OSNews covers the release of the Genode OS Framework version 10.08. "Today, the Genode OS Framework has seen another feature-rich release, introducing support for hardware-accelerated graphics by the means of Gallium3D, wireless networking via the MadWifi communication stack, a new block-device infrastructure, and Qt4 version 4.6.3. Genode is a modular framework for building special-purpose operating systems, currently supporting 6 different kernels. With the new release, its device-driver coverage reaches a new level and brings the project one step closer towards the goal of shaping Genode to a general-purpose OS."

From the Paranoid dept.:
Just uploaded to the Ubuntu Lucid repository for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (and we imagine it will appear shortly in Maverick too for Ubuntu 10.10) is a new package called canonical-census, which marks its initial release. Curious about what this package provides, we did some digging and found it's for tracking Ubuntu installations by sending an "I am alive" ping to Canonical on a daily basis.

From the Pondering the Google Navel dept.:
A confidential, seven-page Google Inc. "vision statement" shows the information-age giant in a deep round of soul-searching over a basic question: How far should it go in profiting from its crown jewels—the vast trove of data it possesses about people's activities?

Should it tap more of what it knows about Gmail users? Should it build a vast "trading platform" for buying and selling Web data? Should it let people pay to not see any ads at all?

From the Google Search(ed) dept.:
The South Korean police raided the offices of Google Korea on Tuesday as part of an investigation into whether the company illegally collected and stored personal wireless data.

The U.S. search and advertising titan is already facing lawsuits and investigations in several countries in connection with private wireless data collected by its “Street View� cars. Street View, which was first launched in 2006, allows users to view panoramic street scenes on Google Maps and take a virtual walk through cities.

LibESMTP is a library to manage posting (or submission of) electronic mail using SMTP to a preconfigured Mail Transport Agent (MTA) such as Exim. It may be used as part of a Mail User Agent (MUA) or another program that must be able to post electronic mail but where mail functionality is not the program's primary purpose. LibESMTP is not intended to be used as part of a program that implements a Mail Transport Agent.

Changes: A certificate domain name comparison bug when wildcards are used was fixed. A subjectAltName comparison failure no longer falls back to commonName, which is now used only when subjectAltName is not present. The auto* file was tweaked for the current versions of these tools.

Release Tags: Stable, Minor feature enhancements

Tags: Communications, Email, Software Development, Libraries

Licenses: LGPL

I wouldn’t be so unequivocal in that headline except for the source.

It’s an in-depth analysis from Florian Mueller, whose FOSSPatents remains fiercely opposed to all software patents. It’s something of a follow-up to a May piece in which he considered the idea of a Fair Troll.

Microsoft is not yet a fair troll, Mueller writes. But it’s better than some.

“The idea of a ‘fair troll’ is about not using patents at all against those who commit to purely defensive use as well.” Microsoft is only fair to those who, like it, believe in software patents, he said.

That being said, the news here is that Mueller no longer things Microsoft to be acting as a troll at all:

After all those years -â and 5-6 years is a really long time in IT â- itâs time to face the facts. At least so far, Microsoft doesn’t use its patents in a destructive way. They don’t just sit on their patents without doing nothing, but they’re a cooperative right holder who doesn’t use them to shut out competition.

What someone like Florian Mueller thinks, or doesn’t think, won’t keep Steve Ballmer up at night, any more than what I say should keep you up at night. (Get your sleep, now.)

But the fact that Mueller’s opinion has evolved, based on evidence, is important. It’s part of a more general shift in attitudes, which is also causing open source advocates to take a far more jaundiced view of Apple, which passed Microsoft in market cap a few months back and now holds a $16 billion lead.

In his latest Mueller even quotes Richard Stallman against Apple. Translating from the Spanish paper, El Mundo, he quotes Stallman thus:

Apple is more evil and much more restrictive than Microsoft because it even limits our right to run applications.

All this is evidence of an important trend. The company perceived as most threatening is always the one that is growing bigger most rapidly. Reading comments here, Apple is often joined on the “public enemies” list by Google, whose record on the issue is rather benign.

So should Steve Jobs wear his reputation for open source villainy as a badge of honor? And does this mean open source villainy is mostly a mass endorsement of antitrust action?

Android 3.0 is readying for an October launch. What you can expect. Most Android users are only now upgrading to version 2.2 of Google's mobile phone operating system but with version 3.0 expected in October, it's worth taking a look at what to expect.

Sqlkit provides a GUI named sqledit to edit data in a database, as well as a package (sqlkit) in PyGtk. Sqledit (the application) can be run from the command line with arguments and will pop directly into the table/mask of the data, or without arguments and will present an input mask to write the database URL. Sqlkit (the Python package) provides SqlMask and SqlTable, two widgets for editing database data. It is meant to be used as a base for database desktop applications.

Changes: Many new features were introduced, along with the latest version of SQLAlchemy. Read-only fields computed from other fields are now supported. The filter panel output is completely configurable. Local sort was added, making it possible to sort related fields in complex masks. Tables can now be split in different views. Many bugs have been fixed.

Release Tags: Major feature enhancements

Tags: Database, API, Front-Ends

Licenses: GPLv3

Despite the fever dreams of Josh Silver and other net neutrality activists Google is not selling them out.

(Evil Google logo from TechRepublic.)

The idea, which Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg explained in a Wall Street Journal piece back in January, is to allow for service level agreements (SLAs) on critical services that need low latency — like large medical files being used in real-time — and leave everything else alone by voluntary agreement.

Ever since a federal court denied the FCC the power to enforce net neutrality in the case of Comcast, the agency and large stakeholders have been seeking a way forward.

When the agency made its proposals for replacement rules a few months ago, the big telcos jumped on it, making clear through allies in Congress they would be overturned — or at least delayed until they became meaningless.

Fact is Google has no financial incentive to sell out net neutrality, but every reason to come up with a fair agreement. Unlike the telcos, Google provides data services and not just pipes. It also has more core assets, managed with more efficiency, than either Verizon or AT&T.

The purpose of coming to an agreement is to allow the market to move forward, in Google’s direction. Right now market conditions favor Google as the low-cost provider of storage, transit, and computing services.

The Heritage Foundation, which doesn’t want the FCC involved at all, is insisting that any deal between Google and Verizon would be between Google and Verizon. It would not obligate AT&T, which wants to limit video traffic over its thin wireless pipes, and would have to be passed by Congress, which has become a telecom black hole.

What’s most problematic to me is the idea that wireless services could throttle video and apps that aren’t paying extra fees for transport. That may be why there are new reports saying the stakeholder talks have ended without a final agreement.

Here’s the deal. Some customers and applications think they need service guarantees to work, but the consumer market does not. Verizon is keeping hands-off the consumer market, knowing that bandwidth market is not capacity constrained, but trying to maintain power over the wireless market, where bandwidth is constrained.

That’s not Google doing evil. That’s Google doing business so the rest of us can, too. The solution to this is more WiFi, to unlicense new wireless bands rather than selling them to the highest bidders, who can’t build them out anyway and so try to sell bandwidth through an eye dropper.

Follow the money. The money is in liberating wireless so it can expand as wired has, to the point where the whole net neutrality debate becomes worthless and SLAs become like the extended warranties on new PCs.

SquidClamAv is a dedicated ClamAV antivirus redirector for Squid. It provides fine control over which files should be scanned. It is easy to install and works even with heavy Squid access.

Changes: This release allows scanning of SSL-encrypted traffic with the new Squid feature sslBump, and fixes bad handling of non-running proxies and clamd daemons.

Licenses: GPLv3