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Iran topped a recent list of repressive regimes that most aggressively restrict Internet freedom. The list, published by Reporters Without Borders, is a part of the 2012 edition of the organization’s Enemies of the Internet report. One of the details addressed in that report is the Iranian government’s bizarre plan to create its own “clean” Internet. The proposed system, an insular nationwide intranet that is reportedly isolated from the regular Internet, would be heavily regulated by the government.
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The Qt development toolkit is undergoing a major overhaul. The developers behind the project announced the availability of the Qt 5 alpha release this week. It's a key milestone on the path to the official launch of Qt 5, expected to occur later this year.
Qt is an open source toolkit designed to support cross-platform desktop and mobile application development. It provides libraries, user interface controls, and other components. Qt was originally created by Trolltech, a Norwegian software company that Nokia acquired in 2008. Nokia subsequently relicensed Qt under more permissive terms and transitioned the toolkit to a community-driven open governance model.
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Mozilla recently published a demo of standards-based video chat in an experimental build of Firefox. The functionality is built with the Web Real Time Communication (WebRTC) standard, which aims to support streaming audio and video communication on the Web without relying on plugins.
The WebRTC standard is currently in the draft stage, but it has been endorsed by most of the major browser vendors. Some initial components are already available in several browsers. The underlying technology comes from Global IP Solutions, which Google acquired in 2010. Google opened the source code of the original implementation under a BSD license in order to facilitate its standardization.
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Facebook is headquartered in Menlo Park, California at a site that used belong to Sun Microsystems. A large sign with Facebook's distinctive "like" symbol—a hand making the thumbs-up gesture—marks the entrance. When I arrived at the campus recently, a small knot of teenagers had congregated, snapping cell phone photos of one another in front of the sign.
Thanks to the film The Social Network, millions of people know the crazy story of Facebook's rise from dorm room project to second largest website in the world. But few know the equally intriguing story about the engine humming beneath the social network's hood: the sophisticated technical infrastructure that delivers an interactive Web experience to hundreds of millions of users every day.
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The Linux Foundation has released the 2011 edition of its kernel development study. The report provides insight into the status of Linux kernel programming and the level of developer participation. It shows the volume of total growth, the relative number of contributions from major sponsors, and other relevant metrics.
The kernel has continued to see strong growth and developer engagement. The Linux Foundation celebrated the kernel's 20th birthday last year, alongside the release of Linux 3.0. The total size of the kernel grew from 13 million lines of code and 33,000 files in 2010 to 15 million lines of code and 37,000 files in 2011.
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The developers behind the GNOME project have announced GNOME 3.4, a new version of the desktop environment. The update brings several significant new features and a number of design and usability improvements.
GNOME is an open source software stack that provides a desktop shell, applications, and development frameworks that are commonly used on the Linux platform. It is the default desktop environment in Fedora and several other Linux distributions. It's released every six months on a time-based development cycle.
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The Star Trek tricorder has become a reality, thanks to the hobby project of a cognitive science researcher. Dr. Peter Jansen has developed a handheld mobile computing device that has a number of sophisticated embedded sensors. The device is modeled after the distinctive design of the 24th-century tricorder.
He began working on the project in 2007 and aims to make it easy for others to reproduce his designs. He has made complete schematics for two of his four models available under the terms of the TAPR non-commercial hardware license. The underlying source code of the device's software environment is available under the GPL. In a blog post about the project, Jansen explained that he hopes his project will encourage scientific curiosity and help people better understand the world.
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The Raspberry Pi foundation issued a statement today with a status update on their much-anticipated $35 Linux computer. The first 2,000 completed units have arrived in the UK, but the devices aren't ready to be shipped out yet because the foundation's retail partners won't distribute them to purchasers until they have been stamped with the CE marking.
The CE marking, which you can find on many consumer electronics products, certifies that a product conforms with the regulatory standards of the European Economic Area. In order to apply the CE marking to a product, it has to undergo a conformity assessment and the manufacturer has to produce certain documents.
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Mozilla has teamed up with Web design studio Little Workshop to develop a Web-based multiplayer adventure game called BrowserQuest. The game is built with standards-based Web technologies and is designed to be played within a Web browser.
With the technical capabilities offered by the latest standards, Web developers no longer have to rely on plugins to create interactive multimedia experiences and application-like user interfaces. As we reported earlier this month, modern standards are making the Web an increasingly viable platform for game development.
BrowserQuest, which is built with JavaScript and HTML5, is a compelling demonstration of how existing standards can be used to create browser games. It uses the HTML5 Canvas element to render a tile-based 2D world, HTML5 audio APIs to support sound effects, WebSockets to facilitate communication with the backend server, and localStorage to save the player's progress.
The game's remote backend, which enables the real-time multiplayer gameplay, was coded in JavaScript and runs on top of Node.js. The load is balanced across multiple Node.js instances on three separate severs. At the time this story was written, the backend was successfully handling over 1,900 simultaneous players. The status of the BrowserQuest backend can be monitored through the game's real-time dashboard interface.
The developers focused on using widely-supported standards so that the game would work well across a wide range of desktop and mobile browsers. It works just as well on a tablet device, for example, as it does on a desktop computer.
The future looks even brighter, as there are a number of pending Web standards that will greatly enhance support for building games on the Web in the future. Features like 3D graphics and support for game controller peripherals, for example, could eventually take the browser beyond the realm of casual gaming. You can refer to Mozilla's wiki to see an overview of the work that the organization is doing to improve browser-based gaming. For more details about BrowserQuest, see the Mozilla Hacks blog or check out the backend server code on GitHub.
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The developers behind the XBMC project have released a major new version of the program. XBMC 11, which is codenamed Eden, brings better performance, broader platform support, theming enhancements, and a number of other improvements. The developers have also created a new XBMC live CD environment based on Ubuntu.
XBMC is a highly portable open source media center application with a sophisticated library management system. It indexes the user's video content and provides an intuitive remote-friendly user interface for browsing and playing media. XBMC and its derivatives, such as Boxee and Plex, are popular among home theater PC users.
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The Web is a powerful publishing platform, but HTML still has some weaknesses as a medium for presenting written content. Browser vendors and other stakeholders are working to remedy those weaknesses by improving the Web's native support for print-quality typography and text layouts.
Adobe is making significant contributions to that effort. A new set of CSS features for advanced text layouts that Adobe developed and proposed for standardization last year are beginning to gain traction. The company's CSS Regions proposal defines a system for creating magazine-style text layouts in Web content.
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Documents submitted to the FCC reveal that Sony is preparing to launch a VAIO laptop with Google's Chrome OS operating system. The new Chromebook has an 11.6-inch display, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, USB ports, an HDMI output, and SD card slot.
Laptop Reviews, which drew attention to the FCC documents this weekend, believes the system may be powered by an ARM-based processor. They note the documents list the CPU as a T25. That could refer to an NVIDIA Tegra 250 T25, an SoC with a dual-core 1.2GHz Arm Cortex A9. Previous Chromebooks have all used Intel's Atom CPU.
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The Pirate Bay (TPB), a popular BitTorrent website, experienced a brief stint of downtime this week. After restoring service, the site's operators confirmed that the outage was caused by routine maintenance and not a law enforcement raid. According to a blog post published by TPB, system upgrades were needed in order to accommodate the website's continuing growth.
In the blog post, TPB also announced plans for a future infrastructure upgrade. The group plans to move its front-end proxy servers into the sky, creating a network of small mobile computers that are tethered to GPS-enabled aerial drones. The airborne computers, called Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS), will supposedly be harder for law enforcement agencies to terminate. TPB contends that any attempt to ground its vessels will be viewed as an act of war.
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