IBM calls time on Symphony OpenOffice fork
IBM's putting its weight behind an Oracle-backed OpenOffice push rather than follow Google, Red Hat and others on an independent effort.
The latest version of IBM's Symphony collaboration suite, version 3.0.1, will likely be the last based on the computing and services giant's fork of the OpenOffice code base.
IBM is instead putting its "energy" into the Apache OpenOffice project, having contributed the Symphony code base to the Apache Software Foundation.
Ed Brill, director of messaging and collaboration for Lotus software, has blogged here: "We expect to distribute an 'IBM edition' of Apache OpenOffice in the future."
The decision sees IBM lining up against Google, Ubuntu-shop Canonical Red Hat, Novell and others who've thrown their hats in with The Document Foundation. Read more...
Google+ ups competition with Facebook by including teens
Google is widening the potential user base for Google+ by lowering the age requirement from 18 to 13 years old -- a move that could help it grow in Facebook's shadow.
Last week, Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product at Google+, announced the change in a blog post. He noted that Google wants to help teens share with their friends, while also helping them keep from over-sharing, especially with strangers.
"Teens and young adults are the most active Internet users on the planet," wrote Horowitz. "And surprise, surprise: they're also human beings who enjoy spending time with friends and family. Put these two things together and it's clear that teens will increasingly connect online."
Teens were allowed onto the site immediately. Read more...
FBI seeks Big Brother-’Minority Report’ hybrid
Recognizing just how powerful a tool social-networking sites have become in orchestrating protests, rallies, and riots in the United States and beyond, the FBI is in the early stages of designing a complex system for monitoring tweets, Facebook status updates, Google+ posts, and the like in real time, all in the name of identifying and heading off potential security threats.
The FBI wouldn't be the first organization to sift through troves of public social networking data for discovering and predicting trends, such as health outbreaks or box-office sales. However, privacy advocates may well be concerned by the prospect of the government building a system that's one part Big Brother from "1984" and one part PreCrime Unit from "Minority Report" -- especially if the FBI (or any other organization, really) were to combine the public social media data with user data it could acquire in any numbers of ways through other channels. Read more...
Update: Industry group pushes new spec to eliminate phishing
Companies such as Facebook, Google, and PayPal are pushing for widespread use of a new technical specification, DMARC, that could make it harder for phishers to reach their victims.
A common problem with email is that it is very easy to spoof the "from" address, making it difficult for an average user to know if an email is really from the domain it purports to be from. Technologies such as DKIM and SPF already allow domain owners to vouch for mail sent in their name, but don't specify what to do with messages that fail the test. DMARC builds on those systems, allowing domain owners to ask receiving mail servers to discard mail that fails authentication tests. That will make it less likely that scam messages impersonating sites such as PayPal will appear in your inbox. Read more...
Pentaho open sources ‘big data’ integration tools under Apache 2.0
BI vendor Pentaho is open sourcing a number of tools related to big data in the 4.3 release of its Kettle data-integration platform and has moved the project overall to the Apache 2.0 license, the company announced Monday.
While Kettle had always been available in a community edition at no charge, the tools being open sourced were previously only available in the company's commercialized edition. They include integrations for Hadoop's file system and MapReduce as well as connectors to NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB.
Those technologies are some of the most popular tools associated with the analysis of "big data," an industry buzzword referring to the ever-larger amounts of unstructured information being generated by websites, sensors, and other sources, along with transactional data from enterprise applications. Read more...
Mozilla OKs Firefox 10 launch this week
Mozilla developers have given the green light to ship Firefox 10 on Tuesday.
Notes from a Mozilla meeting last week said that the upgrade was on for Jan. 31, the next ship date in the every-six-week schedule that the company adopted last year.
The new version includes one of the first components of Firefox's planned silent update mechanism: The browser automatically disables incompatible add-ons and marks all others as compatible.
Add-ons that work with Firefox 4 or later will be marked as compatible in Firefox 10, Mozilla said. Read more...
Twitter now lets governments decide what content is suitable for their citizens
Twitter announced a major change to its censorship policy Thursday to allow the social media service to choose which tweets are seen in which countries. Though it has yet to use the ability, Twitter says it can now "reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world." Read more...
Apple CEO responds to allegations of Chinese worker abuse
Is Apple finally getting tough on their abusive Chinese suppliers? Maybe. Intent on stemming the increasing complaints from the public and investors alike, Apple CEO Tim Cook fired off an email yesterday to combat claims from "people questioning Apple's values," detailing what the company is doing to find "problems" in their supply chain.
Tech giant Apple may have a net worth greater than most first-world countries, but working conditions at their Chinese suppliers' factories are notoriously third world. Addressing this, Cook wrote an email addressed to all employees to explain what the company is doing to combat abuses. Read more...
Amazon Kindle Fire’s Apple-like blitz scorches Samsung
Amazon’s Kindle Fire fourth quarter sales threw Samsung Galaxy into a pyre, as Android-based tabs made their moves against the dominant Apple iPad.
Strategy Analytics reported that that 27 million units of tabs shipped in the fourth quarter. Apple and its iPad owned 58 percent of the market.
But Google Android-based tabs increased their share to 39 percent of the global tablet market, up 10 percentage points from the same quarter a year earlier. Shipments of Android tabs tripled to 10.5 million, as Amazon, Samsung, Asus and others busted a move, said Neil Mawston, SA’s executive director. Read more...