case and sent to arbitration, which SCO then stayed by its bankruptcy. But SCO can't successfully sue any Linux end users, unless they are stupid, until those claims are resolved. Oh, and then SCO would have to explain how the GPL doesn't protect all Linux end users.] - Deseret News

We've all seen countless articles, blog and forum posts explaining how to back up a server with rsync and other tools. While I've cringed when people talked about using non-scalable methods, there actually is a place for quick and dirty backup mechanisms. Small companies running just a few virtual machines in the cloud, or even enterprises with test instances, may wish for a quick and effective backup.

Listen is an audio player which comes with many very useful features such as Podcasts management, browse Shoutcast directory, provides direct access to lyrics, lastfm (currently playing song info and future events) and wikipedia information. One feature I really enjoy in Listem Music Player is it's option to create playlists for you by retrieving information from last.fm and what you most frequently listen to. And another feature creates dynamic playlist based on some criteria you choose:

In the important realm of science, technology and ideas, I believe that the continual conversion of ideas and development effort into the private property of companies like Apple is a great threat to continued free innovation.

Nautilus image converter is a nautilus extension to mass resize or rotate images. if installed an additional menu entry will appear when you right click the mouse inside nautilus. It is a convenient utility which can save you lot of effort.

InternetNZ is excited to announce that renowned Canadian law professor Michael Geist, a world authority on technology law issues, will be the keynote speaker at the PublicACTA event, being held in Wellington on 10 April 2010.

"We are delighted that Professor Geist is able to make it to New Zealand to contribute to the debate around the ACTA negotiations," says InternetNZ Policy Director Jordan Carter. PublicACTA is being held the weekend before the next round of ACTA negotiations in Wellington, 12-16 April 2010. - InternetNZ

Parallels, the virtualization and cloud enabler, has officially announced they’re supporting Chrome OS, Google's Linux distribution. Here are the implications for corporate customers, consumers and partners.

The Linux world is all excited about Ubuntu's new look but surely there are more important things that need to be done to make Ubuntu more appealing?

Showtwell is an open source photo organizer for the Gnome desktop which we were telling you about some time ago. Since then, Shotwell progressed a lot and the latest version 0.5 will bring (it has not been released yet, but it's available in our PPA) a lot of cool new features: * Picasa Web publishing (just like gThumb did a few weeks ago) * Tags as another way of organizing your collection * Printing * Adjust photos dates and times, both to a single moment and shifting several forward and backward in time * more!

In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.” My response was simple. “Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?” Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration. “And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too.” Steve was silent.

Remember Terra Soft and its Yellow Dog Linux for Power processors? Well, Yellow Dog is no longer the darling Linux for Apple machines since the latter company switched to Intel Core and Xeon processors for its PCs and servers a few years back. And Terra Soft doesn't exist any more, after it was acquired by a Japanese company called Fixstars in November 2008. But Yellow Dog is still digging in the back yard to find a cool spot to lay down, and this time around it's playing with Nvidia's CUDA programming environment for its Tesla family of GPU co-processors.

Today is my last day of employment at Sun (well, it became Oracle on March 1st in the UK but you know what I mean). I am a few months short of my 10th anniversary there (I joined at JavaOne in 2000) and my 5th anniversary as Chief Open Source Officer. I hope you’ll forgive a little reminiscence.

A joint resolution on Transparency and State of Play of ACTA negotiations from virtually all party groups in the European Parliament was tabled earlier today. It will debated tonight and faces a vote on Wednesday. If approved, the resolution marks a major development in the fight over ACTA transparency. It calls for public access to negotiation texts and rules out further confidential negotiations. Moreover, the EP wants a ban on imposing a three-strikes model, assurances that ACTA will not result in personal searchers at the border, and an ACTA impact assessment on fundamental rights and data protection. - Michael Geist

The KDE España association is organizing Akademy-es 2010 in collaboration with Itsas (the Free Software group of the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU) and the Department of Culture of the Basque Goverment. This event gathers contributors to and users of KDE software and will be held in the Engineering Technical School of Bilbao from the 7th to the 9th of May.

Energizer has been informed by the CERT Coordination Center (CERT) that the Windows software that was referenced and made available via a download with its Duo Charger, Model CHUSB, contains a vulnerability. Energizer introduced the Duo Charger in the United States and the USB Charger in Latin America, Europe and Asia in 2007. Both products charge Nickel Metal Hydride batteries from both a wall outlet and a USB connection. The product included a feature that would allow the user to view the battery charging status on a computer if associated software was installed. The Duo Charger product documentation referenced www.energizer.com/usbcharger to download the software. The site offered downloadable software in both Windows and Apple(R) versions; however only the Windows version contained the vulnerability.

Energizer has discontinued sale of this product and has removed the site to download the software. In addition, the company is directing consumers that downloaded the Windows version of the software to uninstall or otherwise remove the software from your computer. This will eliminate the vulnerability. In addition CERT and Energizer recommend that users remove a file that may remain after the software has been removed. The file name is Arucer.dll, which can be found in the Window system32 directory.

Energizer is currently working with both CERT and U.S. government officials to understand how the code was inserted in the software. Additional technical information can be found at CERT.

[PJ: I couldn't help but notice the file details on CERT include this: " Language 0x0804 (Chinese (PRC))"] - Energizer press release, MarketWatch