Which countries are the worst greenhouse gas emitters? Now you can see for yourself on this handy Google Map created by a department of the UN and Google. The map shows changes in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2006. Green is good (a decrease in emissions) and purple is bad (an increase).

So who are the worst offenders? Topping the list is Sweden! The country has managed to increase its emissions by 110 percent over that time period. So much for Nordic purity. Following Sweden is Turkey (with a 103 percent increase) and Canada (with a 55 percent increase). Yes, Canada. What is it with these northern countries?

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H Security: US Government uses talent competition to find IT experts

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Welcome to the premier Unified Computing magazine for Information Technology Professionals. Published on a monthly basis, opensourc3 is available for FREE download in PDF format, or can be read on-line. This first issue contains articles on Hypervisor and Cloud Technologies, Virtualization and KVM, Deploying iSCSI in Linux, Management with Puppet and more.

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“We’re here today to announce the death of comments.”

That’s what JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux said in his opening remarks at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp earlier this month. He went on to unveil ECHO, JS-Kit’s new take on how conversations should be happening around content on the web. And today, we’re going to try a limited test of this new system on the TechCrunch Network.

To reiterate, this is just a test that will reside under only this post for the time-being, so let us know what you think.

While at first glance, the comments you see below this post may look like a slight variation of any other commenting system, the reality is much different. Sure, a part of ECHO is made up by what we think of as traditional comments, that is, comments you fill out on a particular article and post to it. But the majority of the content in this commenting area will actually be populated from sources all around the web talking about this piece of content.

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According to a recent IDC study, the market for open-source software has been accelerated by both the slow economy and increased acceptance from enterprise customers The IDC study, “Worldwide Open Source Software 2009-2013 Forecast,” showed that worldwide revenue from open-source software (OSS) will grow at a 22.4 percent rate to reach $8.1 billion by 2013.

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We’ve been getting requests from various citizens to feature their respective cities in our new Geek Weekend feature on CrunchGear, so when a request came in for the Twin Cities, John asked me to write it up and I thought, “Oh, great. More work.” “Perfect! I’m from Minneapolis! I know where geeky stuff is located!”

Background Info: The Twin Cities denotes the capital city of St. Paul, MN and the larger, more cosmopolitan city of Minneapolis, MN. Together the two cities are home to roughly 2.5 million people.

There’s always been a friendly little rivalry going on between the two cities, with some people from Minneapolis viewing people from St. Paul as more blue-collar and rough-around-the-edges, while some from St. Paul think people from Minneapolis are yuppies. I’ve lived in both cities and they’re both nice places. Overall, the rivalry is pretty silly, but it’s there. Look hard enough in any city, though, and you’ll find both a-holes and nice people. No different in the Twin Cities. Everyone’s pretty nice, overall, though.

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Back in May we shared that the Ubuntu Intel graphics performance was still in bad shape after testing out very early Ubuntu 9.10 packages. The netbook experience was killed in Ubuntu 9.04 after a buggy Intel Linux graphics stack led to slow performance, stability issues, screen corruption, and other problems. Months have passed since we last exhaustively looked at the Intel Linux graphics stack, but we have just carried out some new tests using Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3. This new development release of Ubuntu carries the latest kernel, Mesa, and Intel driver packages as we see how the graphics performance is with an Intel 945 and G43 chipsets.

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Defcon is upon us once again, and that can only mean one thing: new badge designs. Our friends over at Wired posted the picture above along with a description of this year’s new badge. Since our last post, there has been little new information released regarding the components used for the new badge. However, we [...]

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Install Drizzle On Debian Lenny

Drizzle is a Free Software/Open Source database management system (DBMS)
that was forked from version 6.0 of the MySQL DBMS.
Like MySQL, Drizzle has a client/server architecture and uses SQL as its primary command language.
Drizzle is distributed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

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Last night one of our long time readers sent me an email that had a link to a Google Safebrowsing Di …(more)…

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(Posted 31 Jul 2009 by solrac)

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(Posted 31 Jul 2009 by Ray)

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(Posted 31 Jul 2009 by falko)

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I had totally forgotten that this is indeed a special day! A holiday of sorts for me and all S …(more)…

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Mozilla’s popular Firefox web browser is quickly approaching one billion downloads for all versions since it was officially launched. According to the Firefox Download Guesstimator, the total number of downloads should reach one billion between 13:30 and 15:00 GMT today.

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The recession in online advertising, which began in the first quarter of 2009, continued into the second. Every quarter we keep track of the combined advertising revenues of the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL), which together represent the lion’s share of all online advertising revenues and is a decent proxy for the market as a whole. In the second quarter of 2009, their combined global ad revenues were $7.864 billion, down 3.4 percent from a year ago.

In economics, a general rule of thumb is that two down quarters marks a recession. Last quarter saw the first annual decline in advertising revenues of 2.1 percent. And the annual decline this quarter got a little worse. However, on a sequential basis compared to last quarter, it is actually pretty much flat (but still down 0.18 percent). So we now have two down quarters on both an annual and sequential basis.

Will this recession continue into the current quarter, or did we just witness a fundamental “reset”, as Steve Ballmer likes to call it.

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The Gnome team has released an update of the Gnome Desktop Environment, version 2.27.5. The highlights of this new release are Brasero 2.27.5, fixed memleaks, lot’s of bug fixes, added documentation to libbrasero-burn and lots of Translation updates.

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[RagingComputer] built this 1-wire attic cooling fan. He’s using an Ubuntu server loaded with OWFS to control everything. The 1-wire temperature sensor is interfaced using USB while a serial x10 module sends out commands to be received by another x10 module near the fan. Back in the day we had covered a linux home automation project. [...]

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12seconds showed off a really slick-looking new iPhone app at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp earlier this month. Unfortunately, that’s not quite ready yet. But in the meantime, they have another iPhone app that is ready, and it’s about as simple as can be — which may be good thing.

Called 12cast, the app claims to be the “simplest way to get video on Twitter.” Here’s how it works, you open the app, enter a title for the video, then rotate it to the left to bring up the video camera. You then record footage, hit send, and you’re done. (If you’re not logged into Twitter, there will be a prompt that comes up to allow you to do that.)

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[ MDVSA-2009:182 ] firefox

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XOOPS Multiple Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities – Security Advisory – SOS-09-005

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Sony Pictures Imageworks, the award-winning visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, is launching an open source development program, it was announced today by Imageworks’ chief technology officer, Rob Bredow. Five technologies will be released initially: OSL, a programmable shading language for rendering, Field3d, a voxel data storage library, Maya Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking, Scala Migration, a database migration tool and Pystring, python-like string handling in C++.

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If you’re in the mood for Linux — and who amongst us isn’t — September may be your month, as the Linux Foundation presents the inaugural LinuxCon in Portland. Just shy of two months ago we sounded the call to rise, shine, and catch the early bird rate — sadly, the early bird’s worm is no more. It’s still possible, though, to grab yourself a spot and shave a nice slice off the price.

read more

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Apparently, the New York Times is still unsure whether its reporters should be allowed to Tweet or not. Intrigued by this tweet from writer and consultant Stowe Boyd, I registered for the New York Times’ Insight Lab, an online community / focus group made up of Times readers interested in providing the media company with direct feedback.

The homepage features a quick poll asking members if they want to see Times’ reporters and editors on Twitter or not. I guess this is the most pressing issue the New York Times wants to hear from its readers about.

For some reason, close to three quarters of the respondents indicated that they’d prefer if the journalists stay far away from the micro-sharing service. Only 7 percent had no idea what Twitter is.

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David Neal, V3.co.uk, Friday 31 July 2009 at 14:48:00

The Ultimate edition of Windows 7 has already been hacked, and is widely
available on the internet, according to various reports.

Windows 7 is not officially released until October, but a cracked version has
appeared on file-sharing sites and other unofficial web destinations.

Microsoft has confirmed the breach in an email, and has warned customers to
avoid downloading the software because of the security issues inherent in using
such web sites.

“We are aware of reports of hacks that attempt to circumvent activation and
validation in Windows 7, and we can assure customers that Microsoft is committed
to protecting them from counterfeit and pirated software. Microsoft strongly
advises customers not to download Windows 7 from unauthorised sources,” reads
the mail.

“Downloading Windows 7 from peer-to-peer sites is piracy, and exposes users
to increased risks, such as viruses, Trojans and other malware, that usually
accompany counterfeit software. These risks can seriously harm or permanently
destroy data, and often expose users to identity theft and other criminal
schemes.”

However, forum posts on file-sharing sites suggest that users have already
activated the software with no problems.

The leak is apparently down to a Lenovo source code key which appeared on the
internet last week, and spread to Chinese web sites before finding its way onto
English sites.

It is common for such keys to be made available to vendors and manufacturers
in the run up to releases, but less common that they are made available online.

Windows 7 will be officially launched on 22 October.

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This is an interesting little toy. A tiny board that can display text on an oscilloscope. The components, or rather just component, is a PIC16F628A. Aside from a power supply, that’s it. It can display 10 characters at a time and, as you can see above, scroll them as well. We don’t really know of [...]

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The Laptop Company, operator of a web-based shopping platform through its BongoBing website, has filed a request for an extension of time to oppose Microsoft in its efforts to register a trademark for the name “Bing” with the USPTO. Furthermore, The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board has effectively granted the extension request until October 28, 2009.

Here’s what BongoBing CEO and co-founder Raul Pellerano had to say about it:

“We have worked hard and invested significant resources in building our BongoBingTM brand and identity, our website and services, and our corporate identity. We believe it is important for a small company like The Laptop Company to continue to use its trademarks and conduct business without confusion in the marketplace.”

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The headline says “Why Code For Free”, but it’s really more complicated than that because there are many FOSS developers who are paid to work on FOSS projects. In this final part of our series, more developers speak on the rewards of being part of the FOSS community.

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Information Security Investigator: Live Blog – Blackhat 2009 Day 2

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