Diaspora eyes 15th September launch date

Diaspora, an open-source alternative to Facebook will be launched on 15 September, the developers of the project have said.

Diaspora describes itself as a “privacy-aware, personally-controlled” social network. The open-source project made headlines earlier this year when Facebook was forced to simplify its privacy settings, after they were criticised for being overly complex and confusing.

The project, developed by four US students, raised $200,000 (£140,000). “We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th,” the team wrote on their blog.

The team said they had spent the summer “building clear, contextual sharing”. “That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their co-workers and what goes to their drinking buddies. We know that’s a hard [user interface] problem and we take it seriously.”

The project was started by three computer scientists and one mathematician from New York. Their idea of building it gained momentum earlier this year during an intense period of criticism of Facebook, the world’s largest social network. “We want to put users back in control of what they share,” Max Salzberg, one of the founders, told BBC News at the time.

The team turned to the fundraising site Kickstarter to raise the $10,000 they thought they would need to build the network.

In the end the team raised $200,642 from nearly 6,500 people.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, reportedly donated to the project.

The initial release on 15 September will be to “open-source” Diaspora, meaning that the team will make the underlying code available for anyone to see and modify.

Many believe that it will be difficult to challenge Facebook, which now has 500 million users and is currently estimated to be worth $33bn.

Google offer users free “voice calls” through Gmail

Google is taking on internet telephone companies like Skype by allowing users to call from its free web-based email service, BBC News has revealed.

The service allows users to make calls to landlines and mobiles from inside their Gmail account.

Phoning anywhere in the US and Canada will be free until the end of the year, while calls to the UK, France, China and Germany will cost 2 cents a minute. Until now Google offered computer-to-computer voice and video chat services.

“This is a real big deal because now hundreds of millions of Gmail users can make phone calls right from their Gmail page,” Craig Walker, product manager for real-time communications told BBC News.

“They don’t need to download an additional application or anything to start making really high-quality low-cost calls. For the user it means much more efficient and low-cost communications.”

The product link will appear on the left hand of the Gmail page within the “chat” window. A “call phone” option will pop up along with a number pad to let you dial the number of the person you want to talk to.

Google said money raised from international calls will pay for the free US and Canadian calls.

“What surprised me was that they actually said they hope to make money off the calls,” said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of technology blog SearchEngineLand.

“Normally Google is like ‘We don’t know how we are going to make the money’ or ‘We will make money down the way, don’t worry about it’ and this stands out as a big benefit that they get actual revenue early on.”

Skype, which is the most successful internet phone offering, claims to have over 560 million registered users. The firm said 124 million used the service at least one a month while 8.1 million were paying customers.

The company is planning to offer shares to the public later this year. Observers said that it is too early to say whether companies like Skype should be worried.

Google hopes to roll the product out to users around the world soon

“Skype is a well known company in this place and they are almost like a verb in the internet calling world in the way Google is with search. You Skype someone. So I think there is some inertia there to get over and I am interested to see how Gmail users respond,” said Tom Krazit, senior writer with technology news site CNET.com.

“But you always have to worry when Google comes after what you do. They don’t do things half way and bring a lot of resources to any problem they try to tackle. It doesn’t mean you are doomed.

“Google’s product won’t work on your mobile browser so Skype has an advantage there but I don’t think it is a stretch to assume Google will come out with a mobile version pretty soon,” said Mr Krazit.

The company plans an eye catching way to get non-Gmail users to give the product a go. It is in negotiations with a number of university campuses and airports to install red telephone boxes around the country to give users the chance to dial and try.

LINUX FORMAT get “Annoyed by OpenSUSE’s forums”

Recently, I have subscribed to Linux Format magazine, after many, many months of borrowing it from my work colleague.

I have always found it to be a very intuitive and well rounded Linux publication, with articles and features aimed at Linux users of all levels (hence my subscription). Personally I believe Linux Format to be advised reading for any Linux enthusiast whether it be via the net or in print.

So I was quite interested to read the post on the Linux Format site from “Hudzilla” (Linux Fomrat Editor, Paul Hudson), which was generally in response to negative comments about the magazine on the openSUSE forum.

I couldn’t help feel that the openSUSE community were a little bit “spiteful” to Linux Format, for reasons unclear (although I’m interested to find out more). I also think that Paul Hudson provides a very “adult” response to arguments posed, despite his initial comments being deleted by the openSUSE forum as “spam”!

See what you think by reading the original post. Quite interesting I think.

What would you change about Linux? The Tux Radar ballot.

Tux Radar are gearing up to record a new episode of their great Linux podcast, and you – yes, you! – get to have a say. The question they’re asking is this: if you had the resources, what single thing would you change? Would you merge KDE and Gnome? Would you introduce a new package manager? (eek!) Would you find all mentions of “Linux” and replace it with GNU/Linux?

If you’d like your views read out on the Tux Radar podcast, please click here for details.

Make Your Own Android Apps with Google App Inventor

Google App Inventor is a new piece of online software that helps users create Android apps quickly and easily.

The website says that app creation is not reserved only to those with programming skills. “To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge,” it says. Users have options of what to include in the app, and the rest of the development process is done by the App Inventor.

The Google App Inventor website helps users create all kinds of applications, from simple games to informative and educational applications, ones that make full use of the Android-powered smartphones’ hardware capabilities. App Inventor provides access to the smartphones’ GPS sensor, enabling the creation of location-aware applications, it uses Android’s text-to-speech capabilities in order to create apps that can speak aloud and it uses internet connection routines in order to allow you to create apps that can communicate with other users or services online.

The Google App Inventor can be used on Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, Windows XP, Vista and 7, GNU/Linux, Ubuntu 8+, Debian 5+ operating systems, using all today’s major browsers on computers capable of running Java 6. App Inventor can also be used on smartphones with Google’s own Android operating systems.

Clonezilla

Clonezilla is an Open Source disaster recovery, disk cloning and deployment solution. Clonezilla is designed by Steven Shaiu and developed by the NCHC Free Software Labs in Taiwan. Clonezilla SE provides multicast support similar to Norton Ghost Corporate Edition.

‘Clonezilla Live’ enables a user to clone a single computer’s storage media, or a single partition on the media, to a separate medium device. The cloned data can be saved as an image-file or as a duplicated copy of the data. The data can be saved to locally attached storage device, an SSH server, Samba Server or a NFS file-share. The clone file can then be used to restore the original when needed.

The Clonezilla application can be run from a USB-flash-drive, a CD-ROM, or a DVD-ROM. Clonezilla requires no modification to the computer; the software runs in its own booted environment.

Download Clonezilla.

Bob Young. The “open-source” entrepreneur

Bob Young is a self-confessed contrarian with a strong desire to change the world by allowing people to share and collaborate. The approach has served him well and has helped turn the Canadian into a multi-millionaire.

From the outset, his software company Red Hat bucked the trend set by the big players like Microsoft which stubbornly guarded every line of code and charged whopping fees to maintain it.

Red Hat’s approach was unusual at the time and relied on free software developed by an open-source community. Customers were given the right to change the code any way they liked and Red Hat sold services to make sure it all worked.

In those early 1990s, many businesses feared that open source would not be stable and often opted for the proprietary model being sold by the likes of Microsoft. Today, the Redmond giant has seen its market share erode; Red Hat has become the world’s open-source leader. Click here to read more.

Synergy! Use a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers.

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Synergy is open source and released under the GNU Public License (GPL).

Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all.

System Requirements

• Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me (the Windows 95 family)
• Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP (the Windows NT family)
• Mac OS X 10.2 or higher
• Unix
  • X Windows version 11 revision 4 or up
  • XTEST extension
    (use “xdpyinfo | grep XTEST” to check for XTEST)

All systems must support TCP/IP networking.

“Unix” includes Linux, Solaris, Irix and other variants. Synergy has only been extensively tested on Linux and may not work completely or at all on other versions of Unix.

The Mac OS X port is incomplete. It does not synchronize the screen saver, only text clipboard data works (i.e. HTML and bitmap data do not work), the cursor won’t hide when not on the screen, and there may be problems with mouse wheel acceleration.

DOWNLOAD Synergy Now

EA Sports “FIFA Superstars” video game launched on Facebook

FIFA Superstars, the latest video game in the EA Sports FIFA Football series, has launched on Facebook rather than on games consoles.

The popularity of social media games has risen in recent years with up to 250 million global players logging on to various games each month.

Previous console FIFA games have retailed at around £30 but FIFA Superstars is free to play online. The footballers making up each player’s team are purchased in packs at a cost of £1 – £2 per pack.

Players pit their teams against those belonging to their Facebook friends. As the tournament progresses, each player earns points which can also be used to purchase team members.

Unlike console-based versions of FIFA games in which the player can decide to play as a manager, a player or both, on Facebook players can only be managers of virtual teams made up of real players from around the world. They can also opt to participate in league games outside of their “friends” network. Go to FIFA Superstars on Facebook now!

There will be a new edition of the console version of FIFA at a later date.

Social media games developer Playfish was bought by FIFA makers Electronic Arts (EA) for $300m (£170m) in 2009.

“Clickjacking” spreads across Facebook

Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users are falling victim to so-called “clickjacking” attacks, warn web security labs.

Facebook members see links to subjects such as “World Cup 2010 in HD” or “Justin Bieber’s phone number” that their friends appear to have “liked”. Clicking the link tricks users into recommending the site on Facebook too.

Security experts say the scam currently has no malicious intent but could be adapted to deliver malware. The link generally takes the user through to a page containing an instruction, such as asking them to click a button to confirm that they are over 18. However, wherever they click on the page it adds a link to their own Facebook profile saying they have also “liked” the site.

Currently the purpose of clickjacking is “trivial” and does not actively result in any malware or phishing attacks, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. “At the moment the attacks which we’ve seen are more like old-school viruses – written for the heck of it to see how many fans they can get.

“But our feeling is that it would be fairly easy for the bad guys to introduce some revenue generation for themselves,” he told BBC News. Clickjacking works across all computer operating systems, added Mr Cluley.

The Facebook attack uses iFrames, which essentially places an invisible button over an entire web page, so that wherever the user clicks, they end up hitting the button – in this case a hidden Facebook “like” button. A free plug-in called NoScript, built for the Firefox web browser, includes pop-up warnings about potential clickjacks.

However, it will also query clicks on Flash videos, commonly used on many websites – and it is not easy to install, said Mr Cluley. “You have to be a little bit nerdy to configure it.”