The Electronic Frontier Foundation "celebrates" twelve years of the DMCA with a report listing of the problems which have resulted from that law, and from its anti-circumvention rules in particular. "EFF's report details the numerous harms stemming from the DMCA's ban on circumventing DRM, including Apple's attempts to lock down the iPhone and force users into its App Store. Also new in this year's report is the account of hobbyists threatened by Texas Instruments for blogging about potential modifications to the company's programmable graphing calculators as well as the story behind the legal attacks on Real DVD and other products that create innovative new ways for consumers to enjoy DVD content they have legitimately purchased."

Registration is now open for the first ever Texas Linux Fest. It will be held at the Monarch Event Center in Austin on Saturday April 10. There will also be evening social events on Friday and Saturday. "Exhibit space is filling up quickly, but if your company, organization, or open source project would like to reserve a booth, you can do so by visiting www.texaslinuxfest.org/sponsorship. There is still time for interested parties to submit a talk for consideration before the February 15 deadline." Click below for the full announcement.

The last set of FOSDEM speaker interviews has been posted; the subjects this time are Andrew Tanenbaum, Benoît Chesneau, Lindsay Holmwood, and Elena Reshetova, speaking on Maemo 6 security. "The main advantage of our security framework architecture is that we don't have any special 'security APIs' by default. For example, there is no secure_fopen() instead of fopen(), which should make the developer's life much easier. The only main change for most applications will be the creation of an additional file inside a Debian package, which we call the 'Aegis Manifest File'. This file declares the needed access control rights for the application, and it will be explained in more details in the presentation."

Starting with version 1.1, VideoLan Media Player (VLC) will get extensions support, and anyone will be able to write their own - like it is with Firefox extensions:

One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function.

The N900 is Nokia's first device built around the Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system. Is it a mainstream smartphone, a must-have for Linux developers, or both?

Get the most out of your netbook with an operating system built to purpose. Netbooks were big news in 2009 and we can expect them to be just as popular in 2010. But, being small and ultraportable there are compromises to be made: smaller screens, slower processors and smaller keyboards are just some of these. So, to get the best out of your netbook you need to pair it with an operating system built to make the most out of the smaller form factor.

Frank wondered how long his phone had been buzzing.  He was about to turn it off when he saw that it was his daughter Marla calling.

I'll get to Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 later, but the "safe graphics mode" boot option in that very Ubuntu live DVD helped me figure out how to get Sidux 2009-04 to boot on my Intel 82830 GCG (aka Intel 830m) graphics-running Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101. Over the course of two computing sessions I experienced both the Alpha 2 of the upcoming Ubuntu LTS release as well as the Sidux take on Debian Sid, circa early last year, both of which I've wanted to do in order to "plan" this laptop's future when I decide to leave Debian Lenny behind.

Firefox 3.6 final is out in the wild and yet again, most Ubuntu users are not able to upgrade their resident Firefox 3.5 to this latest release. Let's cut the chase. All you need to do is to get the latest version of Ubuntuzilla, a python script which pretty much gets the job done without any hassles.