Giving the user control over the Web experience has been a longstanding Mozilla priority, and Firefox 8 takes a new step here. With earlier versions, third-party software could extend Firefox with new features–Skype’s tool for highlighting phone numbers for easy online calling, for example. With Firefox 8, though, third-party add-ons will be disabled by default.

“These add-ons installed by third parties present a number of problems: they can slow down Firefox start-up and page loading time, they clutter the interface with toolbars that often go unused, they lag behind on compatibility and security updates, and most importantly, they take the user out of control of their add-ons,” said Mozilla programmer Justin “Fligtar” Scott in a blog post about the feature.

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In an era when record labels fight the underground, unpaid spread of music tooth-and-nail, and companies like Apple take six years to strip the Digital Rights Management out of their massive online song stores, Reznor seems to have found a fire in non-traditional distribution arrangements. He’s used alternate reality games and secret scavenger hunts to promote new works, and released full CDs under a “pay for it if you feel like it” arrangement. In addition to PDFs of artwork and liner notes, the new albums come with full Creative Commons license arrangements that allow fans to modify, share, and remix the work at their leisure.

One would think Reznor has fallen into a Downward Spiral of economics, but the facts don’t lie: his release of the four-part instrumental album Ghosts I-IV netted the singer/songwriter/geek more than $750,000 in the first three days of its release–even given the fact that fans could legally grab the music for absolutely no cost. In turn, said album became the bestselling MP3 album of 2008 at Amazon.com. And fans have responded to the licensing arrangements in kind, launching full communities of their own for collecting, promoting, and releasing remixed Nine Inch Nails tracks. (For more information on how Reznor accomplished this feat, check out this Creative Commons blog post)

Read the full detail @ Yahoo!

The organisation has acknowledged the attack, and one on the Fedora servers as well. It says that it is investigating to see if data was stolen or malware introduced to its systems.

“In connection with the incident, the intruder was able to get a small number of OpenSSH packages relating only to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (i386 and x86_64 architectures only) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86_64 architecture only) signed.

More at vnunet.com

Microsoft also said it is contributing code to support a PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) project and committing to offer royalty-free specifications for Windows Server and.NET Framework protocols as part of its expanded support for the open-source community. The company announced its plans at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) now being held in Portland, Oregon.

Full Story at Yahoo News

At JavaOne in May 2007, Sun announced that the work was largely completed and so OpenJDK was launched. What was less newsworthy was the fact that on release – OpenJDK still relied on code that was encumbered – between 4 and 5 percent of the code was closed, non free source that Sun didn’t own.

complete article here.

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