Looking at the title, you might say: “Not another openssl certificate generation guide!”. I know, I know, but I promise that I will try to be different here.

Indeed, there are abundant resources available on how to use openssl to generate digital certificates and I have learned a lot from them. However, I don’t think it is easy for all of us to memorize the complicated openssl command line syntax.

I just heard about the proposed ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) over at Free Software Daily and from the Free Software Foundation. Right now the governments of the United States, the European Commission, Japan, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Canada, and Mexico are secretly negotiating this new treaty which aims to increase the enforcement of intellectual property laws yet again.

Zock is a new piece of free software for organizing betting games.

It is a “betting office” targeted at cliques of friends or co-workers which would like to organize a betting game for a sport event.

Right now, it needs testers. If you are interested in using it, read on.

A report by the Standish Group indicates that adoption of ‘open source’ has caused a drop in revenue to the proprietary software industry by about $60 billion per year. That’s not a huge amount of money compared to what has been lost though the misselling of mortgages, but it is still a lot. The report identifies the value of these ‘open source’ products to be about 6% of the world market for software.

The guys at Perl.it are at it again! The fourth Italian Perl Workshop is taking place next September in Pisa, Italy.

From http://bear454.blogspot.com :

Jimmac announced today on the Tango Mailing List that thanks to about a bazillion requests and the negotiation skills of Michael Meeks, the Tango Icon Library will be changing licenses from CCASA2.5 to Public Domain. Yes, folks, free as in free. Put those beautiful icons in any app you want; they’re yours…

http://bear454.blogspot.com/2008/07/tango-is-free.html

There are about 1000 million PCs on the planet, most running that other OS. For the folks running free software, the future is now. They can run on almost anything. They can shift hardware/software platforms easily. They can increase the number of seats easily. The 900+ million not running free software are now or will soon be a burden to their owners: mal-ware, forced upgrades, high life-cycle costs and bloat.

Early in May Becta, the UK government agency charged with helping schools in their use of ICT, released a tender to support ‘open source’ adoption in UK schools. Several organisations decided to tender, and of the four short-listed, three covered a very large part of the communities and companies that have been involved in the field to date. On Thursday Becta announced that it had awarded the contract the the fourth bidder.

The topic of switching from Windows to Linux has been bashed numerous times and it often comes with the same arguments: high-performance, cheap, goes against the big monopolies, and so forth. Now, as a user, does it really matter? This article focuses on the steps you need to make for a successful switch or, at least, mix platform for the best result.

Alternatives

Microsoft turn to free software? That’ll be the day. Some have suggested that Microsoft might embrace free software and thus resolve the present conflict. That actually would be a terrific strategy for them, but I don’t think that Microsoft is smart enough to do it.

Open Source projects have gained in the past few years an entirely different reputation in the public’s eye, in a good sense.

Now-days we are seeing things happening in the Open Source arena, beautiful things, that most of us didn’t expect to take place so fast and so intense. Among these, are the huge amount of endorsement in terms of project sponsorship coming from Fortune 500 companies as well as funds that keep pouring on either existing Open Source projects to support them or even

http://lfnw.org

LFNW is the showcase for what people in the Northwest are doing with Linux and open source software. It’s a place for Linux enthusiasts to get together to share their passion for what good software can do. This is an opportunity for everyone… satisfy your curiosity… get free stuff… ask experts… explore the latest in software technology… support freedom… experience the magic of grassroots software.

Today evening (15th April, 2008) a candle light vigil/protest was organised at the Town Hall, Bangalore, India to observe Document freedom and also to apply pressure on the Indian Govt. to file an appeal with the ISO regarding the passing of OOXML amid serious irregularities. The vigil was organised by the Free Software Users Group, Bangalore and was attended by Engineering college students, IT profesionals and even members from a local slum computer training centre. This is just the beginning as more serious and sustained activities are being planned.

Why it should be a lot more about feeling, rather than knowing, that free software and free culture is right.

Over the last ten years or so, free software has grown from being just a geek-phenomena. GNU/Linux has become a serious force in the business and server market with major companies now throwing their weight behind it. But on the consumer side of the market, things look still quite a bit different. Although GNU/Linux adoption has made some progress on the desktop too, it’s still largely absent, Windows comes pre-installed on almost all new machines sold and you see even die-hard free software advocates using Mac OS X on their personal machine. Why is that?

In Part I, I have shown what I did to get the build and installation going. In Part II, I will show what steps I took to get a simplest test like the following done: A EAP-MD5 test that involves an OpenDiameter server (aaad), an OpenDiameter client (nasd), and a EAP-MD5 client (pacd) talking to nasd using PANA. All three parties reside on one single host.

Simple as the test is, a lot of work is needed in OpenDiameter’s case, as we will see soon.

Some Background Information

The Diameter Protocol

I’ll admit it. I fell hook, line and sinker for Google’s “We do No Evil” claim. I loved Google.com. I host my email accounts on Google using the hosted domains service. I use blogger.com for my tech blog. Google was my home page.

So what changed? I started to sense something wrong a few months ago when I started watching the ads in GMail. They’re reading my mail. That’s not a revelation of course. Everyone knows that. But the reality of it hit me like a ton of bricks. Some bot in the kingdom of Google is reading my mail and targeting ads directly at me.

Diameter is a AAA protocol that is supposed to be the successor to RADIUS, and OpenDiameter is an open source implementation of the Diameter Protocol. I recently started playing around with OpenDiameter and, to my surprise, the online resources and documentations on how to use it are very hard to find, if there is any. I figured out my way to get the basics running, and I am here to share my initial experiences, hoping to help other OpenDiameter beginners. I also hope that the OpenDiameter community could contribute more

ever wanted to watch a flash video but don’t want to use adobe’s proprietary software? I know how you feel. But now you can with a plugin for Totem movie player that allows you to browse and play You tube videos without any flash plugin. here is the link to the article that will describe how to do this.

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/04/04/play-youtube-videos-from-the-totem-movie-player/

P.S. If someone could please clue me in on how to do anchored links in a post it would make them a lot more useful.

It uses a free flash mp3 player, combined with the power of PHP/XML.

What you need.

1) php cli or apache module 2) download the zip file attached 3) extract to a folder say phpMp3 4) copy your mp3’s in the same folder. 5) from your command prompt/cli or apache just run createTracks.php 5) open the index.html

Download and Source and Demo :- http://www.techbirbal.com/viewtopic.php?f=95&t=2025

I was surprised to find that I have never seen nor heard of this movie before it just suddenly appeared in Google video today. Called Alternative Freedom the Movie I just couldn’t resist.

Cast:

Doseone (rapper: pop culture commentator) DJ Danger mouse (mix maker extraordinaire) Richard Stallman (The Grand philosopher of Free Software) Lawrence Lessig (Super lawyer, creator of Creative commons) Andrew “Bunnie” huang (reverse engineering pro)