Cody Taylor

CSEMike writes “Currently popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. For applications like BitTorrent or Gnutella, sharing a file means exposing your behavior to anyone interested in monitoring it. OneSwarm is a new file sharing application developed by researchers at the University of Washington that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. Instead of communicating directly, sharing in OneSwarm is friend-to-friend; senders and receivers exchange data using multiple intermediaries in an overlay mesh. OneSwarm is built on (and backwards compatible with) BitTorrent, but includes numerous extensions to improve privacy while providing good performance: point-to-point encryption using SSL, source-address rewriting, and multi-path and multi-source downloading. Clients and source are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.”

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An anonymous reader writes “The widely used Bourne-Again Shell (BASH) version 4.0 is out. The new major release fixes several remaining bugs in the 3.x releases, and introduces a bunch of new features. The most notable new features are associative arrays, improvements to the programmable completion functionality, case-modifying word expansions, co-processes, support for the `**’ special glob pattern, and additions to the shell syntax and redirections. The shell has been changed to be more rigorous about parsing commands inside command substitutions, fixing one piece of POSIX non-compliance. Most of us will probably wait for the distros to test the new version and upgrade gradually, but you always have the option of grabbing the source and compiling it yourself. Enjoy.”

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We’re at the native Linux desktop, moving towards the Android desktop (netbooks coming soon). What would bridge those two environments, is to offer a second Linux sandbox which runs along with Android.

Barence writes “Adobe claims that its Flash platform reaches ‘99% of internet viewers,’ but a closer look at those statistics suggests it’s not exactly all-encompassing. Adobe puts Flash player penetration at 947 million users out of a total 956 million internet-connected devices, but the total number of PCs is based on a forecast made two years ago. What’s more, the number of Flash users is based on a questionable internet survey of just 4,600 people — around 0.0005% of the suggested 956,000,000 total. Is it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached? Including Linux users? Including users at work? Including brand-new systems?”

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jonniee writes “D is a programming language created by Walter Bright of C++ fame. D’s focus is on combining the power and high performance of C/C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. And now he’s ported it to the Macintosh. Quoting: ‘[Building a runtime library] exposed a lot of conditional compilation issues that had no case for OSX. I found that Linux has a bunch of API functions that are missing in OSX, like getline and getdelim, so some of the library functionality had to revert to more generic code for OSX. I had to be careful, because although many system macros had the same functionality and spelling, they had different expansions. Getting these wrong would cause some mysterious behavior, indeed.'”

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Steve Ballmer’s deal with the Catalonian government is seen as a leverage against their existing Open Source strategy.It was a pretty personal deal between Steve Ballmer and president of the Generalitat de Catalunya José Montilla.

ASUS on Friday said it has been developing a netbook based on Google’s Android platform that would ship by the end of 2009 — and would make Linux on netbooks a real alternative to more expensive (not to mention closed) Windows PCs.

We’ve become quite adept at sharing information over the intertubes. But perhaps that’s different when it comes to sharing that information personally and verbally. Ever been annoyed when someone at a computer asks you a question as though you’re some sort of walking encyclopedia rather than looking it up on the Web?

tytso writes “I’ve recently started exploring ways of configuring Solid State Disks (SSDs) so they work most efficiently in Linux. In particular, Intel’s new 80GB X25-M, which has fallen down to a street price of around 0 and thus within my toy budget. It turns out that the Linux Storage Stack isn’t set up well to align partitions and filesystems for use with SSD’s, RAID systems, and 4k sector disks. There are also some interesting configuration and tuning that we need to do to avoid potential fragmentation problems with the current generation of Intel SSDs. I’ve figured out ways of addressing some of these issues, but it’s clear that more work is needed to make this easy for mere mortals to efficiently use next generation storage devices with Linux.”

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Sometimes the best friend a Windows user can have when things go haywire is a good Linux-based repair kit.